A roundtable on investable urban mobility systems beyond electrification at the Smart Mobility Summit of Cities and Regions

How do cities move beyond buying electric vehicles and start building investable urban mobility systems? This was one of the central questions put on the table at the Smart Mobility Summit of Cities and Regions, whose goal was to explore an ITS agenda for liveable, resilient and prosperous urban nodes during the ITS Congress in Istanbul.

The roundtable discussion, involving Turkish cities, on the topic of investable green urban mobility systems confirmed that there is no longer a debate about the transformation required: cleaner fleets, smarter traffic management, better data, more reliable public transport, and lower emissions are now broadly shared ambitions. The difficult question is whether cities are technically, institutionally, and financially ready to deliver this transition at scale. The main bottleneck is not always technology, rather there are a number of hurdles standing in the way before the technology can even be deployed.

Regulation and fragmented authority are deployment barriers

Installing charging infrastructure is a complex process that goes beyond simply installing equipment. Land allocation, licensing, municipal property, parking rules, fire safety, enforcement, grid connection, and electricity distribution are just some of the facets that need to be reckoned with. If these pieces are not aligned, deployment slows down or comes to a halt.

The host city of Istanbul cited a case where 36 charging stations had to be cancelled because of regulatory and procedural bottlenecks. This is a concrete example of a failure to implement smart mobility not because of immature technology but because of the lack of readiness of the institutional system around it.

Electrification quickly becomes an energy infrastructure question  

A city may start by discussing acquiring electric buses, electric taxis, or charging stations. But very quickly the real questions become: Where is the grid capacity? Where is the transformer capacity? Who pays for the connection? How are charging points licensed? How is fire safety managed? How are closed car parks adapted? And how do we make sure that the public can actually benefit from the infrastructure?

This is where a shift in thinking is required. A depot is no longer merely a depot. A bus garage, a taxi charging hub, a park-and-ride facility, or a closed car park can become part of a wider urban energy system. If this is not planned properly, cities may simply move the bottleneck from diesel supply to electricity connection.

Electrification is not one model for every mode

Some cities, such as Istanbul, want to encourage electric taxis through privileges and incentives, but taxis are commercial vehicles that need to operate almost continuously. Charging time directly affects income, service availability, and fleet productivity. Cities must deal with the dilemma of where the taxis will charge, how fast they can charge, how incentives are structured, and whether the business model works for drivers and users alike.

The same applies to buses, maritime transport, logistics vehicles, and service fleets. Each mode has its own operational logic.

Electric buses require operational redesign, not just procurement

Izmir, a city that currently has over 20 electric buses in operation, attests that the performance of an electric bus depends on much more than vehicle specification. It is conditional on route design, charging-point optimisation, timetable planning, air-conditioning load, road gradient, battery behaviour, and real passenger demand. In other words: electric buses cannot simply be inserted into a diesel operating model. System definition based on robust data must come before procurement.

Many cities, however, point to a deeper data challenge: basic operational data regarding occupancy rates, boarding and alighting data, origin-destination patterns, route-level performance, and real demand by time of day is still not strong enough. The lack of this information makes it difficult to optimise routes, charging, and investment packages.

Electrification cannot succeed without good data analytics. ITS is a crucial aspect of this puzzle.

Finance is still framed too much around assets, not systems

Electric mobility can offer better lifecycle economics. It reduces fuel costs, maintenance costs, emissions, and air pollution, and, if designed well, it also improves service reliability. But the capital expenditure is no small matter. Vehicles, batteries, chargers, depot redesign, transformer capacity, software, grid connection, and maintenance skills all require significant upfront investment.

Urban mobility is one of the most heavily subsidised public services because cities need to protect affordability. Low fares are socially important, but they cannot easily finance a capital-intensive transition. This creates a structural financing problem: the economic and social benefits arrive over time, but the capital cost arrives on day one.

City typologies matter: One model does not fit all

A megacity like Istanbul, a tourism region like Muğla, a port and logistics city like Mersin, an industrial city like Kocaeli, a compact historic city like Sanliurfa, and a fast-growing city do not have the same transition pathway to electrification.

As evinced by Muğla, installing even a limited number of charging stations can be challenging when geography, seasonality, and dispersed mobility patterns are part of the equation. A city serving tourism peaks cannot design its fleet and charging system in the same way as a dense metropolitan corridor. Port cities and coastal cities raise another important dimension: urban mobility is not only land-based; maritime transport, port access, and road integration must also be considered.

For some modes, electrification may be more complex and capital-intensive than for buses. Biofuels and hybrid solutions may therefore deserve closer attention as transition options in specific cases.

Electricity must be clean, not only electric

Electricity alone is not the solution if it is carbon intensive. The climate value of electrification depends on the electricity mix. This means that future urban mobility planning must bring together electric fleets, renewable electricity supply, smart charging, storage, micro-grids, and energy management.

This is especially relevant in the context of COP31, which will take place later this year in Türkiye, and the European Commission’s wider electrification agenda. Cities can become real laboratories for the next phase of decarbonisation. But only if mobility planning and energy planning are integrated from the beginning.

The takeaways

• Cities are committed to the transition to intelligent mobility. They want cleaner fleets, smarter systems, better control over congestion, more reliable public transport, and services that improve daily life.  
• The blockers to electrification are concrete and go beyond technology. Regulation, fragmented authority, grid readiness, transformer capacity, depot and charging design, data gaps, procurement constraints, limited fiscal space, tariff limitations, and weak project preparation.
• There is a clear economic dichotomy. Electrification is often economically rational over the lifecycle but financially difficult at the point of investment.
• ITS technologies are available, but at times institutionally difficult to integrate. Cities want systems, but budgets and procurement procedures still tend to buy isolated assets.
• PPPs, blended finance, and other innovative delivery models involving risk sharing can only work if both the private and public sides do their part. The private sector can help manage vehicle availability, battery performance, charging uptime, maintenance, software, and energy services. But if the public side has not clarified land permits, grid access, data ownership, tariff logic, and service obligations, the risk becomes too high or too expensive.
• The planning and financing model needs to change. Cities need to move on: from asset procurement to system procurement, from isolated charging stations to energy-mobility planning, from pilot ITS to operational decision systems, from grant dependency to blended and performance-based finance, and from fragmented municipal projects to investable urban mobility pipelines.

This article was written based on a report provided by Dr Goktug Kara, Delegation of the European Union to Turkey, on the roundtable discussion he moderated at the Smart Mobility Summit of Cities and Regions on the topic ‘Beyond electrification: Powering investable urban mobility systems’. The views expressed here should not be attributed to the European Commission.

Participants at the roundtable: 

This article is part 1 of a 4-part series.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4