How new technologies can contribute to measuring sustainable mobility

While much effort has been concentrated on making transportation more sustainable, the measurement of these efforts (through models, evaluation, or scenarios) is not trivial. In fact, not only is the selection of indicators challenging, but efforts made to design useful indicators are often hampered by the presence of data that are erroneous or incomplete. Nevertheless, the significant penetration of new technologies such as smartphones and smart infrastructure could hold the key to developing more relevant and comprehensive indicators. In this paper, the authors review commonly used indicators and discuss their limitations with respect to the data upon which they are built. The authors then describe several new technologies that hold promise for the collection of more pertinent and accurate data sets upon with indicators may be built. Finally, the authors discuss their potential for the future and illustrate a hypothetical scenario by reviewing a one-day global positioning system (GPS) traces of one of the authors. While the first and obvious application of new technologies will be to improve much needed accuracy, combining different sources together seem to hold much potential from model calibration to real time operations.