Smart Road Plan: The Future of Mobility

This study investigates the development of the Smart Road Plan, implemented by Anas S.p.A in Italy. This initiative aims to integrate mobility and accessibility into the urban fabric through digital solutions integrated into physical infrastructures for safety reasons. The road network functions and management is built on synergic integration among processes by obtaining interoperability and seamless system integration between citizens and infrastructures that cooperatively and synergically produce public value. Consequently, citizens have become both consumers and producers of services and information by continuously sharing data to the infrastructures and stakeholders through personal devices and on–board systems obtained directly from vehicles. This urban Renaissance strives to enable long–term economic growth while increasingly impacting citizens’ quality of life. Smart Road Plan represents a promising scenario to increase national competitiveness and sustainable prosperity development. This attractive scenario is positively portrayed for its effectiveness and beneficial application to significant issues and challenges. However, the road network has become a surveillant assemblage of information hubs whose collective intelligence is dictated by actionable data flows to sustain urban functionality. The concept of smartness may overlook potential harms and risks. The right to privacy is particularly threatened by advanced predictive analytics and hyper–monitoring of citizens from their spatial and temporal context. Furthermore, potential technological vulnerabilities to cybersecurity threats and attacks pose critical concerns about safeguarding personal and sensitive information. Then, it raises ethical and social issues relevant to citizens’ privacy who are concerned about their security due to the ubiquitous and pervasive penetration of services and platforms. However, the current literature fails to address the privacy and security implications pertaining real–time data exchanges between citizens and infrastructures. The Italian government and the European Commission have been closely working on policies and strategies to regulate the connectivity among users, vehicles, objects, and infrastructures. Therefore, it becomes important to explore how the Italian and European regulatory frameworks integrate citizens’ privacy and security with the technological progress in the Smart Road Plan. Qualitative content analysis in a case–study research design was conducted, with a mix of theory–driven and data–driven methodologies for developing a systematic coding scheme. The regulatory frameworks (N = 14) explore the Italian and European strategies and policies from relevant stakeholders and organizations involved. It was found that the regulatory context is fragmented and uncoordinated, characterized by a plurality of normative and strategical instruments. There is a lack of in–depth investigation of related risks and concerns, although privacy and security represent the biggest challenges and major worries of citizens in smart Renaissance. However, technical and organizational measures and standards are introduced.