Smart, Sustainable, Both or Neither? A Systematic Review of the Human Paradoxes of Autonomous Mobility in Smart Cities

Autonomous vehicles are a flagship technology of the smart city, yet smartness and sustainability are distinct goals. Automated urban mobility can be both smart and sustainable, one without the other, or neither, and which outcome a city reaches depends on how people adopt and use it. This article reports a systematic review of the human paradoxes of automated urban mobility. Drawing on a synthesis of the literature on automated mobility and the governance of sustainable mobility, it covers twenty recurring paradoxes and organises them into five families according to what generates them. Mapping the corpus shows where the evidence is dense and where it is thin, and it shows that work on the attractiveness of automated travel outweighs work on zero-occupancy running by more than an order of magnitude. It also shows that the direction of reported findings depends on how a study was conducted. Models tend to report benign outcomes for the quantity they optimise and adverse outcomes for quantities they only represent, so appraisals drawing on a single study design will be biased in a predictable direction. The paradoxes are not inherent to the technology. They hinge on human choice and governance, and automated mobility reaches the smart and sustainable quadrant only where adoption is shared, well matched to need, sequenced with care, and steered by explicit public choices. The article sets out the CalmMobility paradigm as that steering framework, maps each tension to the instruments that decide its outcome, and offers testable propositions and a research agenda for the tensions that remain thinly evidenced.