Will Budapest ever be a smart city?

Is it a realistic expectation to have more and more self-driving cars in the streets of Budapest? – one of the main questions at Smart City Hungary 2016 conference, organized by Napi.hu and Noguchi Porter Novelli.

More and more car factories deal with sensors and cameras, and the need for self-driving cars, says László Urbán, Deputy CEO of Magyar Suzuki Zrt. But to make having self-driving cars in the city possible without supervision we need a smart city.

Planes have been taking off by themselves for years and metro line 4 has been working without a driver, so we are not that far from the goal, says István Varga, dean of the Faculty of Transportation Engineering and Vehicle Engineering at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

But there are some serious questions that must be taken into consideration. He mentioned an example: the self-driving car possibly will cause some accidents, because of technical errors, and there the question of responsibility will become an important issue.

According to László Kovács, it is quite relative what counts as “smart”, but many problems could be avoided with smart cities. It will be needed for the cars to communicate with each other and the sensors in the town. The technical possibility is given, but the developments are not possible in the next few years, because of non-technical issues.

But what makes a city smart?

Solving a problem will not make a city smart, the whole system must be considered. So what is smart city?

“It is deliberated, homogenous, the result of developments based on long-term aims from economic, environmental and social points of view.”