The purpose of this work is to review urban transportation likely to be offered in the future. Trip-making behaviour has already changed considerably as lifestyles change and they will continue to change in the future. This work reflects and places emphasis on profound thinking about the possibilities, rather than predicting them. Thoughts about possibilities for the future draw upon imagination, perceived and justified feasibility, and lessons gained from the past. This work attempts to capture the possibilities, logistics and travel modes of future urban transportation. A visionary, feasibility-related approach grounded in a realist perspective is proposed, only conceptually, to explore plausible visions for the future. In addition, this work shows the inefficiency of using private cars (PCs) and argues that in the development of autonomous and electric vehicles, PCs cannot provide a solution competitive with the potential that urban transportation systems have for the future. Hence, the solutions for the future must be based on public transport (PT) modes of travel, regardless of whether they are metro, bus, light rail, tram, ridesharing services, an ordinary taxi, personal rapid transit, or any other PT-based future mode. The key principal of operation for the mobility of a smart city will be the ability to optimize the connectivity of movement in order to approach a seamless move, while endowing the phrase door-to-door travel with new meaning. Finally, it would be remiss not to mention the unforeseeable implications of the Covid-19 pandemic for future mobility, more controllable by automation of non-privately owned vehicle, and with the prospect of people demonstrating a greater inclination towards changing their habits, behaviour, and thinking paradigms. Highlights

This work investigates and discusses how the introduction of electric buses (EB), both battery and plug-in hybrid EB, will and should change the operations planning of a public transit system. It is shown that some changes are required in the design of a transit route network, and in the timetabling and vehicle scheduling processes. Other changes are not required, but are advisable, using this opportunity upon the introduction of EB. The work covers the main characteristics of different types of EB with a short description, including the most popular charging technologies, and it presents the generally accepted transit operations planning process. Likewise, it describes and analytically formulates new challenges that arise when introducing EB. The outcome of the analyses shows that multiple new considerations must take place. It is also shown that the different charging techniques will influence the operations planning process in different ways and to a varying extent. With overnight, quick and continuous charging, the main challenges are in the network route design step, given the possibility of altering the existing network of routes, with efficient and optimal changes of the timetabling and vehicle scheduling components. An illustrative example, based on four bus lines in Norrköping, Sweden, is formulized and introduced using three problem instances of 48, 82, and 116 bus trips. The main results exhibit the minimum number of vehicles required using different scenarios of charging stations.