Intelligent Transportation Systems for Sustainable Urban Mobility: A Systematic Literature Review of Research and Applications in Public Transport

This article examines how Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applied to public and shared urban transport contribute to sustainable urban mobility by synthesizing a decade of peer-reviewed research on intelligent, technology-driven public transport solutions. Using a PRISMA-based systematic literature search in Scopus for 2014–2024, followed by bibliometric analysis with VOSviewer version 1.6.21 and manual thematic content analysis of 186 selected studies, the review maps intellectual structures, implementation areas, and sustainability dimensions of ITS-enhanced public transport systems research. The results show that priority ITS applications in public transport implementation areas cluster around smart infrastructure and frameworks, AI- and data-driven mobility systems, smart public transportation, and IoT-enabled connected mobility, with a strong focus on real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and adaptive operations. Sustainability analysis indicates that ITS applications in public transport primarily advances technology-driven sustainability, smart and sustainable urban mobility, environmental sustainability, and economic efficiency, while social sustainability and governance aspects—such as equity, accessibility, safety, and institutional capacity—are less consistently addressed. The review also highlights a highly interdisciplinary, yet thematically fragmented field with geographically concentrated evidence and limited longitudinal, real-world impact evaluations. Quantitatively, the review finds that over 90% of studies address technology-driven, smart urban mobility, environmental, or economic sustainability themes, whereas only 56.99% explicitly engage social sustainability dimensions. Overall, the study concludes that ITS applications in public transport already function as key enablers of more efficient, low-carbon, and intelligent transport systems, but calls for more integrated, context-sensitive, and human-centered frameworks that explicitly align ITS applications in public transport design, implementation, and evaluation with multidimensional sustainability goals and global sustainable mobility agendas.