The Development of the Smart Cities in the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) Era: From Mobility Patterns to Scaling in Cities

Comment: In the paper titled "The development of the smart cities in the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) era: from mobility patterns to scaling in cities" the authors present an overview of the development of smart cities by defining a methodology that allows the identification of criteria for determining the optimisation of urban mobility with a particular interest in the development of future autonomous mobility.

In the entire paper, the authors use standard technical and scientific terminology. The manuscript is well written and structured. The idea of the research is interesting and presents some novelty.

A large number of previous researches by the authors and others have been discussed and those results have been compared to the results of the current research.

Sometimes the acronyms the first time that they are used in the document, the words are not written out with the short form placed in parentheses immediately after, some sentences are not clear due to grammatical errors, etc. At any rate, the topic is very important and it could have identifiable advance in knowledge.

Response: The authors would like to thank the reviewer for his/her valuable comments and suggestions. Below please find the detailed modifications we have made to the revised manuscript to address his/her comments. The modifications made are explained below in a step-by-step fashion, along with the rationale used for each modification. We incorporated your suggestions into the paper. Thank you for your constructive comments that helped us improve the paper, and we hope that we have addressed them satisfactorily.

Comment: The caption of Figure 10 is missed.

Response: Thank you for your comment. We have added a suitable caption to Figure 10.

Comment: I do not agree with the approach that the authors have chosen for section 6. It would be better to have two separate sections: one for discussion and another, named section 7 that should be added, for conclusions.

Response: Thank you for your kind suggestion. The authors have revised section 6 and divided the discussion and conclusion into separate sections.

Comment: The conclusion explains what the current study found and should talk about what future studies should accomplish. Other main general findings are probably buried in the main section of the paper. I invite the authors to improve the paper's conclusion in this sense.

Response: Thank you for highlighting. We incorporated this suggestion into the revised manuscript.

Comments: This paper summarises the development of the smart cities. A topic that is not of considerable interests to research community.

1. The results are not supported by data.
2. This paper is a review article. It lacks significance of content.

Response: We thank the reviewer for taking his/her valuable time to read and review our paper. Unfortunately, we regret that he/she has not identified considerable interest in the subject addressed in the paper. On the contrary, in our opinion and considering the various studies published in the literature, it is a sweltering area of ​​research in this last period, on which it is necessary to carry out multiple investigations regarding revisions or proposals for new approaches. Furthermore, we regret that the reviewer's in-depth analysis is formalised only with two simple sentences, in our opinion, without clear indications on how to improve our paper. We would like to clarify that, being a review, we carried out a thorough bibliographic search to cite the most relevant sources regarding the treated topic. We do not want to present a solution from scratch supported by data validated by simulations or a real testbed. If anything, we show approaches, methods, and results already present in the literature to provide a fairly in-depth review of the reviewed topics. Possibly, the reviewer does not have a clear understanding of the concept of a "review paper," and, for this reason, he/she concludes by stating that our paper lacks the significance of content. Sorry, but this type of paper is highly appreciated in several journals, including Infrastructures, where several co-authors have already published this type of paper.

Comment: I've read the manuscript thoroughly. It presents an interesting background of the smart city concept and process of its development, taking into account modern technologies, sometimes described as "game-changers" (i.e. IoT).

The abstract lacks with results of the findings. The goal of the paper should be rather presented in the final part of the introductory section. Although the authors state that "This paper provides an overview of the development of smart cities by defining a methodology that allows the identification of criteria for determining the optimisation of urban mobility with a particular interest in the development of future autonomous mobility", a clear goal followed by the research question nor hypothesis was not presented.

Response: The authors would like to thank the reviewer for his/her valuable comments and suggestions. Below please find the detailed modifications we have made to the revised manuscript to address his/her comments. The changes made are explained below in a step-by-step fashion, along with the rationale used for each modification.

Comment: Also, the manuscript lacks a description of the research methods. It is difficult to justify why concrete solutions are being described (i.e. autonomous vehicles, whereas others are omitted).

Response: Thank you for your comment. We do not want to present a solution from scratch supported by data validated by simulations or a real testbed. If anything, we show approaches, methods, and results already present in the literature to provide a fairly in-depth review of the reviewed topics. We added more sentences to explain it in the main text.

Comment: In the case of section 2.5, there is a lack of the "Mobility-as-a-Service" concept which is fundamental to the development and integration of different forms of transport and mobility under one, integrated platform.

Response: Thank you for your kind suggestion. We added more sentences to explain it in the main text.

Comment: In section 2.9, a BIM concept should be explained to the readers.

Response: Thank you for highlighting. We added more sentences to explain it in the main text.

Comment: According to Figure 1 ("The benefits of the spread of smart cities"), partly focused on transport lacks "integration" which is far more important than electric vehicles. Thanks to modern technologies, platforms are being used to integrate services of different operators in a real-time mode. It results in concepts like "Mobility-as-a-Service" and "Transport on Demand".

Response: Thank you for your helpful suggestion. We changed figure 1.

Comment: Figures 1 to 3 lack a source of the data.

Response: Thank you for indicating. We have corrected and added the sources in these figures.

Comment: Subsection 4.2.2. is based on only one paper of Malysheva, E.V.,: Impact of Automated Vehicles on Urban Form (using 4 figures from her paper). I find it as a citation range too large.

Response: Thank you for your comment. We have justified it.

Comment: Probably the title of Table 2 should be changed (now it is "Table 2. Add a suitable title of this table"). That table lacks a relevant source, although is very interesting.

Response: Thank you for your kind suggestion. We have revised the title.

Comment: The text between rows 515-545 is quite interesting although it lacks justification why such a division of distance was selected. Authors omit different factors influencing the length of the trip (i.e. personal factors and the built environment-related factors).

Response: We added your evaluable suggestions considering more new sentences and references.

Comment: Fig. 10 probably lacks a relevant title. In the figure, the word "mobility" should also be changed to "mobility".

Response: Thank you for your response. We have added a suitable title to this Figure.

Comment: The authors state that SEAPs and SUMPS are important documents. But there is very little literature support for this thesis. Therefore i recommend exploring the concept of the SUMP more deeply, as it is strongly promoted by the EU. There is also a vast literature on this topic that could improve the manuscript.

Response: Thank you for your suggestion. We have added more sentences to it, also considering new references.