Smart Highway Market Size and Share
Market Overview
| Study Period | 2019 - 2030 |
|---|---|
| Market Size (2025) | USD 66.88 Billion |
| Market Size (2030) | USD 165.37 Billion |
| Growth Rate (2025 - 2030) | 19.85% CAGR |
| Fastest Growing Market | Asia Pacific |
| Largest Market | Asia Pacific |
| Market Concentration | Medium |
Major Players
*Disclaimer: Major Players sorted in no particular order Image © Mordor Intelligence. Reuse requires attribution under CC BY 4.0. |
|
Smart Highway Market Analysis by Mordor Intelligence
The smart highway market size is valued at USD 66.88 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach USD 165.37 billion by 2030, rising at a 19.85% CAGR. Strong public-sector capital programs, rapid advances in connected-vehicle standards, and steep declines in sensor prices anchor this growth trajectory. Asia-Pacific remains pivotal as central and provincial authorities channel funds into multi-lane expressways equipped with IoT nodes, while North America and Europe align regulatory road-safety targets with technology mandates. Large highway owners are shifting from asset-centric procurement to service-level contracting, paving the way for cloud-native traffic platforms that scale nationwide. Private operators view embedded EV-charging strips and solar surface tiles as fresh revenue lanes, and venture-backed software firms are racing to secure edge-analytics footholds before 5G latency advantages normalize.
Key Report Takeaways
- By product technology, smart traffic management systems led with 38% revenue share in 2024, while communication systems are forecast to expand at a 20.5% CAGR to 2030.
- By component, services captured 46% of the smart highway market share in 2024; software is projected to grow at an 18.8% CAGR through 2030.
- By application, traffic congestion management accounted for a 41% share of the smart highway market size in 2024 and connected and autonomous vehicle support is advancing at a 22.2% CAGR through 2030.
- By deployment model, cloud solutions held 52% of the smart highway market share in 2024, while the same model is set to expand at a 19.9% CAGR through 2030.
- By road type, the highway segment commanded 62% of the smart highway market share in 2024, while expressway is set to expand at a 19.23% CAGR through 2030.
- By geography, Asia-Pacific captured 35% of revenue in 2024; the region is projected to grow at an 18.3% CAGR through 2030.
Global Smart Highway Market Trends and Insights
Drivers Impact Analysis
| Driver | (~) % Impact on CAGR Forecast | Geographic Relevance | Impact Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Government smart-infrastructure spending surge | +5.2% | Global; strongest in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific | Medium term (2–4 years) |
| Growing traffic-congestion costs | +4.1% | Major urban centers worldwide | Short term (≤ 2 years) |
| Mandatory road-safety regulations | +3.7% | Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific rollout | Medium term (2–4 years) |
| Rapid sensor / IoT cost decline | +2.8% | Global | Short term (≤ 2 years) |
| Emerging C-AV ready corridor pilots | +2.3% | North America and Europe; pilot zones in Asia-Pacific | Medium to long term (3–5 years) |
| Dynamic in-road EV-charging pilots | +1.75% | Europe and Asia-Pacific; early-stage trials in North America | Long term (≥ 4 years) |
| Source: Mordor Intelligence | |||
Government smart-infrastructure spending surge
Record-level public appropriations are underwriting multi-year construction pipelines. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocates USD 1.2 trillion, including a USD 7.5 billion carve-out for nationwide charging corridors, while India’s 2025 budget channels INR 2,87,333 crore (USD 34.5 billion) toward highway modernisation.[1]U.S. Department of Transportation, “SMART Grants Program,” transportation.gov Dedicated grant programs tie funds to digital-infrastructure milestones, which effectively guarantee procurement for advanced sensing, analytics, and V2X modules.
Growing traffic-congestion costs
Urban congestion now erodes municipal GDP growth and undermines emissions targets, pressing authorities to deploy AI-directed adaptive signalling. Early deployments in Singapore and London showed measurable travel-time reductions and volatile-organic-compound declines, reinforcing the economic case for city-to-cloud traffic telemetry.
Mandatory road-safety regulations
The 2024 National Roadway Safety Strategy introduced a Safe-System framework that favors automated incident detection and lane-departure alerts. Europe’s General Safety Regulation 2025 revision similarly mandates intelligent speed assistance, ensuring continued momentum for sensor-dense carriageways.
Rapid sensor / IoT cost decline
Unit prices for radar, lidar, and vision modules have fallen faster than Moore’s Law projections, opening secondary corridors and peri-urban arterials to digital upgrades. Low-power cameras with on-board AI inference now ship at price points once reserved for basic CCTV, accelerating total lane-kilometre coverage.
Restraints Impact Analysis
| Restraint | (~) % Impact on CAGR Forecast | Geographic Relevance | Impact Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| High capex and long payback | -3.2% | Developing economies most exposed | Medium term (2-4 years) |
| Data-privacy and cyber-security risks | -2.5% | Notably North America, Europe | Short term (≤ 2 years) |
| Inter-agency interoperability gaps | -1.7% | Multi-jurisdiction corridors | Medium term (2-4 years) |
| PPP procurement delays | -1.3% | Emerging markets | Short term (≤ 2 years) |
| Source: Mordor Intelligence | |||
High capex and long payback
Full-stack smart-corridor retrofits demand roadside units, fibre backbones, and cloud orchestration that rarely deliver fiscal break-even within a single political term. Multilateral lenders require blended-finance structures to mitigate sovereign-risk premiums, slowing bid-to-award cycles.
Data-privacy and cyber-security risks
The March 2025 rule on connected-vehicle ICT supply chains imposes strict vendor-origin checks on roadside equipment.[2]U.S. Department of Commerce, “Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain: Connected Vehicles,” federalregister.govOperators now budget for layered zero-trust architectures, penetration testing, and cyber-insurance premiums, which lift project costs and prolong integration schedules.
Segment Analysis
By Component: Services Anchor Digital Transformation
Services held 46% revenue share in 2024 as governments relied on integrators to dovetail legacy assets with edge-native platforms. Advisory teams orchestrate change-management programs, while managed-service contracts guarantee round-the-clock network uptime. Software revenue is smaller today yet grows at an 18.8% CAGR, propelled by subscription-based analytics that monetise traffic metadata. Hardware remains essential but is increasingly commoditised; the arrival of software-defined roadside units enables over-the-air feature releases without civil-works disruption. This architecture boosts lifetime ROI and eases compliance with evolving V2X standards.
Smart highway market operators recognise that labour-intensive design-build-operate contracts transfer performance risk to vendors. Outcome-oriented service-level agreements encourage predictive maintenance driven by digital twins that mirror pavement stress and signal latency, lowering unplanned closures. As procurement offices pivot toward total-cost-of-ownership metrics, service consortia are likely to consolidate, echoing trends seen in cloud-infra outsourcing during the prior decade.
Note: Segment shares of all individual segments available upon report purchase
By Product Technology: Traffic Management Drives Adoption
Smart traffic management systems account for 38% of 2024 revenue and remain the entry point for municipal pilots. AI-guided signal phasing, variable-speed advisories, and hard-shoulder running demonstrate visible congestion relief that satisfies commuter watchdogs. Communication systems, projected to expand at 20.5% CAGR, underpin emerging cooperative-driving use cases. The edge-cloud mesh handles sub-ten-millisecond handshakes between connected vehicles and gantry radios, enabling lane-merge orchestration at scale.
A notable shift is the infusion of computer-vision cameras that dynamically adjust resolution grids to cut energy draw while tracking dense traffic scenes. Platform suppliers bundle these sensors with microservices that feed predictive engines, moving the smart highway market beyond reactive control loops to anticipatory optimisation.
By Application: Congestion Management Dominates Priorities
Traffic congestion management retains 41% share as cities monetise travel-time savings through dynamic tolling and freight priority lanes. Every 1 % drop in delay equates to meaningful GDP lift and emissions cuts, aligning financial and sustainability KPIs. The connected and autonomous vehicle support niche grows the fastest at 22.2% CAGR, driven by automakers’ need for high-definition maps, continuous over-the-air updates, and redundancy lanes for Level-4 vehicles.
Incident detection platforms now blend smartphone inertial-measurement-unit data with roadside radar to triangulate crash sites and dispatch responders in under three minutes.[3]American Traffic Safety Services Association, “Driving Transportation Safety Forward with AI,” atssa.comThese capabilities strengthen political will for broader sensor coverage, anchoring long-run investment cases.
By Deployment Model: Cloud Solutions Accelerate Implementation
Cloud deployments captured 52% revenue share and are poised to widen their lead as operators decommission proprietary data centres. Pay-as-you-use compute allows agencies to start small, scaling analytics clusters when corridor utilisation soars. Hybrid topologies persist where data-sovereignty statutes demand localised storage. Edge nodes execute safety-critical commands such as automated emergency braking within 50 milliseconds, while complex optimisation routines run in regional clouds. [4]Federal Highway Administration, “Connected / Automated Vehicles and Emerging Technologies,” ops.fhwa.dot.gov
Performance baselines prove compelling, agencies report 30% faster algorithm iterations and 40% lower maintenance outlays after migrating to managed platforms. Consequently, the smart highway market size for cloud-native solutions is projected to hit USD 86.0 billion by 2030, equal to nearly 52% of total spending.
Note: Segment shares of all individual segments available upon report purchase
By Road Type: Highways Prioritise Smart Infrastructure
Primary highways represent 62% share because national freight corridors carry the heaviest economic load. Ministries prioritise these lanes for embedded weigh-in-motion scales, automated lane-keeping beacons, and in-road charging coils that top up commercial EVs at cruising speed. India targets 10,000 km of new lanes in FY 2025-26, though China plans a 30,000 km extension within the same window. The investment gap underscores divergent execution models, China favours integrated design-build contracts using modular prefabrication, while India’s parcelled approvals stretch timelines.
Urban roads trail due to complex stakeholder coordination and curbside uses that complicate sensor placement. Expressways present a middle ground, adopting corridor-wide V2X while piloting lane-specific dynamic tolling.
Geography Analysis
Asia-Pacific secures 35% revenue and expands at an 18.3% CAGR through 2030. National governments position digital corridors as engines for economic rebalancing from coastal megacities to interior manufacturing hubs. China’s rollout of nearly 800 smart-city pilots embeds roadway telemetry in wider data-governance frameworks.India deepens budget-line allocations, helped by multi-lateral green-bond issuances that ring-fence funds for ITS.
Europe commands 31% share and champions common standards that enable cross-border continuity. The UK’s Connected and Automated Mobility roadmap assigns GBP 100 million (USD 126 million) to prove self-driving logistics corridors, projecting a GBP 42 billion market by 2035.Scandinavian administrations integrate smart highways with green-hydrogen truck stops to align with Fit-for-55 emissions ceilings, turning climate policy into procurement leverage.
North America holds 27% revenue and grows at 15.1% CAGR. Federal stimulus accelerates design-build finance models, while state DOTs embrace open-application-programming-interface mandates that level the playing field for mid-sized software vendors. Canada pilots digital-twin sub-layers beneath resurfaced asphalt to model freeze-thaw stress, and Mexico bundles ITS rollouts with fibre concessions along tollways to cross-subsidise capital outlays. The smart highway market size in North America is slated to reach USD 44.7 billion by 2030.
Competitive Landscape
The smart highway market remains moderately fragmented yet shows unmistakable consolidation cues. Siemens, IBM, and Cisco deploy end-to-end suites spanning roadside units to cloud dashboards, exploiting scale to meet turnkey tender requirements. Kapsch TrafficCom and SWARCO partner with civil-works majors, embedding proprietary lane-control algorithms into concrete-pavement contracts.
Strategic moves illustrate differentiation paths. Cisco repurposed street-light poles as multi-sensor hubs during Smart City Expo US 2025, creating an upgrade path for municipalities that lack roadside real estate. EnGoPlanet launched ultra-thin photovoltaic luminaires that integrate environment sensors, offering operators new carbon-credit monetisation vectors. Siemens expanded its Mobility Software Suite with cloud-native digital-twin modules to cut traffic-simulation runtime by 70%.
Solar Roadways pioneers hexagon tiles that generate electricity while melting snow, and start-ups in Israel and South Korea commercialise inductive charging coils rated for 200 kW. M&A intensity is likely to increase as platform owners seek proprietary power-management IP to complement traffic-control portfolios.
Smart Highway Industry Leaders
-
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (Nokia Corporation)
-
Cisco Systems Inc.
-
IBM Corporation
-
Indra Sistemas SA
-
Infineon Technologies AG
- *Disclaimer: Major Players sorted in no particular order
Recent Industry Developments
- May 2025: Cisco showcased pole-mounted 5G IoT hubs that integrate computer-vision analytics, positioning the firm to win smart-corridor retrofits in budget-constrained cities.
- April 2025: The U.S. DOT released ITS use-case guidelines for SS4A grants, standardizing AI-driven conflict analytics and unlocking scalable funding paths for county agencies
- March 2025: The U.S. Department of Commerce finalized rules restricting connected-vehicle components sourced from foreign adversaries, forcing prime contractors to revisit supply chains and boosting domestic silicon demand.
- February 2025: India announced GNSS-tolling to eliminate plaza queues, signalling a nationwide opportunity for satellite-to-cloud billing platforms and likely phase-out of dedicated short-range communications gantries
Research Methodology Framework and Report Scope
Market Definitions and Key Coverage
Mordor Intelligence defines the smart highway market as the revenue that flows from hardware, software, and integration services enabling connected sensing, edge control, and two-way communication on limited-access roads such as expressways and freeways. These solutions cover smart traffic management, transport management, monitoring, and roadside communication platforms that are newly deployed or retrofitted onto existing lane-kilometers.
Scope Exclusions: Urban arterial ITS projects, stand-alone public-parking systems, and generic smart-city applications that are not tied to highway corridors are outside this study.
Segmentation Overview
- By Component
- Hardware
- Software
- Services
- By Product Technology
- Smart Traffic Management Systems
- Smart Transport Management Systems
- Monitoring Systems
- Communication Systems
- Lighting and Energy Systems
- Other Technologies
- By Application
- Traffic Congestion Management
- Safety and Incident Detection
- Smart Parking
- Toll Collection
- Emission Monitoring
- Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Support
- Other Applications
- By Deployment Model
- On-premise
- Cloud-based
- Hybrid
- By Road Type
- Highway
- Urban Road
- Expressway
- By Geography
- North America
- United States
- Canada
- Mexico
- South America
- Brazil
- Argentina
- Rest of South America
- Europe
- Germany
- United Kingdom
- France
- Italy
- Spain
- Rest of Europe
- Asia-Pacific
- China
- Japan
- India
- South Korea
- Rest of Asia-Pacific
- Middle East and Africa
- Middle East
- Saudi Arabia
- United Arab Emirates
- Rest of Middle East
- Africa
- South Africa
- Nigeria
- Rest of Africa
- Middle East
- North America
Detailed Research Methodology and Data Validation
Primary Research
We interview highway concessionaires, state DOT project managers, integrators, and edge-sensor OEM engineers across North America, Europe, and key Asian economies. Their insights help us test price spreads, validate uptake rates for cloud traffic platforms, and adjust assumed deployment timelines that emerged from desk work.
Desk Research
Our analysts first map the global lane-kilometer base using open data from the United States Federal Highway Administration, Eurostat road statistics, the International Road Federation, and comparable releases from India's MoRTH. Sensor import values are gauged through UN Comtrade and Volza, while project pipelines are traced in Tenders Info and Dow Jones Factiva press archives. We then pull patent clusters around adaptive signal control and roadside units from Questel to size innovation momentum by region.
A second sweep looks at regulator white papers, trade-association briefs (ITS America, C-ITS Platform Europe, ITS Japan), and listed-company 10-K filings to extract average system pricing, service mix, and refresh cycles. These public sources are blended with proprietary cost benchmarks sitting in Mordor's D&B Hoovers and Marklines subscriptions. The list above is illustrative; many additional open databases and documents are consulted for corroboration and clarification.
Market-Sizing & Forecasting
We build a top-down model that starts with government highway-modernization budgets, public-private concession awards, and average upgrade costs per lane-kilometer, which are then cross-checked against bottom-up snapshots of integrator revenue and sampled ASP × volume data. Variables such as lane-kilometers slated for upgrade, average sensor density, V2X roadside unit penetration, cloud-service attach rates, EV-charging lane pilots, and 5G rollout schedules feed the model. Forecasts use multivariate regression on those drivers, anchored to price-volume elasticities validated during primary calls. Gaps in supplier data are bridged by regional analogs that share similar funding structures before final calibration.
Data Validation & Update Cycle
Outputs pass a three-step variance scan, peer review, and senior-analyst sign-off. We refresh every twelve months, with interim tweaks triggered by funding approvals, large contract wins, or policy shifts; clients therefore receive the latest vetted baseline.
Why Mordor's Smart Highway Baseline Earns Decision-Maker Trust
Published values often diverge because firms pick different boundaries, cost stacks, and refresh cadences. Our team states a single, lane-kilometer-anchored scope and updates figures every year, which keeps numbers comparable and current for planners.
Key gap drivers are that other studies sometimes bundle urban ITS or exclude software services, apply flat sensor prices instead of region-specific tiers, or freeze exchange rates for the forecast window. Mordor Intelligence avoids those shortcuts, and this discipline underpins the reliability buyers expect.
Benchmark comparison
| Market Size | Anonymized source | Primary gap driver |
|---|---|---|
| USD 66.88 B (2025) | Mordor Intelligence | - |
| USD 68.77 B (2024) | Global Consultancy A | Includes urban ITS and digital signage beyond highways |
| USD 42.91 B (2024) | Research Publisher B | Hardware-only scope and single-year currency conversion |
Taken together, the comparison shows that Mordor's clearly defined scope, variable-level modeling, and annual refresh cycle give stakeholders a balanced, transparent baseline they can trace back to measurable drivers and replicate with confidence.
Key Questions Answered in the Report
What is the current size of the smart highway market?
The market stands at USD 66.9 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach USD 165.4 billion by 2030.
Which segment leads the smart highway market by product technology?
Smart traffic management systems lead with 38% revenue share in 2024.
How fast is the cloud deployment model growing?
Cloud-based implementations are projected to expand at a 19.9% CAGR through 2030.
Which region holds the largest share of the smart highway market?
Asia-Pacific holds 35% revenue share and is expected to grow at an 18.3% CAGR to 2030.
What is the major restraint facing smart highway adoption?
High capital expenditure and extended payback periods reduce project momentum, particularly in developing economies.
Why are communication systems gaining importance in smart highways?
They enable real-time V2X data exchange that supports autonomous-vehicle operations and other advanced services, driving a projected 20.5% CAGR.
Page last updated on:
