Boston's smart-city record is unusually easy to check, because the city publishes the evidence against itself. Ten of the metrics behind CityScore come from BOS:311, whose every case has been open data since 2009 — but no independent audit has ever tested whether a case marked closed was actually fixed. The Street Bump app became the world's standard example of sensing bias without anyone checking its own reports by neighbourhood. Boston commissioned a study of a harbour barrier and then published the study that told it not to build one. The pattern holds across the ten entries here: the accounting arrives years before the outcome, and the city says so.
The atlas documents 10 projects in Boston, the earliest dating to 2006: 1 with a documented success, 1 scaled back, 8 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (2 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Boston is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The instrumentation came first, and it came from residents' phones. The Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics released Citizens Connect in 2009, six years before Boston had a 3-1-1 phone number at all, and followed it in 2011 with Street Bump, which read a driving phone's accelerometer and filed road defects without anyone tapping anything. Street Bump's real finding was not potholes but sunken manhole covers, at roughly four times the rate; 1,250 of the worst were fixed with the utilities that own them. Kate Crawford's 2013 essay made it the canonical case of a sensor that samples only people with phones and cars — an argument from ownership statistics that Boston's own unpublished neighbourhood breakdown was never used to test. The city ended the project in 2014. Bike share arrived in the same window and stayed: Hubway launched in 2011 on $4.5M of grants and was publicly owned from day one.
Between 2014 and 2017 Boston wrote down the rules. A mayoral executive order of 7 April 2014 and the CIO's 2015 policy created a duty to publish — with no ordinance behind it and no reporting cadence, so there is nothing to audit in either direction — and the CKAN portal Analyze Boston followed in April 2017. Citizens Connect became BOS:311 when the phone code went live on 11 August 2015. Vision Zero was pledged the same year and cashed in on 9 January 2017, cutting the default limit on city-owned streets from 30 to 25 mph. That change is one of the few urban speed-limit reductions with a controlled evaluation, and the result is a lesson in reading distributions: mean speeds moved 0.3 percent, not statistically significant, while the odds of exceeding 35 mph fell 29.3 percent. The average driver ignored it; the dangerous one did not.
The same years bought a fare system that has not arrived. The MBTA awarded a Cubic-John Laing concession about $723M in November 2017 to replace the CharlieCard by mid-2020. A December 2019 reset scrapped the planned single launch and added more than $200M; the contract reached $935.4M, the project $960.2M, and in May 2024 the board moved full rollout to June 2026 with a contractual longstop of June 2027. Bank cards were finally accepted from 1 August 2024. Commuter rail — named first in the 2017 promise — still cannot tap, and the second-generation card promised for spring 2025 was still 'coming soon' in July 2026. Meanwhile the card's original flaw outlived its own lawsuit: the MBTA sued MIT students in 2008 for describing that the balance sits on the card rather than in a back office, and Medford high-schoolers cloned it again in 2023, that time with the agency's cooperation.
Since 2016 Boston has been converting models into obligations. Climate Ready Boston mapped the flooding that follows 36 inches of sea-level rise, and a 2021 zoning overlay made those maps binding on new construction in the 2070 flood area — a rarer step than publishing them. BERDO did the same to emissions: the 2013 disclosure ordinance became a binding standard in October 2021, with declining limits to zero by 2050 and $234 per tonne over the line going to an environmental justice fund rather than to general revenue. Both are still promises. The first BERDO compliance reports were not due until 15 August 2026, so no payment has been collected; the Conservation Law Foundation found in 2024 that most coastal projects due by 2030 were missing from the capital plan through 2029; and the Green Line still has no system that enforces its own signals, seventeen years after the NTSB recommended one and two years after a train ran a red light at East Somerville.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2006 to 2019. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Boston's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Three of Boston's four newest commitments have a date in the next two years, and each will show whether the accounting was real. BERDO's first verified compliance filings landed in August 2026 — the first chance to see whether owners pay $234 a tonne or take the flexibility routes, and whether the environmental justice fund is ever sustained by anything but its $3.5M city seed. Phase 1 of the Green Line train protection system, which only alerts the operator, was anticipated in summer 2026; automatic braking is not due until 2028. The MBTA's fare replacement has June 2026 as its rollout date and June 2027 as its contractual longstop, with commuter rail the mode to watch. Against all three, the quiet counterexample is the one that did not need a contract: the income-eligible reduced fare launched in September 2024 and reached 44,875 riders in its second year, about 6 percent above forecast.
Where Boston appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Boston — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Boston threads below, not counted out of them.
Two cities that put the same duty in different law and reached the same deed: both dedicate their data to the public domain, both run a 311 line that publishes everything, and both slowed their streets by opposite means.
Two cities that documented their own complaint-line bias — Boston's by outside researchers, Chicago's conceded by the city itself — and that bought the same fare system, one of them withholding payment until it worked.
Two coastal American cities pricing the same rising water differently — Miami costs a pump-and-seawall build, Boston zoned the risk into its planning — and both put the low-income fare on the agency card without ever capping it.
Every editorial link from Boston's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Boston, United States.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/boston/ (last verified 2026-08-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.