Bucharest

The traffic platform is the oldest and the most stalled. Operational since 2008, the Bucharest Traffic Management System gives the city centralised, adaptive control of signals across roughly 100 junctions in the inner ring, with CCTV, fibre links and priority for surface transport — an induction-loop system that has worked only intermittently for years. Its refresh keeps slipping: EU recovery contracts worth about 73 million lei, signed in 2023, lapsed unused because the works could not be finished by the July 2026 deadline, and in May 2026 the city approved feasibility studies for a first modernisation phase of 92 intersections while looking for roughly 85 million lei elsewhere.

The fare payment is the one thing that landed. Since 2020 the surface operator has accepted contactless bank cards at on-board validators, extended to the whole fleet under a February 2022 contract at the same fare as a transport card. Bucharest was a latecomer by its own bank's account, which had already deployed the system in 16 Romanian cities including the capital's own metro — whose national operator procured a separate scheme. There is no daily fare capping, ticketing remains spread across several parallel apps, and on 26 May 2026 a fibre incident at a third-party provider stopped card payment across the entire surface fleet for hours.

The heating map is the entry that explains the city. Since November 2021 Termoalert has shown the live state of the district-heating network — every outage colour-coded by stage, with affected streets, repair progress and estimated restoration dates. The transparency sits on a system in deep trouble: 924 km of primary and 2,763 km of secondary pipes, much of it more than 25 years old, losing 37.73% of the heat fed into it in 2024. In spring 2026 the map showed about 3,500 of the roughly 9,000 connected blocks with hot-water problems at once.