Chengdu, the roughly 21-million-strong capital of Sichuan and China's largest western metropolis, has built one of the world's fastest-growing metro networks — past 500 route-kilometres within about a decade. Its flagship smart-transit move is Line 9, opened in December 2020 as the city's first fully automated (GoA4) driverless metro: a 22km orbital line whose trains run unattended on Alstom's Urbalis signalling, watched by thousands of onboard obstacle- and derailment-detection sensors. The automation is genuine, but the occasional 'China's first GoA4 line' billing is not — Beijing's Yanfang line ran driverless three years earlier.
The atlas documents 7 projects in Chengdu, the earliest dating to 2018: 1 with a documented success, 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (2 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Chengdu is actually doing.
Computed from the 7 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Chengdu's first two systems both work at a scale smaller than their names. The 2018 electronic fence for shared bikes alerts a rider who parks outside a designated zone and charges a dispatch fee if the bike is not moved; a 2022 district pilot upgraded it to satellite positioning accurate to roughly a centimetre across about 2,800 fence points and 21,000 bikes, and then had to waive the fees for a fortnight because riders still could not tell where a zone ended. The transport data centre opened the following year and ingests more than 300 million records a day from over 100,000 sensing terminals and 99,000 video feeds across aviation, roads, rail, buses, taxis and ride-hailing. Its clearest reported win is not citywide either: taxi queue complaints at the airport reportedly fell about 90 per cent once the centre took over dispatch there.
2020 brought the two purchases that look most like a smart city and least resemble one in operation. Metro Line 9 opened that December as Chengdu's first fully automated line — a 22-kilometre orbital route running unattended from day one, with obstacle and derailment detection built into the fleet rather than retrofitted onto a driver-run line later, as the network passed 500 kilometres. From April, a municipal investment subsidiary began replacing separate streetlight, camera, signage and signal posts with combined multifunction poles carrying lighting, 5G small cells, traffic and environmental sensors, emergency call points and charging. More than 3,500 went up against a stated target of 30,000 within three to five years — and on the operator's own account, most of what has been installed so far replaces old streetlights, with the sensor and camera capacity reserved for future use rather than switched on.
From 2021 the city built the room that is supposed to hold it all together. Smart Rongcheng runs a three-tier city, district and street command structure aiming at unified management of the whole municipality: 1,482 urban vital-sign indicators fed by 37 departments, 58 categories of early-warning data covering weather and water levels, and 120 connected application scenarios run by 25 departments with 109 more added by the districts. The most concrete published result is administrative rather than physical — the citizen hotline handling more than a million requests in 2022 with resolution and satisfaction rates above 90 per cent, and routine faults such as a broken streetlight dispatched to a crew and reportedly fixed inside half an hour. In parallel, robotaxis began carrying passengers in the high-tech zone in July 2022 and grew their operating area sixfold by mid-2024 — while the fleet stayed at eight cars, running office hours, with a paid safety officer in every one, and peak waits reported at close to two hours.
By 2024 Chengdu had overtaken Shanghai and Beijing in registered vehicles, and the traffic police answered with a campaign rather than a platform. Open Doors, Fix Congestion combines deep-learning signals that read live video and recalculate green time instead of running a fixed schedule, a system that flags a slow-moving vehicle on the ring roads within thirty seconds, and drones working with ground units on incident response. The results are reported the way they were produced — corridor by corridor. The congestion index near the West China Hospital fell from 3.28 to 2.44, a stretch of Dianxin Road by about 41 per cent, and travel time on one signalised road carrying some 50,000 vehicles a day reportedly halved. By mid-2025 the city counted over 21 million square metres of road space freed and 116 lanes added.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2018 to 2024. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Chengdu's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Chengdu reports at the scale where its numbers are true and buys at the scale where they are not, and that gap is the thing to watch rather than any single project. The traffic police publish corridor-level results and no citywide congestion figure, which is the honest choice — a citywide average would hide the fact that a few streets improved by forty per cent and most were untouched. The poles are the same shape in reverse: 3,500 installed against 30,000 planned, and the sensors on the ones already up are reserved rather than running, so the question is not how fast the target is met but when any of the reserved capacity is switched on. The robotaxi permit has existed since 2022 and the fleet has not grown past eight cars with safety officers, while the same operator runs without them in other Chinese cities. And the command centre's headline achievement is a hotline statistic, which tells you how fast a complaint is closed and nothing about whether the city got safer, cleaner or quicker to cross.
Where Chengdu appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Chengdu — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Chengdu threads below, not counted out of them.
Neighbouring Sichuan-basin megacities running the identical three programmes: signals reading live video, the same robotaxi fleet scaled up from a handful of cars, and a one-network government portal reporting its own numbers.
Every editorial link from Chengdu'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 Chengdu, China.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/chengdu/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.