Chicago

Every editorial link from Chicago'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.

• 🇩🇰 Copenhagen: Copenhagen's Cloudburst Management Plan Two answers to the same overflow: Chicago dug 110 miles of tunnel from 1975; Copenhagen rebuilt its streets to hold the rain from 2011.
• 🇹🇭 Bangkok: Bangkok Flood Control Centre: Drainage Telemetry & Street-Level Forecasting Bangkok's gauges feed a staffed room that works the pumps; TARP publishes reservoir levels live, and real-time control is still research.
• 🇩🇰 Copenhagen: Bycyklen: Tablet-and-GPS Bike-Share Copenhagen's fleet died with its operator in 2022; Chicago's outlived three — Alta, Motivate, Lyft — because the city owns the bikes.
• 🇫🇷 Paris: Plan Vélo Digital Infrastructure Mesh Kindred open-data street sensors: Chicago's poles measured air and foot traffic 2016–21; Paris's bike counters publish hourly.
• 🇮🇳 Bengaluru: BMTC Bus Tracking and Open Transit Data Same workaround, different reason: Bengaluru's developers scrape the operator's app for a GTFS; Chicago's scraped this feed to audit it.
• 🇫🇮 Helsinki: HSL Open Transit Data & the Digitransit Platform Helsinki opened its planner API in 2010 and it became shared open-source infrastructure; the CTA's feed is a revocable grant.
• 🇮🇳 New Delhi: Citywide CCTV Rollout and Delhi Police Facial Recognition Delhi's police told a court their matching ran at 1-2% and kept the system; Chicago measured 9.1% and let the contract lapse.
• 🇯🇵 Osaka: Osaka Metro Open-Loop Contactless Fare Payment This gate took a bank card in 2013; Osaka waited until 2024, then switched on 548 Kansai stations in a single day.
• 🇳🇵 Kathmandu: Kathmandu Metropolitan Air Quality Monitoring Dashboard Open-data air sensing, a decade apart: Chicago's pole nodes published readings 2016–21; Kathmandu launched its own city network in 2025.
• 🇪🇸 Santander: SmartSantander Two pioneering open sensor testbeds, both retired: Santander's EU pilot came first (2010–13); Chicago's 100+ pole nodes ran 2016–21.
• 🇺🇸 Boston: BOS:311 and Boston's Service-Request Record Boston's reporting bias was shown by outside researchers; Chicago's was conceded by the city itself, which then took tree trimming off 311.
• 🇺🇸 New York City: NYC311 Service Requests & Open Data New York's website overtook the phone; Chicago's 311 was still 52.8% phone calls in 2025, with ward offices filing 60,340 requests.
• 🇺🇸 San Francisco: Surveillance Technology Ordinance & Facial Recognition Ban San Francisco requires a published impact report and a Board vote before a department may acquire a technology like this.
• 🇺🇸 Los Angeles: Measure W — LA County's Safe, Clean Water Program Both count water nobody meters: LA's acre-feet are modelled from designs, and TARP's overflow figures are the district's own.
• 🇺🇸 Washington D.C.: DC 311 and the Open311 API It Started Both publish every request; D.C.'s file has no channel field and no audit. Chicago's has both — and the audit found closed is not fixed.
• 🇺🇸 San Francisco: NextMuni: Real-Time Muni Predictions & the Fight Over Who Owned Them San Francisco fought the same licence question: a licensee claimed its predictions, and the city wrote ownership into the contract.
• 🇺🇸 Los Angeles: Operation LASER & PredPol — Predictive Policing Both ended after their own inspector general looked: LA could measure no crime effect; Chicago found evidence in 9.1% of responses.
• 🇺🇸 San Francisco: DataSF and San Francisco's Open Data Law San Francisco put the same duty in its administrative code and publishes the inventory as a dataset, so anyone can count what is missing.
• 🇺🇸 New York City: NYC Open Data and the 2012 Open Data Law New York wrote the same duty into a 2012 local law; Chicago's came by executive order, and the reports stopped two years in.
• 🇺🇸 Boston: Analyze Boston and the 2014 Open Data Executive Order Boston used an executive order too, but wrote in no reporting duty at all — so nothing lapsed, and there is nothing to audit.
• 🇺🇸 New York City: Citi Bike Docked Bike Share & Open Trip Data New York owns none of its bikes and says it cannot touch the fares; Chicago bought the fleet in 2013 and caps rises at 10% a year.
• 🇺🇸 Boston: Bluebikes: Bike Share Owned by Thirteen Municipalities The one-owner version: Chicago's CDOT owns Divvy outright and negotiates with Lyft alone — no regional council in between.
• 🇺🇸 San Francisco: Clipper: One Card for Two Dozen Bay Area Operators, and the Rebuild That Ran Late Cubic's Bay Area rebuild repeated 2013: it launched in December 2025 and by March had ten major outages and 1.3 million cards migrated.
• 🇺🇸 Boston: CharlieCard and the AFC 2.0 Fare System Replacement Same contractor, different decade: Cubic's Boston system took bank cards in 2024, eleven years after Chicago's gates did.