Chongqing is a direct-administered municipality the size of a small country — its registered population runs to roughly 32 million, but most of that is farming counties spread across a mountainous jurisdiction bigger than Austria. The figure the atlas uses here, about 11.5 million, is the actual built-up urban area (Demographia's 2025 estimate, ranking it 36th worldwide), the dense, cliff-and-river city of bridges and the monorail that famously runs through a residential tower. Its smart-city record leans hard on transport and infrastructure safety rather than citizen services: two of China's first fully-driverless robotaxi permits (in the outlying district of Yongchuan, not the city centre), a national connected-vehicle test corridor, sensors on most of its Yangtze River crossings, and a river-monitoring dashboard for 17,500 volunteer 'river chiefs'. Almost everything measured here is self-reported by the agency that built it, and the record includes a real embarrassment — a driverless taxi that drove into an open construction pit in 2025 — alongside the official successes.
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Three entries that show what Chongqing is actually doing.
Timeline (2018–2024)
All 6 projects in Chongqing
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
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- 🇮🇳 Hyderabad: Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATCS/CoSiCoSt) Contrast in scale: Chongqing's brain claims 1.5bn fused records citywide; Hyderabad's adaptive signals cover select junctions.
- 🇨🇳 Shenzhen: i深圳 — Shenzhen's Unified Government Services App Same super-app model — Shenzhen's i深圳 portal also reports its own milestones, with no independent audit of either.
- 🇨🇳 Shanghai: Suishenban: One Network for All Government Services Shanghai's Suishenban is the model super-app Yukuaiban follows — same self-reported growth-curve pattern.
- 🇨🇳 Shenzhen: Shenzhen's Autonomous Vehicle Law & Citywide Driverless Robotaxi Permit Shenzhen's 2022 law gave driverless cars legal cover nationwide; Chongqing's Yongchuan permit and 2025 trench crash test that framework.
- 🇨🇳 Shenzhen: Shenzhen's Digital Water Quality Monitoring Network Both China river-quality platforms trace pollution to its source via sensors — Shenzhen traces discharges, Chongqing fingerprints water.
- 🇨🇳 Shanghai: Flood & Typhoon Command System Same genre of Chinese city command dashboard fusing sensors and cameras onto one map, though Shanghai's watches floods, not river chiefs.
- 🇨🇳 Chengdu: Smart Rongcheng — Chengdu's citywide 'one network' operations command Both are China's 'one network' government portals; Chengdu's numbers are equally self-reported by the operating agency.
- 🇨🇳 Wuhan: National Intelligent Connected Vehicle (Wuhan) Demonstration Zone Peer national C-V2X pilot zone: Wuhan's is China's sixth, this is the fourth — both measured in km of wired road, not vehicles served.
- 🇨🇳 Chengdu: Apollo Go robotaxi pilot — driverless cars with a safety officer still on board Same Baidu Apollo Go fleet, one region over — Chengdu scaled from 8 cars in 2022 too, without Chongqing's construction-trench incident.
- 🇨🇳 Wuhan: Apollo Go Robotaxi Network Same Apollo Go operator: Wuhan's fleet froze citywide in a cloud outage; Chongqing's drove into an open trench — different failure modes.
- 🇨🇳 Wuhan: Wuhan City Safety Risk Monitoring & Early Warning Platform Both monitor bridge structural health with sensors — Chongqing's covers 24 of 28 Yangtze bridges, Wuhan folds bridges into a wider platform.
- 🇨🇳 Tianjin: Automated Waterlogging Monitoring & Early-Warning System Sibling Chinese sensor network: automated thresholds trigger warnings, though Tianjin watches flooding, not bridge stress.
- 🇨🇳 Chengdu: 'Open Doors, Fix Congestion' — Chengdu traffic police's AI signal and drone campaign Peer AI traffic campaign one province over: Chengdu's signals also read live video feeds, and its results are police-reported too.
