Dublin measures in the open and acts through others. Almost everything its systems record is public: the council's traffic counts, sound levels and street-by-street air readings, the live position of every bike dock, a regional open-data portal where every dataset names a licence. What the readings may do is decided elsewhere. The bikes belong to an advertiser, the fares and the bus feed to a national authority, the tide forecast closes no gate by itself, the delivery drones fly from a neighbouring council's area, and no legal limit turns a noise reading into an order. The city's record is unusually honest about that gap, because most of it comes from the city's own open data.
The atlas documents 11 projects in Dublin, the earliest dating to 1989: 1 with a documented success, 10 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Dublin is actually doing.
Computed from the 11 entries below — a profile, not a score.
1989–2009: the first instruments. Dublin's record starts in the signal boxes: in 1989 the council put its first 35 junctions under the adaptive SCATS traffic system, run from a control room at the Civic Offices. After the tidal flood of February 2002 it commissioned a coastal flood forecast that warns the crews who must close the gates on the Dodder and the quays. In 2009 two very different systems arrived: a permanent ambient noise network, and dublinbikes, paid for not in cash but in billboards, so that JCDecaux, not the city, owns the bikes and the docks.
2011: the year Dublin went open. Within three months the region gained three of its lasting systems. The National Transport Authority put live bus arrivals for every Dublin Bus stop on a website, an app and a text service; the Leap card arrived in December and became the place where Dublin's fare rules live; and the four Dublin councils opened Dublinked, Ireland's first regional open-data platform. The first developer API for the live bus data ran on it.
2017–2022: testbeds and street-level data. Smart Docklands made the Docklands a testbed for neutral-host 5G and flood sensors, and hosted a 110-bin pilot of the solar compactor bins that report when they are full, which the council was also buying for streets across the city. From May 2021 a Street View car mapped the air on every street, and a peer-reviewed analysis of its drives named traffic as the dominant local source of NO2.
2023–2026: the owners' turn. The recent chapter is about who holds the levers. The NTA is replacing Leap with a new ticketing system that is not due to take bank cards before 2028, and a contract to end the 'ghost buses' on the live signs was still awaited in September 2026. The council decided to let the JCDecaux deal expire in 2027 and procure a bike share whose stations it will own. Its Drone Unit began modelling drone traffic over the city, while the delivery drones themselves were being decided on next door, in Fingal.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1989 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 Dublin's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Three handovers decide what Dublin's systems become. In 2027 the dublinbikes concession ends and the city takes the stations into its own hands; the NTA's new ticketing is due to bring bank-card payment in 2028, and its new vehicle location system is meant to stop buses that never left the garage from counting down on the signs. What is not scheduled matters as much: no published evaluation exists of what the adaptive signals achieve, of how well the tide forecast performs, or of any traffic measure that followed the street-level air map. Dublin already publishes its readings; the next step is to publish what they changed.
Where Dublin appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Dublin — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Dublin threads below, not counted out of them.
The same systems in the same years, split on who keeps the result: Taipei's bike contract hands the assets to the city and its pumps act on their own; Dublin's bikes stay with an advertiser and its flood forecast waits for council crews.
Every editorial link from Dublin'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 Dublin, Ireland.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/dublin/ (last verified 2026-09-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.