Eindhoven pairs an unusually candid paper trail — a 2015 data code that says public-space sensing must be public, and independent research that later found no evidence its own flagship lighting experiment worked — with newer layers still being built: intelligent traffic lights shared with neighbouring Helmond, a zero-emission freight zone enforced by cameras since January 2025, and a shared-mobility hub network barely a sixth of the way to its 500-hub target.
The atlas documents 7 projects in Eindhoven, the earliest dating to 2014: 2 scaled back, 5 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (2 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Eindhoven is actually doing.
Computed from the 7 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Eindhoven's smart-city record opens with several unconnected experiments landing in the same eighteen months. In 2014 the city and TU Eindhoven turned the roughly 250-metre nightlife street Stratumseind into a living lab, installing colour- and intensity-adjustable LED lighting alongside sound and crowd sensors to test whether ambient light could calm bar-hour aggression. The following year the municipality wrote an eight-rule data code declaring that anything sensed in public space is public property, and tried to put that principle into practice with a voluntary public sensor register. In the same stretch the regional waste authority Cure tendered fill-level sensors for 1,200 underground containers shared with two neighbouring towns, and bus operator Hermes put 43 articulated electric buses into daily service — a fleet large enough that its existing scheduling software couldn't plan around battery range, so Hermes and VDL wrote their own.
Eindhoven's openness about its own instrumentation gave the years that followed an unusually candid paper trail. A year after the 2018 sensor-register pilot, not one institution had actually registered a sensor on the public map; the idea scaled into a national successor project, SensRNet, which by 2026 lists its own development as paused. Stratumseind's dedicated multi-sensor research phase wound down around the same time — a 2022-2023 street rebuild replaced it with a narrower, still-operating adaptive-lighting system, but independent privacy-law scholars examining the original Living Lab found no published evidence that the colour-changing streetlights, rather than the extra cameras and staff installed alongside them, actually reduced aggression.
Traffic control caught up in 2019, when Eindhoven became one of five pioneer cities in the Dutch national Talking Traffic programme, converting Ring-road intersections into intelligent traffic lights that give behind-schedule buses priority and feed speed advice to connected-car apps. The city's best-known showcase from that year, an "ITS corridor" of linked intersections demonstrated at the 2019 ITS European Congress, turns out to be only half Eindhoven's: the corridor runs into neighbouring Helmond, home of its own Brainport Smart District.
The newest layer is about consolidating rather than sensing. Eindhoven's 2024 Masterplan Mobiliteit 2050 set a target of a shared-mobility hub within 200-300 metres of anywhere in the city; by mid-2026 the city's own open dataset counted 78 hubs against a long-run target of 500, and in March 2026 access to shared bikes, e-bikes, scooters and cargo bikes was consolidated behind a single concession, uMob. Freight got its own enforcement layer on 1 January 2025, when ANPR cameras at every road into the city ring began checking plates against the national vehicle-emissions database for the zero-emission zone — though a privacy review of that camera data and a court-forced carve-out for one business park pushed real fines well past the zone's first year.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2014 to 2025. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Eindhoven's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The nearest open questions are about follow-through rather than technology: whether uMob's shared-mobility concession, barely five months old and reliant on subcontracted operators, publishes any independently verifiable ridership figures as it works toward 500 hubs; whether the zero-emission zone moves from warning letters to actual fines now that its ANPR privacy review has run its course; and whether the national sensor registry that grew out of Eindhoven's own 2018 pilot ever resumes development, or stays paused as a decade-old transparency promise nobody could fully deliver.
Where Eindhoven appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Eindhoven, Netherlands.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/eindhoven/ (last verified 2026-08-10). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.