Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City's oldest entry is the one that settled who holds the measurement. The city once lost around forty per cent of its drinking water to leaks; in 2008 the utility signed a World Bank-financed performance-based contract covering a 23-square-kilometre zone with about 140,000 connections, carving it into more than a hundred continuously metered district areas and paying the contractor for verified leakage reduction. The contract targeted 37,500 cubic metres a day and about 92,000 were achieved, with roughly 12,000 leaks repaired. District metering has since spread across the network and the utility reports non-revenue water below twelve per cent. The unfinished half is custody: once the contract ended, the headline number went back to being the utility's own.

Five years later the city built a complaint line and then, unusually, published its own remainders. 1022 began in 2013 as a hotline for reporting broken infrastructure and grew into the unified portal across phone, message, email, web, app and social channels, logging 650,961 reports by the end of 2017 and taking over two million contacts in the pandemic year. What turned it from a hotline into a management instrument is the figure it publishes about its failures: the share of reports handled past deadline fell from 13.96 per cent in the first half of 2022 to about one per cent that autumn. Between July 2025 and early January 2026 it received 85,108 reports and processed 83,744. The city's own reviews still name the failure no number of channels fixes — reports bounced between the 86 units and 625 focal points that share the queue.

The traffic layer arrived in 2020 and only reached enforcement five years later. The urban traffic management centre runs cameras with automatic plate recognition feeding both violation detection and signal control; enforcement went live at 31 intersections in September 2025, expanding to roughly 216 key junctions by early 2026 with about 200 more signal cabinets due to be networked that year. In its first five months the network detected over 8,000 violations, mainly red-light running, wrong-lane driving and illegal stopping. Then in December 2024 the city opened Vietnam's second metro line — 19.7 kilometres and fourteen stations, delivered turnkey with communications-based train control and seventeen trains, run by Vietnamese crews who took over from the supplier's supervisors during trial running. A driver sits in every cab and no operator source claims or dates unattended service.

The metro also produced one of the few honest ridership stories in this atlas. Rides were free until 20 January 2025, which inflated the opening month's headlines: 1.4 million riders in eleven days told less than the paid-fare year that followed, which closed at 20,558,990 passengers — an average of 56,326 a day against a pre-launch expectation of about 39,000. Beating your own forecast is rare in a genre where the circulating number is usually the signalling vendor's design capacity dressed up as demand. Four months later the city relaunched transit payment without a proprietary card: an open-loop system in which any contactless bank card, wallet or phone is the ticket, starting on more than 500 buses with a target of over 2,000, alongside a pass card and app for regulars, and four metro stations dropping paper tickets in a September 2025 pilot. The city's first attempt, an account-based card launched in 2019 with a technology partner, never became the standard and stopped operating at the end of 2024.