No single body runs Los Angeles. Of the entries below, the signals belong to a city bureau, the streetlights to another, the water and power to a utility with its own board, the toll lanes and the vans to a county agency, the stormwater tax to a flood control district covering 88 cities, and the earthquake alerts to the federal government — which is why half of them are marked regional rather than citywide. The other thing to notice is how much this city has switched off. It cancelled its two predictive-policing systems in 2019 and 2020, retired its earthquake app in 2020, and let its street-cleanliness survey narrow from a citywide quarterly sweep to a handful of World Cup corridors. Three abandonments in one city is more than any other entry in this atlas records.
The atlas documents 13 projects in Los Angeles, the earliest dating to 1984: 4 with a documented success, 1 documented failure, 2 scaled back, 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (3 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Los Angeles is actually doing.
Computed from the 13 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Los Angeles instrumented its asphalt before almost anyone. ATSAC went live for the 1984 Olympics and still runs the city's signals; only Sydney's SCATS is older in this atlas. The county's TAP card followed a slower path — the board picked smart cards in 2001, Cubic finished the equipment in 2006, and paper passes started disappearing in February 2007. In 2009 the Bureau of Street Lighting began swapping 140,000 cobra-head lamps for LED, finishing in 2013 and cutting street-lighting energy by about 64 percent.
The 2010s were the decade the city started scoring things. The LAPD ran Operation LASER, which gave individuals points, from 2011, and PredPol, which forecast where property crime would happen, from the same year. Metro opened tolled lanes on the I-110 in November 2012 and the I-10 three months later, pricing a lane rather than a cordon and recalculating the rate from live detectors. In 2016 the city published its geospatial data on GeoHub and sent sanitation crews to drive every street and alley in the city, grading each block one to three. Publication and secret scoring arrived in the same years, from the same city hall.
Then came the switch-offs. The LAPD's own Inspector General reported in March 2019 that the chronic-offender scoring was applied inconsistently and that neither programme's effect on crime could be measured; the scoring tool was dropped that April and PredPol was cut by memo in April 2020, the stated reason being the pandemic budget. ShakeAlertLA, the first public app in the United States to relay federal earthquake warnings, launched at the end of 2018, sent nothing during the Ridgecrest earthquakes six months later because the city had set its threshold too high, and was retired in December 2020 in favour of California's statewide app. In between, LADOT wrote the Mobility Data Specification, which is the piece of Los Angeles that other cities actually adopted.
Since 2020 the running costs have arrived. Metro Micro, the on-demand vans launched that December beside the routes NextGen had cut, was costing about $42 a boarding against roughly $8 on the bus; Metro tripled the fare in March 2024 and contracted operations to Via's Nomad Transit that December. Copper thieves stripped the wire out of the streetlight network faster than crews could repair it, and by March 2026 the city's answer was 60,000 solar lamps with nothing worth stealing rather than more sensors. And the largest municipal utility in the country only began replacing its 1.5 million electric meters in September 2025, seventeen years after the state authorised its investor-owned neighbours to do the same.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1984 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 Los Angeles's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Los Angeles has two hard deadlines that are doing the work a strategy usually does: the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics. Metro opened its fare gates to ordinary bank cards in May 2026 in time for the first, though only at the adult fare, with discounted riders promised for 2027. The cleanliness survey that once covered every street now inspects tournament corridors. The pattern to watch is the one the entries already show: this city measures early and then discovers it cannot pay to keep the measurement running. Its streetlight network reaches 37,000 of 223,000 poles; its stormwater programme can map every funded project but reports acre-feet modelled from designs, with its own oversight review unable to rule out double counting; and its meters are being replaced by a utility that will not name a completion date.
Where Los Angeles appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Los Angeles — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Los Angeles threads below, not counted out of them.
Two very unlike cities running the same two programmes: hundreds of small works to deal with rain — Copenhagen to shed it, Los Angeles to keep it — and a lighting retrofit where remote control reached everything, or almost nothing.
Opposite economics on the same object: Manila's fare card charges the rider a fee it never refunds and lets balances lapse, Los Angeles's unlocks a cap — and in both cities a threshold decides when a crew is sent.
Two answers to the same gap in transit data: Nairobi mapped the flexible service it already had and bent an open standard around it, Los Angeles wrote the standard and then paid heavily per boarding to create the service.
Every editorial link from Los Angeles'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 Los Angeles, United States.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/los-angeles/ (last verified 2026-08-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.