Almost nothing in this atlas entry is run by the City of Miami. The city of 440,000 sits inside a county of 2.6 million that operates the transit, the fare card, the water utility, the school-zone cameras and the 311 line the city's own website tells residents to dial. What Miami itself does is publish: a GIS hub whose datasets ship a Creative Commons Attribution deed even though no ordinance requires any of it, and a city-scoped extract of the county's service requests that records a target in days, the days actually taken and an overdue flag on every case — and stops on 12 August 2024, the day the county changed platform. Two candidates were rejected during this build for belonging to neighbouring governments rather than to Miami.
The atlas documents 8 projects in Miami, the earliest dating to 1986: 1 scaled back, 7 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (6 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Miami is actually doing.
Computed from the 8 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The automation is older than the smart-city vocabulary. Miami-Dade County opened Metromover in April 1986 as a driverless elevated people mover, extended it in 1994, and stopped charging for it in 2002 after voters approved a half-penny transit surtax. Forty years on, the thing that closes the line most weekends is not the automation but the 1980s wayside and control equipment beneath it: a $153M overhaul awarded in 2021 missed its May 2025 deadline, commissioners added $15.5M of oversight in hopes of finishing by 2028 or 2029, daily service was cut by two and a half hours, and the county is refurbishing its 27 existing cars rather than buying new ones until the track work is done.
The fare layer arrived in 2009 and has been added to rather than replaced. The county's Cubic-built EASY Card reached Tri-Rail in 2011, and in August 2019 the gates opened to ordinary bank cards, systemwide by early 2020. Miami caps — but only by the day, at $5.65, the price of a 1-Day Pass. There is no weekly or monthly cap and the whole pass shelf is still on sale, which puts Miami between Los Angeles, which abolished passes for automatic caps in 2023, and Chicago and Boston, which cap nothing. Three fare media now coexist, and one of them is the county's own: mobile passes bought in the GO app cannot open a Metrorail faregate.
Between 2018 and 2022 the city built its publishing habit, and the county built its heat institution. Miami's Socrata portal went stale after June 2022 with twelve unlicensed datasets while its GIS hub kept running, and in 2021 Miami-Dade appointed what it and its funder both call the world's first Chief Heat Officer, seeded by a philanthropic challenge grant — Athens named Europe's first that July. The post produced a December 2022 Extreme Heat Action Plan, a heat season running 1 May to 31 October, and the only pilot of its kind in the country: the National Weather Service lowered the county's heat-advisory threshold from a heat index of 108°F to 105°F.
Then the limits closed in from two directions. Florida's HB 433 took effect on 1 July 2024, barring counties from requiring employers to give outdoor workers any heat protection beyond the state or federal minimum; Miami-Dade withdrew its pending proposal. The county then cut the Chief Heat Officer post to help close a $400M budget gap, and the officer left late in 2025 — though the county's own web page still described the role in the present tense in July 2026. In the same window the county switched on the other kind of instrument: school-zone speed cameras went live on 4 November 2024 across 206 zones, all of them outside the city limits. By early 2026 they had produced 236,573 citations and nearly 34,000 licence suspensions, and accounted for close to 70 percent of all speeding tickets in the county.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1986 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 Miami's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The interesting question in Miami is what a measurement is allowed to do. Its clearest answer runs the wrong way: the county got the heat-advisory threshold lowered, and then state law removed its power to attach any obligation to the reading, and then the budget removed the post that had argued for both. The camera programme is the mirror image — a statute that caps the fine, the speed threshold and the hours, but says nothing at all about paying the vendor, so RedSpeed keeps 30 to 33 percent of what the county retains, a projected $71M against the county's $144M, and no evaluation of speed or crash effects has ever been published. Two things are worth watching. The county awarded a 20-year, $273.6M contract in November 2025 to convert roughly 470,000 water accounts — still read by hand today, by 35 meter readers — to advanced metering; no installation has been documented since. And Miami's 311 record has been dark since the August 2024 platform migration, with the county's own published series ending at 2023. Until one of them resumes, the most auditable thing about service delivery here describes a system that no longer exists.
Where Miami appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Miami — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Miami threads below, not counted out of them.
Mirror images on open data: Washington promises the public domain and ships something else in its metadata, Miami legislated nothing and ships a clean deed on almost everything — and both wrote Open311 code that has since gone dark.
The automation timeline read backwards: Miami has run a driverless mover since the eighties and struggles to keep the hardware alive, Toronto resignalled decades later and kept the driver — and their fare products head opposite ways.
Two coastal American cities pricing the same rising water differently — Miami costs a pump-and-seawall build, Boston zoned the risk into its planning — and both put the low-income fare on the agency card without ever capping it.
Every editorial link from Miami'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 Miami, United States.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/miami/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.