Montreal's recurring question is not what the technology does but who owns it. A pension fund manager owns the driverless metro and the transit authority pays it by the passenger-kilometre; the province owns every speed camera on the city's streets and Quebec's own guidance says municipalities cannot even apply for one; the city owns the bike share's bikes and docks but the operator holds the copyright in the trip data. Where Montreal does hold something outright, it is unusually disciplined about it: every one of the 405 datasets on its open data portal names a licence, which no other city in this atlas manages.
The atlas documents 8 projects in Montreal, the earliest dating to 2007: 1 scaled back, 7 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is independent (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Montreal is actually doing.
Computed from the 8 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The 2000s ended in a procurement scandal that still frames the city's reputation. Montreal awarded a consortium roughly CA$356M over 25 years in late 2007 to meter its non-residential buildings; Auditor General Jacques Bergeron judged the tender 'trop vite, trop gros et trop cher' — too fast, too big, too expensive — and the city cancelled it in September 2009, then paid more than CA$13M in arbitration and sued in 2018 to get it back. The instructive part is what came next: Montreal restarted in 2012 with three contracts worth about CA$55M and by 2023 had fitted some 19,500 buildings with remote-read meters. The price had been the scandal, not the meters. But the leakage the original contract was sold to fix has not moved — the city's own data still puts overconsumption and losses at 30 percent, exactly where they were in 2015.
Meanwhile the city was building the habits that now distinguish it. 311 opened in 2007, though handling requests is a borough power, so one number fronts up to nineteen back offices — and the auditor general later found the boroughs had no mechanism to analyse why requests recur, and that elected officials pulled constituents' problems out of the queue ahead of scheduled work. The data portal followed in the early 2010s, and in February 2014 a council resolution adopted plain Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — the unmodified international deed, chosen expressly to avoid adding another licence to the world. A policy overhauled in December 2015 committed the city to publishing by default and to inventorying what it holds, and that inventory is still maintained today.
BIXI is the city's clearest case of the ownership question answered the hard way. It launched in May 2009 with 3,000 bikes on modular stations that needed no excavation, and Montreal-built equipment was then sold to London, Toronto, New York, Boston and Washington. The auditor general found in 2011 that the city had launched with no business plan, no serious feasibility study and arguably no legal authority; the maker went bankrupt in January 2014 owing about CA$50M. Montreal bought the local assets for CA$11.9M and created a non-profit to run them — the opposite of Copenhagen, where the same kind of insolvency killed the system outright. Two other data layers date from these years: GPS on the snow fleet from December 2014, and the OPUS card, in service since 2008.
Since 2017 the region has been reorganising who decides. A new regional authority, the ARTM, took over the fare system and replaced 17 inherited fare grids and more than 750 fare products with four zones between 2021 and 2023 — but riders still cannot tap an ordinary bank card, except on ten suburban bus lines where a pilot has run since December 2024. And the REM opened in July 2023: a genuinely driverless metro, built and owned by CDPQ Infra, the pension fund's infrastructure arm. Quebec's Auditor General reported in November 2024 that the province's contributions will supply more than half of the ridership revenue the REM collects over its operating life, and that on CDPQ Infra's own projections Quebec would begin earning a return on its equity in about 25 years.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2007 to 2023. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Montreal's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Three things are worth watching, and each is a test of whether Montreal gets a lever back. The ARTM's CA$146M Concerto programme is meant to bring contactless bank cards network-wide from 2026 and post-payment in 2027, which would end the region's decade-long lag behind Chicago, Miami and Toronto. Quebec is deploying more than 250 photo radar devices from 2026 with a call for proposals that would, for the first time, let municipalities suggest where they go — Mayor Valerie Plante asked for 300 cameras for school zones in 2024 and got no placement authority at all. And the REM's remaining branches are due through 2027, on a railway that has had a service interruption of twenty minutes or more roughly one day in four, and whose builder has said publicly that it has not yet delivered the reliability passengers have a right to expect. The quieter test is the one Montreal has already half-failed: the water it loses. Twenty years of metering, billing and open registers have not shifted a 30 percent loss rate, and the city publishes the meters while withholding the readings as commercially confidential.
Where Montreal appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Montreal — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Montreal threads below, not counted out of them.
Washington rides on docks Montreal's manufacturer built, and both show what happens when the thing you depend on is not yours: one bought its supplier out of bankruptcy, the other cannot even site its own speed camera.
Canada's cleanest natural experiment — the same systems under different owners: a metro with nobody aboard against one that kept its driver, and a bike-share the city owns outright against one whose data belongs to the operator.
Two cities where the private side owns more than it looks: unattended metro lines in private hands, a bike-share whose data belongs to the operator, and two open-data catalogues among the cleanest in the atlas.
Every editorial link from Montreal'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 Montreal, Canada.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/montreal/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.