New York's smart-city layer is written in statute more than in software. Local Law 11 of 2012 made publishing data a legal duty; Local Law 84 made large buildings report their energy use; Local Law 97 put a price of $268 a tonne on the emissions they report; Local Law 144 made employers audit their hiring algorithms. The recurring finding in the entries below is that the measurement arrives years before the consequence. Roughly 28,000 buildings filed emissions reports and the enforcement that landed was against about 1,400 who filed nothing. Researchers checking 391 employers found 18 bias audits. Fourteen years of adaptive signals could not stop Midtown speeds falling from 6.4 to 4.6 mph — a toll cut traffic 11 percent in its first year.
The atlas documents 18 projects in New York City, the earliest dating to 2003: 2 with a documented success, 1 documented failure, 3 scaled back, 12 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 New York City is actually doing.
Computed from the 18 entries below — a profile, not a score.
New York learned to count itself in the 2000s, one utility at a time. 311 opened at one minute past midnight on 9 March 2003, folding more than forty agency hotlines into one number; from 2010 every request has been published daily with its opening and closing timestamps, which is why outsiders can audit the city's response rather than take its word for it. In July 2008 the water department signed a $68.3 million contract to fit roughly 831,000 metered properties with radios reporting four times a day, and Local Law 84 of 2009 made large buildings report their energy and water use annually. The subway's own count began the same year, when the Canarsie line came into full communications-based train control.
Then the city made publication a duty rather than a policy. Local Law 11 of 2012 required every agency to name an open-data coordinator, file an annual plan and put its public datasets on one portal by the end of 2018 — and, unusually, forbade anyone attaching a licence or registration requirement to them. Around the same law the city started buying its street layer from private partners instead of building it: Citi Bike opened in 2013 with no public operating subsidy, LinkNYC in 2016 with advertising in place of tax money. Both delivered, and both showed what the arrangement costs. LinkNYC never reached a quarter of its promised kiosks; Citi Bike's fares rose without the city holding a lever to stop them.
From 2019 the readings started acquiring prices. Speed cameras and bus-lane cameras began issuing tickets automatically that year. Local Law 97 capped building emissions per square foot from 2024 at $268 per tonne over the limit; Local Law 144, adopted in 2021, obliged employers to have hiring algorithms independently audited for bias and to publish the result; FloodNet put street-level flood sensors in the neighbourhoods that flood. In 2023 the sanitation department began the plainest change of all, pushing set-out to 8pm and offering an earlier slot to anyone using a lidded bin, which started moving a century of kerbside rubbish into containers.
The first consequences arrived in 2025 and 2026, and mostly as money. Congestion pricing began in January 2025 and cut traffic into the zone by 11 percent in its first year — the only measure that moved a number a decade of signal retiming could not — then paid for the December 2025 signalling contracts that extend train control to the A and C. West Harlem became the first fully containerised district that June, at the cost of about 500 parking spaces. The statutes fared less well: the state comptroller called enforcement of the hiring-audit law ineffective in December 2025, and the buildings department's first Local Law 97 compliance round ended with cases against non-filers rather than over-emitters.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2003 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 New York City's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The open question in New York is collection, not measurement. No source shows a penalty yet assessed for exceeding a Local Law 97 cap, and from July 2026 renewable energy credits let buildings buy their way past one — Urban Green estimates half of all excess building emissions, and 85 percent of office emissions, could be offset that way by 2030. The hiring-audit law has produced two complaints in two years. Against that, the toll survived a federal attempt to rescind it in March 2026 and now funds the signal work; containerisation has six more districts committed by end-2027 and a citywide deadline of 2031; and the water network is being rebuilt, with 230,000 of its 600,000-plus radios replaced and some customers back on estimated bills while they wait. New York rarely lacks the reading. It lacks the follow-through, and it publishes enough for anyone to check.
Where New York City appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to New York City — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the New York City threads below, not counted out of them.
The origin and the late adopter of the same idea: Singapore automated cordon tolling decades before New York brought it to the United States — and both now grade their buildings on measured energy rather than on promises.
Both cities learned that certified is not running: Bengaluru's finished line stood waiting for trains it had ordered, and New York's resignalling was substantially complete on paper long before it changed anyone's journey.
The two American cities that answered 'who owns this data' most explicitly and most differently: New York's law forbids licence conditions and then ships no dedication at all, San Francisco dedicates everything to the public domain.
Every editorial link from New York City'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 New York City, United States.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/new-york-city/ (last verified 2026-10-11). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.