Osaka spent 2025 building a city for six months. Expo 2025 gave it a Level 4 autonomous bus, a vertiport, a metro extension and face-recognition gates at 130 stations — and then the Expo closed, the train service was halved the next day, the bus fleet was written off, and the showpiece station gate was replaced by ordinary gates with cameras bolted on. What survives is quieter and older: a driverless guideway line from 1981, and tide gates that shut themselves when a tsunami warning sounds.
The atlas documents 9 projects in Osaka, the earliest dating to 1981: 1 with a documented success, 2 scaled back, 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (9 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Osaka is actually doing.
Computed from the 9 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The oldest layer here is automation, and it did not go smoothly. The New Tram opened in March 1981 on the bayside artificial islands, six weeks after Kobe's Port Liner, and ran with staff aboard for a decade. Unattended operation began in October 1991 and ended abruptly in October 1993, when a train ran away and hit the buffers at Suminoekoen, injuring more than 200 people; crews rode again until February 2000. It is the only automated line in this atlas with a documented rollback — a reminder that the interesting question about driverless transit is not whether it works but what happens when it does not.
The second layer answers a problem the city made for itself. Decades of industrial groundwater pumping sank about 21 square kilometres of western Osaka below sea level, behind seven tide gates on five rivers. Since 2018 those gates have closed on their own: a tsunami advisory from the national weather service is relayed as an emergency alert and becomes a close command at every gate, with the three 1970 arch gates joining in April 2023 and sounding an eight-minute warning to boats first. It is a rare case of a national signal directly actuating physical infrastructure — and, as far as the record shows, it has never fired on a real tsunami warning.
Then came the deadline. Expo 2025 on Yumeshima drove a burst of deployment between 2024 and 2025: open-loop bank-card payment switched on across 548 Kansai stations in one day that October, walk-through face-recognition gates opened at 130 of 134 metro stations in March 2025 after a trial that began with staff in 2019 and wheelchair users in 2022, and Osaka Metro won Level 4 approval for a full-size autonomous bus that carried visitors from April to October. Underneath the Umekita redevelopment, a platform door that slides along the platform edge to match whatever train arrives had opened in 2023.
The reckoning came fast. The autonomous bus was suspended for two months after one of the fleet touched a wall in manual mode, ran to the Expo's last day, and by May 2026 Osaka Metro had booked a 6.7 billion yen loss on the 190 buses it could not reuse. The Umekita station's arch-shaped face-recognition gate was retired in February 2026 for plain gates with cameras. The metro extension to the Expo site was cut roughly in half the day after the closing ceremony. Meanwhile the slower work continues on its own timetable: the regional data platform has three of 43 municipalities aboard, and the water bureau is still asking whether its meters can ride on the electricity network, with citywide reading targeted for the 2030s.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1981 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 Osaka's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Osaka is this atlas's clearest study of what an event deadline does to a city. It buys real infrastructure — the fare gates, the contactless rollout and the tide-gate automation are all genuinely in service — but it also buys things sized to six months rather than to a city, and the bill arrives afterwards. The Level 4 bus is the sharpest example: a checkable regulatory first, a real passenger service, and a 6.7 billion yen write-off inside eighteen months. The open question now is whether anything grows into the space the Expo left. Yumeshima is due to become a casino resort around 2030, which would give the halved metro extension its riders back. The data platform and the water metering programme are on 2030s timelines and answer to nobody's ribbon-cutting, which may be why they are moving slowly and may also be why they will still be there. The most durable thing in the city's record remains the tide gates — built for a threat that has not yet come, and maintained anyway.
Where Osaka appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Osaka — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Osaka threads below, not counted out of them.
Neighbouring port cities that keep buying the same machine and reaching opposite verdicts: an automated line that lost its crew and got it back against one that never had one, a written-off expo shuttle against a pilot that now charges.
The clearest pair in the atlas on what a reading is allowed to do by itself: a tsunami warning closes Osaka's tide gates with nobody in the loop, while Rio's sirens wait for an official to confirm the protocol before anyone hears them.
Japan's two Level 4 buses, opposite fates: Haneda's airport loop became a standing service, Osaka's Expo shuttle was written off with the fair. The other thread is the meter: Osaka wants its water readings sent over the electricity rollout.
Every editorial link from Osaka'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 Osaka, Japan.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/osaka/ (last verified 2026-08-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.