San Francisco instruments early and then keeps discovering that what it built belongs to somebody else. A vendor's licensee claimed to own the bus predictions the city had paid for and got a rider's app pulled from the App Store, until SFMTA wrote ownership into the contract. SFpark's kerb sensors were switched off and the prices now come from payment data. A carrier's 3G shutdown darkened 400 arrival displays. The water utility's radios aged out and about 8,200 households stopped getting bills. Robotaxis run here under permits the state issues and the city went to court to stop, and lost. What San Francisco does control it gives away freely: its data carries a public-domain dedication, the most permissive licence of any city in this atlas.
The atlas documents 10 projects in San Francisco, the earliest dating to 1998: 1 with a documented success, 1 scaled back, 8 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 San Francisco is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Two systems from the turn of the century still shape the city's transit. The Advanced Train Control System took over the Market Street subway in 1998 and gridlocked it — trains sent down the wrong tracks, emergency brakes dropping, riders forcing doors open in the tunnel — in a failure the press named the Muni Metro Meltdown. A year later SFMTA put NextBus arrival predictions on the 22 Fillmore, with countdown signs at the shelters. Both were early. Both are now being replaced: a $212 million Hitachi contract signed in January 2025 runs to 2034, and the prediction system's name is being retired.
The city opened up between 2007 and 2010, and one of those openings was forced. 311 launched in March 2007, folding more than a thousand agency phone numbers into one line. Mayor Newsom's Executive Directive 09-06 created the data portal in October 2009. But the same year a NextBus licensee told Apple it held exclusive rights to distribute Muni's arrival predictions to phones; the city insisted the data was public, renegotiated the contract so that it 'expressly declared that the MTA owns the data', and published an XML feed that November. Clipper followed in June 2010 across two dozen Bay Area operators, and the water utility began putting 175,000 meters on radios that same month.
Then the sensing layers started failing, and the city legislated instead. SFpark's parking sensors, installed for a 2011 demonstration, were abandoned by 2013 and the programme now prices kerbs from payment records. In 2019 the Board of Supervisors did something rarer: it banned city departments from using facial recognition — the first US city to — and required its own approval, with a published impact report, before any department may acquire surveillance technology. That register exists and is maintained; it listed 93 technologies in March 2026.
The last four years are about the things the city cannot decide. Waymo and Cruise began carrying paying passengers in 2022 and 2023 under permits from the state DMV and utilities commission; San Francisco protested, moved to stay and asked for a rehearing, and the Court of Appeal upheld the permits in January 2025. Voters loosened the surveillance-approval rules in March 2024. AT&T's 3G shutdown took out over 400 arrival displays in June 2022. And when the city finally got automated speed enforcement in 2025 — California's first, warnings from March, citations from 5 August — the rules that make it unusual were written in Sacramento: no facial recognition, no paying the vendor per ticket, fines ring-fenced for street safety.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1998 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 San Francisco's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The open questions are all about who holds the lever. Clipper's rebuilt back office is months behind and nine operators asked the regional authority in July 2026 to pursue contractual remedies against its vendor; the Muni train-control replacement does not finish before 2032, on a capital plan running beside a $307 million operating shortfall closed with a state loan; the water utility says it is evaluating an upgrade to the radios that failed, without a contract, a count or a date. Against that, San Francisco publishes more honestly than most: its open-data inventory is itself a dataset, so anyone can count the 474 inventoried sets still unpublished and the 153 published ones more than a year stale, without asking the city. The city's own Controller has told its 311 operation to fix internal controls so that its published reports can be relied on. Very few cities in this atlas hand you the means to check them.
Where San Francisco appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to San Francisco — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the San Francisco threads below, not counted out of them.
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.
Two cities that put the same duty in different law and reached the same deed: both dedicate their data to the public domain, both run a 311 line that publishes everything, and both slowed their streets by opposite means.
The same vendor and the same two questions: Cubic fumbled both fare-card launches, both transit feeds come with a bespoke revocable licence, and both cities had to decide in public what their police may keep buying.
Every editorial link from San Francisco'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 San Francisco, United States.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/san-francisco/ (last verified 2026-08-12). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.