Surabaya's digital-government record is older than most: e-procurement and e-budgeting date to 2002–2003, and by 2013 the city had folded business licensing into one online window. What it built later is a traffic-control room descended from a 1990s system and a free 112 emergency line watching hundreds of cameras — both still running. Its best-known export, a bus that let riders pay with plastic bottles, kept growing its routes and fleet after 2018 but quietly moved the bottle swap off the bus in 2022, and the city still hasn't matched the fare subsidy some peer cities offer. The newest project — GPS on the rubbish trucks — only started in 2026 and has no results yet.

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Three entries that show what Surabaya is actually doing.

Timeline (2004–2026)

• 2004 — Government Resource Management System (GRMS) — Integrated Budget & Procurement Live
• 2010 — Surabaya Intelligent Transport System (SITS) — Adaptive Traffic Control Live
• 2013 — Surabaya Single Window (SSW) — Integrated Online Licensing Live
• 2014 — e-Health Surabaya — Online Queueing for Public Clinics Live
• 2016 — Surabaya Command Center 112 Live
• 2018 — Suroboyo Bus — Plastic-Bottle Fare Transit Live
• 2026 — Surabaya Waste Fleet GPS Tracking & Cleanliness Dashboard Live

All 7 projects in Surabaya

✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.

Compare with other cities

• 🇩🇪 Hamburg: Transparenzportal: Publish-by-Default Information Register Different mechanism, same goal: GRMS tracks procurement internally while Hamburg forces disclosure before contracts take effect.
• 🇹🇭 Bangkok: Dusit Model: Shared Records & Video Clinics Across Four Districts Both digitize primary-care access in Southeast Asia, but Bangkok's shared records reach across four districts, not one app.
• 🇨🇴 Medellín: SIMM Intelligent Mobility System & Traffic Control Center Same pattern on two continents: a camera-fed control room marketed as adaptive, with no independent study of traffic effect.
• 🇵🇭 Manila: Manila's Business One-Stop Shop Same consolidation move: Manila folded permits, treasury and zoning into one office; Surabaya did it online instead.

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• 🇮🇳 New Delhi: Doorstep Delivery of Public Services Opposite fix for the same gap: Delhi sent staff to residents' homes instead of expecting them to self-serve through an app.
• 🇰🇷 Incheon: IFEZ Smart City Integrated Operations Center Same model of one 24/7 room linking multiple agencies' dispatch, though Incheon's opened a year later and covers three districts.
• 🇨🇴 Medellín: SIES-M Integrated Emergency & Security Camera Network Both pair an emergency line with an integrated camera network run jointly by police and city agencies from one command centre.
• 🇨🇴 Medellín: EnCicla Public Bike-Share Both novelty transit programs lost their original draw over years and needed a later subsidy or recovery push to keep running.
• 🇧🇷 Rio de Janeiro: Comlurb's GPS-Tracked Waste Collection Fleet Same idea at bigger scale — Rio's Comlurb runs 24/7 GPS tracking and alerts on ~200 trucks from one control room.
• 🇦🇺 Sydney: SCATS — Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System Direct lineage: Surabaya rebuilt its signal network on Sydney's own SCATS platform in 2010, 35 years after Sydney invented it.
• 🇻🇳 Ho Chi Minh City: HCMC Intelligent Traffic Control Center Both Southeast Asian cities built camera-linked control rooms, but neither has published an independent congestion study.
• 🇨🇳 Chongqing: Yukuaiban: Chongqing's One-Stop Government Services App Same one-login model replacing separate department counters, just built for a Chinese megacity instead of Surabaya.
• 🇧🇭 Manama: National eGovernment Service Identity Loop Bahrain's SIJILAT is the same idea — one hub for commercial licensing — bundled into a broader national eGov login.
• 🇵🇰 Karachi: Karachi Red Line BRT Both BRTs fold circular economy into transit — Karachi turns cattle waste into bus fuel, Suroboyo once turned bottles into fare.
• 🇮🇩 Jakarta: TransJakarta BRT & Mikrotrans Angkot Integration Same country, opposite fare story: Jakarta held one flat fare for two decades while Suroboyo Bus moved from bottles to cash.
• 🇮🇩 Jakarta: TPST Bantargebang: Jakarta's Metered Landfill Jakarta's waste trucks are also GPS-flagged and weighed automatically — a stricter, revenue-linked version of the same tracking.