Taipei treats the whole city as a testbed: since 2016 its Smart City Project Management Office has matched more than 170 proof-of-concept trials with 500+ ICT vendors across transport, housing, healthcare, education and payments, under a "Government as a Platform, City as a Living Lab" model. Rather than one flagship system, Taipei's approach is procedural — an annual pipeline that keeps testing smart lampposts, bike-share integrations and dozens of smaller ideas, formalised since 2020 under a broader "1+7" smart-government framework.
The atlas documents 10 projects in Taipei, the earliest dating to 1996: 1 with a documented success, 9 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (10 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Taipei is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Taipei's smart-city fingerprint starts with infrastructure nobody would call glamorous. The Wenhu Line opened driverless in March 1996 — Taiwan's first automated guideway transit, four years late after rolling-stock fires and a derailment during testing, but unattended ever since. The city built its own fare card, EasyCard, from 2002 for the MRT and buses, and in 2007 its Hydraulic Engineering Office began automating stormwater pumping stations one river-system zone at a time, station by station, well before anyone in city hall was using the phrase "smart city."
Openness came next, tested in public. Taipei and Giant Bicycles piloted YouBike on eleven stations in Xinyi District in 2009, expanding it citywide by 2014. In 2011 the Department of Information Technology put municipal datasets online at Data.Taipei, calling itself Taiwan's first government agency with an open-data policy. By 2016 these separate experiments had a coordinating home: the Smart City Project Management Office turned the whole city into a matchmaking ground for vendors, running more than 170 proof-of-concept trials with 500-plus companies under a living-lab model that still sets the pace for how Taipei tries new technology — procedurally, in small pilots, rather than through one flagship system.
The sensor layer thickened from 2018. The Parking Management Engineering Department began wiring roadside spaces with geomagnetic sensors, and from 2019 the Traffic Control Engineering Office linked flow detectors and AI cameras to a subset of signal timing — first recomputing cycles every five minutes, later holding side-road reds dark until traffic actually arrived. In 2020 city hall folded a decade of separate resident cards into one login, TaipeiPASS, and in 2021 YouBike relaunched as a GPS-tracked, smartphone-rentable 2.0 network.
The most recent chapter hands pieces of what Taipei built to bodies bigger than the city. EasyCard, launched as a Taipei Smart Card Corporation project in 2002, grew so far beyond its origin that the city government is today a minority shareholder in a nationwide payment network it once owned outright. And in July 2023, Taiwan's Ministry of Transportation folded Taipei's own MRT, buses and YouBike into TPASS, a flat NT$1,200 monthly pass designed, funded and rolled out from Taipei's own budget cycle no longer, but from a national post-pandemic special budget shared with New Taipei, Keelung and Taoyuan at once.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 1996 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 Taipei's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
What's next for Taipei is mostly finishing what earlier phases left half-built. Only 51 of the city's 88 stormwater pumping stations are automated, with no dated commitment yet to the rest. YouBike's own 2026 target — 2,000 stations and 27,500 bikes, including 4,500 e-assist units — sits well above where the network stood as of its last official count. TaipeiPASS keeps adding registered users while its list of active merchant discounts keeps shrinking, a tension nobody at city hall has explained. And TPASS, the pass Taipei residents now use daily, runs on a time-limited national special budget rather than a permanent funding line — a 2026 appropriations delay already held up promised rider cashback for three months, a preview of what happens when a city's transit pricing depends on a ministry's annual fight over money it doesn't control.
Where Taipei appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Taipei, Taiwan.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/taipei/ (last verified 2026-08-11). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.