Algeria

What the record shows

In Algiers the instrument usually exists and the authority to use it sits somewhere else. That is the shortest description of this record, and it applies to the traffic system, the metro, the fare card and the air network in turn. It is also worth saying plainly at the top that this is the thinnest evidence base of any national record here: almost everything below rests on press reporting or a supplier's account, and the one entry with an official source publishes volumes rather than performance.

The city's adaptive-signal project is the clearest case. In 2017 an Algerian-Spanish joint venture was contracted to fit 500 Algiers intersections with camera-linked adaptive traffic lights run from a control centre at Kouba. Only 22 of the 200 first-phase junctions were ever wired, none fully switched on: fibre-optic faults stalled the network, and a national-security refusal to authorise the integrated traffic cameras froze what remained. The Spanish partner withdrew. The reason it could not be rescued is written into the entry next to it — the capital's camera network is run by the national police directorate from its own command centre, which also hosts the traffic-decongestion plan and the intelligent traffic-light management system. The interior ministry put 1,837 cameras in service in April 2024, with a further 5,592 planned for full coverage of the capital — a grid several times the size of the one the city's own project could not switch on. Putting the camera grid and the signals in one command centre is efficient, and it makes the police the de facto traffic authority. The city could install the hardware; authorising the cameras was never its call.

The air-quality network is the record's other outright failure, and it teaches a rule this atlas keeps relearning: check that the station exists before you trust the number. Samasafia — "clear sky" — gave Algiers four fixed monitoring stations in 2002 on a World Bank loan, measuring nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, particles and ozone, and published a daily index in newspapers and on public display panels. Its last measurements date from August 2009. Consumer air-quality apps nonetheless show an index for Algiers every day; with no operating reference network in the city since 2009, those figures come from models rather than from instruments on the ground. A published number is not evidence that anything is being measured.

The metro supplies this atlas with one of its longest-running demonstrations that automation equipment is a capability rather than a staffing decision. The line opened on 31 October 2011 with a Siemens turnkey system — communications-based train control with moving block and automatic train operation, track-to-train radio, train location, ticketing and a central control post from which the line is supervised. The supplier describes the on-train element as driving-assistance automation. Fifteen years on there is still a driver in every cab, and no operator, ministry or supplier statement has ever named a date from which trains would run unattended. Beside the Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City lines, the Lahore Orange Line and the Cairo monorail, it belongs to the group of entries where the label and the roster have never been the same thing — and of those four it is the oldest.

The multimodal transport card shows how far a signed standard gets on its own. In June 2018 the city's transport authority issued a card and a common functional reference so that each operator's ticketing system could work with the others, and six operators signed the protocol — tram, metro, buses, national rail. What runs today is narrower: a monthly subscription sold in a tram-only version and a multimodal version, and the multimodal one is the single product that cannot be renewed by electronic payment. It has to be collected and recharged in person at a commercial agency, while the tram-only subscription renews online. Interoperability agreements are cheap and integration is not, and eight years after the standard was signed the harder half is still the one missing.

The water utility is the entry that comes closest to working as intended, and it is the one that shows what this record cannot tell you. Its remote-control centre at Kouba has supervised the networks of the Algiers and Tipaza wilayas since 2008, polling more than 300 drinking-water sites — production and transfer plants, pumping stations, reservoirs, distribution points — plus about a hundred sewerage sites over radio and mobile links. The utility publishes what it supplied in 2024 and what it repaired: roughly 28,000 leak interventions, with about eight million cubic metres recovered against 387 million supplied. Neither published result carries a network-efficiency figure. Telemetry tells you what is in the pipes, not what is missing from them — and across this atlas the number that separates a working leak programme from an expensive one is precisely the one Algiers does not publish, the share of water that never reaches a customer. If the entries below agree on one lesson, it is that the constraint in Algiers is rarely the equipment on the street. It is a permission, a jurisdiction or a published figure that never arrived.