Taiwan

What the record shows

Taipei has bought a lot of things that work, and almost nobody outside the city has checked any of them. Every entry below rests on an official source — the operator's figures, the department's own before-and-after study, the ministry's own count. That is not an accusation; the substance here is real and some of it is exceptional. But it is the defining feature of this record, and it has a cause worth naming: the city's method is a procurement pipeline rather than an evaluation one.

Start with the thing that has held longest. The Wenhu Line has run unattended since 28 March 1996 — rubber-tyred trains under the highest grade of automation, supervised from a central operations centre, with nobody aboard. Across this atlas the driverless label usually turns out to describe a signalling capability rather than a roster: Hanoi switches to manual when rain makes the rails slippery, Algiers has had the equipment since 2011 and never named a date, Cairo's grade rests on the supplier's word. Taipei's is thirty years old and it earned itself the hard way — two rolling-stock fires and a derailment during 1993–94 testing pushed the opening four years past target, and it has stayed unattended ever since, including through a 2009 merger with the Neihu extension. It is the oldest held claim of its kind in this atlas.

The same instinct — automate the thing that does not need judgement — runs through the entry nobody would put on a poster. Taipei's Hydraulic Engineering Office runs 88 stormwater pumping stations and has automated 51 of them since a 2007 pilot, finishing in 2019: each pumps on its own intake basin's water level, while 42 rainfall gauges and 214 water-level gauges feed a citywide monitoring dashboard for the staff. That is the top rung of the measurement-to-consequence ladder, and it is worth setting beside Bangkok, which has street-level flood forecasting at four-metre resolution and three-hour rain nowcasts, and whose crews still work 200 pumping stations by hand because pumping pre-emptively on a forecast is still being studied. Taipei bought less prediction and more actuation.

Where the city spends to move a number, it moves. YouBike began as an eleven-station pilot in 2009 and now runs about 1,300 stations and 15,000 bikes under a build-operate-transfer contract; when Taipei made the first thirty minutes free in February 2024, daily rentals rose 53 per cent to roughly 200,000, and cumulative rides passed 399.8 million by August 2025. The cost arrived later and in a different currency: growth on shared pavements produced enough pedestrian conflict that Taipei, New Taipei and Taoyuan adopted a shared penalty-point system. A subsidy can buy ridership quickly; the externality shows up years after launch, not at it. The traffic signals tell the same story with the same caveat about who did the measuring — dynamic signals recomputing timing from flow detectors every five minutes, reported by the city at 10 to 13 per cent faster travel and 13 to 14.5 per cent less delay in its own 2019–2020 data, alongside responsive signals that hold a side road red until traffic actually appears.

Two entries show the limits of what a city can do alone, in opposite directions. EasyCard started in June 2002 as a fare card for the metro and buses and outgrew its owner: it now works on the bike share, the high-speed rail and thousands of retailers, with more than 80 million cards in circulation by 2019, issued by a company the city part-owns but no longer controls. TPASS went the other way — a flat monthly pass covering metro, city buses, light rail, intercity buses, national rail and the bike share across four adjoining cities, designed and funded not by Taipei but by the national transport ministry from a post-pandemic special budget. In its first six months regional ridership rose 9 per cent, one suburban metro's rose 34 per cent, and driving trips fell 7.3 per cent against a 5 per cent target. A national ministry can stand up a multi-city fare product faster and more cheaply than any single city — and tying it to a time-limited special budget left it exposed, as 2026 appropriation delays held up cashback payments to roughly 533,000 riders for three months.

The remaining entries fill in the method. The Smart Taipei office, set up in 2016, runs the city as a living lab: more than 170 proof-of-concept trials in contact with over 500 technology vendors, with annual subsidy rounds keeping the pipeline full. That explains both the breadth of this record and its evidentiary monoculture — a proof of concept is designed to establish that something can be installed, not to establish what it changed. Data.Taipei has published municipal datasets since September 2011 and puts every one of them under Taiwan's government open-data licence, which is compatible with the standard international attribution deed — a complete and readable licence position that the catalogues of Cape Town and Lagos never reach. TaipeiPASS bundles virtual ID cards, municipal services and bill payment behind one login open to non-residents, reaching roughly four million registered users by November 2024 while its discount-partner count fell from 646 shops to 233 — the kind of detail a city publishes only if it is not curating. Kerbside parking sensors have grown steadily since 2018 to more than seven and a half thousand spaces. If the entries below agree on one lesson, it is that Taipei is unusually good at getting things into service and unusually short of anyone whose job is to say what they were worth.