United States

What the record shows

No country in this atlas carries a bigger record than the United States — and none carries more documented retreats. That is less an accident of coverage than a property of how American agencies work: board minutes, audit reports and standing performance dashboards are published as a matter of routine, so a project can be seen failing in the operator's own numbers. The oldest entry in the American record, the Deep Tunnel beneath Chicago, has been under construction since 1975 — a reminder that instrumenting a city is a decades-long business, not a product cycle.

The one big federal experiment is documented here end to end. In 2016 the U.S. Department of Transportation ran its Smart City Challenge: 78 cities applied, seven reached the final, and Columbus won $40 million in federal money plus $10 million from Paul Allen's Vulcan. The atlas holds the aftermath as three entries: the program itself, wound down when the grants ended; the Linden LEAP self-driving shuttle, which carried 50 passengers in fifteen days before a hard stop and finished its life delivering food-pantry boxes; and the $16 million data platform that went offline soon after federal funding ended, because the agencies it was built to relieve never came to depend on it. Washington's current instrument is deliberately smaller: the SMART grants program funds demonstration projects at $100 million a year through 2026 — pilot money, with the question of who operates the result left to the cities.

Who owns the infrastructure is the sharpest thread in the American record. Chattanooga's municipal fiber and smart grid is the strongest municipal-ownership case in this atlas — an independent 2024 study put the community benefit at $5.3 billion — and it runs against a legal ceiling: Tennessee law stops the utility's broadband at the edge of its electric territory, and when the FCC tried to preempt that limit, a federal appeals court struck the preemption down in 2016. The same ownership question runs through the data the cities publish: San Francisco and Boston dedicate their open data to the public domain, New York's law forbids licence terms but grants no dedication in their place, and Chicago attaches a notice obligation for reusers — four cities, four different answers to whose data it is.

Where an American city instruments its streets, the limit it meets is usually a border or a statehouse, not the technology. Washington's enforcement cameras detect reliably at 546 locations and cannot collect a fine across the state line, so the program's gap sits in Maryland and Virginia driveways. New York's cordon toll — the first in the United States, half a century after Singapore's — cut traffic into the zone by roughly 12% in its first year while fighting off repeated federal attempts to revoke it, and was upheld in court in March 2026. Florida's legislature went one further: Miami-Dade's heat alerts lost the power to oblige anyone when state law HB 433 barred local heat-protection mandates, and the post that issued them then fell to a budget cut.

Honest performance numbers, where this record has them, come from operators that were already publishing them. New York's MTA reports mean distance between failures as a standing metric — which is why its electric-bus retreat is documented at 2,111 miles between failures against 13,000 for diesel, the only US bus-electrification entry in this atlas that carries measurements of that kind, in a country whose federal Low-No program is putting $5.5 billion into bus purchases over five years. The building-emissions ledgers are younger still: New York and Boston both turned energy reporting into binding caps, and by their first 2026 deadlines neither had collected a dollar for over-emitting — the accounting exists, the enforcement is untested.

The American record also holds this atlas's clearest case of automation switched off and won back: Washington's Metro drove itself from 1976, went manual within a day of the 2009 Fort Totten crash, and needed fifteen years, a regulator's line-by-line concurrence and a fix to how railcars sense their position before trains drove themselves again. San Francisco's parking sensors died of maintenance costs; the demand-responsive pricing they proved lives on through payment data. If the entries below agree on one lesson, it is that the hard part is rarely the instrument — it is keeping an institution attached to it.

Sources beyond the atlas

Facts above that do not come from a linked entry rest on these:

• USDOT — SMART Grants Program ($100M per year, fiscal years 2022–2026)
• USDOT release, 23 June 2016 — Columbus wins the Smart City Challenge and Eno Center — 78 applicants, seven finalists
• FTA — Low or No Emission Grant Program ($5.5B over five years under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law)
• Tennessee v. FCC, 832 F.3d 597 (6th Cir. 2016) — the FCC's preemption of Tennessee's territorial limit on EPB's broadband, reversed