Why do smart-city pilots never become real services?
The pilot never became a service — 28 documented cases in this atlas, each linked to its sources.
The test: Did it work at trial scale, and stop when the trial, the grant or the vendor did?
A pilot is designed to end. That is not a criticism of pilots — it is the reason so few of them turn into anything, and the reason a press release about a trial tells you almost nothing about a city. Stockholm's driverless bus is the instructive case in this group, because it did graduate: five years as a scheduled public route, and then cancelled for the oldest reason in transport, too few passengers. Wellington retired 3,800 in-ground parking sensors after eight years. Helsinki's Whim was widely called the world's first commercial mobility-as-a-service app, and its operator filed for bankruptcy in 2024.
Two labels, kept apart. 10 of these are recorded as failed — stopped, cancelled, or demonstrably not doing what it was built to do — and 18 as scaled back, which mostly means a service that still runs but delivered materially less than promised. An entry earns either label only where a named source says so.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
The 28 documented cases
The other five patterns
The whole record
Every entry in the atlas that failed or was scaled back, all six patterns in one place, with the arithmetic behind the share: smart city project failures.