A boundary drawn in software that a vehicle enforces on itself — in this atlas, mostly a way to regulate shared fleets rather than a technology.
🤖 This definition was generated with AI from the sources linked throughout. It has not had a complete human review — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources. How this works.
A geofence is a boundary that exists only in software. A vehicle that knows where it is compares its position against the polygon and changes its own behaviour at the line: a shared bike refuses to end a rental outside a marked bay, a scooter slows in a pedestrian zone, a delivery robot stops at a district edge.
In this atlas it is almost always a regulatory instrument rather than a technical one. Nanjing requires geofenced parking zones of every licensed operator alongside positioning-equipped locks and a live data feed to a government platform. Beijing turned to electronic fences after freezing deployments of 2.35 million dockless bikes, choosing to regulate by data rather than ban.
What a geofence cannot do is enforce itself. It depends on the operator honouring the rule in its own app, and on the position fix underneath being good enough to tell one side of a kerb from the other. Chengdu piloted centimetre-level satellite positioning to sharpen its zones and still needed a fee amnesty, because riders could not reliably tell where the zone ended.
Added 2026-08-20 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary