When someone else does the maths
What happens to a smart-city claim as the person checking it gets further from the people who built it.
8 stops · 8 cities · 7 countries · 1989–2019 · 6 graded independent or peer-reviewed
Most impact figures in this atlas come from the operator — honest, but self-reported. This route climbs away from that: from a number nobody outside has checked, through an agency's own audit, to a study with a control group. The claims get narrower at every step, and the last one is a finding the city did not want.
Read in order: every stop goes a step further than the last.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
- 1 🚲 City Brain The starting point, and the shape of most of the record: roughly 15% higher travel speeds, reported by the vendor, checked by nobody outside.
- 2 🌱 World's First All-Electric Bus Fleet Independently documented, but read the number: 16,000 buses and the CO₂ they avoid describe the size of the purchase, not what changed on the street.
- 3 🏛️ Oslo Climate Budget The city counts carbon like money and publishes the shortfall itself — its own budgets project 63–69% against a 95% target.
- 4 🚲 Superblock Sant Antoni Measured from outside the project but inside the city: the public health agency put the drop in NO₂ at 25% in the pedestrianised area.
- 5 🌱 Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) Peer-reviewed, and the finding cuts both ways: large early gains, and diminishing returns once most vehicles already comply.
- 6 🚲 Stockholm Congestion Charging Zone The rare over-delivery, confirmed independently: a 22% fall in cordon traffic against a 10–15% target.
- 7 🚲 Metrocable & Social Urbanism A control group at last. Homicide fell 66% more in the neighbourhoods the cable car reached than in comparable ones that it did not.
- 8 🚲 Hoy No Circula: Mexico City's Plate-Based Driving Restriction And the answer nobody ordered: three peer-reviewed evaluations of the driving ban, and not one of them finds cleaner air.
What this route shows
Nothing here was faked. What changes is the question: an operator measures what its system did, an auditor measures whether it did it, and a study with a control group measures whether it mattered. Only the third can come back negative — which is why so few numbers in any smart-city catalogue are of that kind.