Bandung

Bandung's transport department has been running its own vehicles under one map since 2009, when Trans Metro Bandung began operating under a semi-autonomous unit that now covers five corridors and two feeders. Its digital layer is deliberately unglamorous: a single site showing the live position of the bus fleet alongside the tour buses and the school buses the same unit operates, rather than an app per service. The fare design is the interesting part. Bandung did not mandate cashless payment; it priced it — a general rider pays a quarter more in cash than by QR code, and a uniformed student pays double. Where a city cannot compel a payment medium, a visible price gap does the work a policy would.

In January 2015 the mayor opened the Bandung Command Center, and it became the stock image of Indonesian smart-city ambition. It still runs — three call-taker desks staffed around the clock in three shifts handling the free emergency number, agents verifying each call and forwarding it by type to agencies and volunteer responders, operators watching hundreds of camera points, three event summaries published daily to a public account, and the city's flood warning feed hosted in the same room. What is worth noticing is what did not survive alongside it. The 2015 press pack promised an integrated city brain; what demonstrably still has staff rostered onto it eleven years later is emergency dispatch and a camera wall.

Two years later the city automated a bike share and then had to un-automate it. BOSEH launched in 2017 with stored-value cards, docks and PIN-released locks, and the hardware still works — but registration is only possible at five staffed booths, reporters have found broken docks, snapped locks and missing bikes at unstaffed shelters, and by August 2025 the network had shrunk from about thirty sites to twenty-three active ones, with 200 bikes trucked out from a depot each morning and collected again each evening. At one shelter with eight docks, two bikes were parked; staff at another put weekday demand at ten to fifteen rentals. Automatic docking is what makes a bike share cheap to run, and once the docks are unreliable the city pays for a van, a driver and a booth attendant to do the job the hardware was bought for.

The most recent layers show the same question asked of data and of signals. The open data portal is genuinely maintained — 2,083 datasets and 921 map layers from 83 city bodies, two-thirds of them updated in the last two years — and genuinely little used: the median dataset has been downloaded six times, 187 have never been downloaded at all, and the single most popular file is a list of the city's restaurants and cafes. Sixty-two per cent of the catalogue comes from sub-district offices, so it leans toward administrative statistics rather than operational data, and not one dataset is flagged as real-time. The area traffic control system is the sharpest case: the department streams live camera feeds from fourteen junction locations and publishes a rolling tally of the violations those cameras record, but the mayor said plainly in 2025 that the adaptive retiming capability is installed and unused for want of the counts it needs. Nothing the dashboard records becomes a fine either, because ticketing rests with the national police system rather than the city. The service app Sadayana is the department's answer to the era that produced all this: one front door instead of an app per service, with the abandoned predecessor still sitting on the same store, last updated in January 2019.