Dresden builds its systems with the university next door and runs them for years, but almost none was set up to show whether it worked. The traffic computer has read more than a thousand detectors since 2004, and its developers say no serious congestion figures can be given; the mobility hubs are judged by user numbers, the open data portal by its dataset count. The system that changed decisions went in after part of the Carolabrücke collapsed in September 2024.
The atlas documents 9 projects in Dresden, the earliest dating to 2004: 2 with a documented success, 1 documented failure, 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (9 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Dresden is actually doing.
Computed from the 9 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The record starts in the street network. After a 2003 council resolution, VAMOS was built up from July 2004: TU Dresden develops it for the city, it draws on more than a thousand detectors, runs the traffic signals automatically and includes the parking guidance system. In 2017 its own developers said no serious congestion figures can be given for Dresden. On top of it, a project of city, operator and university from 2006 to 2017 converted 24 junctions on the Nord-Süd-Verbindung to conditional tram priority: a green only for trams and buses running late. The Dresdner Verkehrsbetriebe say that saves six to eleven per cent of travel time per direction; the figure is the operator's own. The quietest system is a utility's: the Kaditz wastewater plant covers almost 85% of the energy its treatment needs from sludge biogas, also by the operator's account.
From 2015 the city began to share. The council asked for municipal data to be made available in September 2015, the same year volunteers who wanted the car-park figures had to scrape them from the city's website, and the open data portal went live in 2019; on the national portal GovData, all but three of its 872 datasets carry the attribution licence Datenlizenz Deutschland. The council decided on mobility hubs in March 2017, the first MOBIpunkt opened at Pirnaischer Platz in September 2018, and MOBIbike replaced the earlier sz-bike in August 2020 with 1,000 bikes. Its rentals rose from 780,800 in 2021 to 2,076,300 in 2024, a measure of use rather than of the journeys the bikes replaced.
Two projects did measure, and what they found is mixed. The EU lighthouse MAtchUP in Johannstadt (2017–2023) evaluated its measures over twelve months against a baseline: 37% less heat in 12 public buildings on a central control system, 3.5% in 560 retrofitted flats. The MOBIshuttle on-demand vans, from June 2022, measured their cost, €12.02 per passenger, and stopped in December 2024 when the city could not fund them; the operator's report could show the shift away from the car only in outline. The hubs show the gap from the other side: by 2022 the city judged them by user numbers, and its December 2023 progress report gives two different counts of them.
The bridge changed the order. Section C of the Carolabrücke collapsed in the early hours of 11 September 2024; the city's experts found that stress corrosion had begun during construction and that failure would not announce itself through wide cracks. Since then acoustic sensors listen for snapping prestressing wires. At the Carolabrücke they recorded wire breaks from 16 February 2025, and the city awarded the demolition directly. On the Budapester Straße bridge they flagged damage before anything fell, and the city cut traffic to one lane each way, set a 7.5-tonne limit, put in emergency props and reopened the bridge in part on 24 August 2026. Every one of those steps was a decision by people; the sensors made them possible in time.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2004 to 2024. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Dresden's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The next test is whether Dresden's sensors and portals are asked to answer more than how much there is. On the Budapester Straße bridge the city expects the damage to the wires to continue, so the monitoring buys time to plan a replacement rather than a cure. The open data project funded since 2023 is meant to support use rather than volume; the number it still has to publish is which decisions, services or businesses rest on the data. And since August 2025 commercial e-bike and e-scooter providers compete with MOBIbike on the same streets, a reason to start reporting which trips the city's bikes replace.
Where Dresden appears in the atlas's own analysis.
One city the atlas reads next to Dresden — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Dresden threads below, not counted out of them.
Two German cities that run transport and data through their own operators and portals: detector-fed signal control, a transit operator's app that puts shared cars next to tickets, and open data under the Datenlizenz Deutschland.
Every editorial link from Dresden's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Dresden, Germany.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/dresden/ (last verified 2026-11-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.