Hanoi

Hanoi started with the lights, and the record of that programme is unusually specific about what is not connected. The state lighting company has been moving streetlight control off hardwired lines onto mobile radio since 2012, adding mapping-based management in 2016 and a platform that lets operators dim for weather and flag faults. By January 2023 about 1,898 of the network's 2,456 control cabinets were linked to the control centre — roughly seventy per cent, covering 204,361 fixtures across 5,031 kilometres of lighting. The rest still run unmonitored, and the city says so.

Air monitoring followed in 2016 and became the clearest case in the atlas of counting the wrong thing. The city began with two reference-grade stations and eight sensor units feeding a public portal, and by 2024 a stocktake counted 61 monitoring stations across state and private operators, 35 of them the city's. The usable number is much smaller: only six are reference-grade fixed stations, only eighteen released historical data, and a station lost on average fifty days of readings a year. During a seventeen-day pollution episode in October 2024 several stations went dark, and when winter smog returned at the end of November 2025 the portal itself was unreachable because its domain registration had expired. No reading triggers anything: the health ministry's advice to keep young children home on hazardous days is a recommendation. The following year the city tried to digitise its kerbs and could not — iParking let drivers find and pay for licensed on-street parking from May 2017 and grew to about 150 locations before the city stopped it in September 2020, because fees did not flow directly to the treasury, operators had no equipment to count vehicles in and out, and at many sites attendants went on tearing paper tickets and taking cash beside the app.

The metro arrived in 2021 and brought the automation question with it. Vietnam's first two lines both run in Hanoi: the Chinese-built Cat Linh-Ha Dong line opened that November, ten years after construction began and at a cost that had risen by more than half, and the elevated section of the Nhon line followed in August 2024 with its four underground stations still unfinished. Both run automated train control and both roster a driver in every cab — the operator's director has explained that trains run automatically in normal weather and switch to manual when rain makes the rails slippery, and the newer line recruited hundreds of operations staff, drivers included, before it opened. No source names a date for the day nobody is on board. Equipment for automatic operation is a procurement fact, not an operations fact.

The two most recent projects are the ones that finished something. Hanoi retired cash and paper from its subsidised bus network in stages — a pilot on 25 routes from late 2023, a virtual pass in 2024, then electronic payment extended to all 128 subsidised routes from December 2024 — and made it real with a deadline rather than an app, when paper monthly passes stopped being valid in July 2026 and the old chip-less free-ride cards followed a month later. Riders tap a card or show a QR code that refreshes every thirty seconds across 154 routes and more than 2,200 buses. The citizen app iHanoi launched in June 2024 and began by decree, with a mayoral directive ordering accounts for every civil servant inside three weeks; the count the city published early was 16 million accesses, which is a count of visits rather than of users. Its convincing layer arrived later: after a 2025 reorganisation pushed complaint handling down to wards, the app has taken more than 94,000 complaints with about three-quarters processed, and since May 2026 a map red-flags the wards and communes that miss their deadlines, with the overdue published by name.