Japan's fourth-largest city sits at the centre of the country's automotive industry, but almost all of that R&D — Toyota's own city-scale test bed included — happens in neighbouring Toyota City, Kariya and Susono, not inside Nagoya itself. The city's own record is smaller and more recent: a decades-long retrofit that only brought one-driver automatic train operation to its oldest subway line in 2017, a 2026 bus corridor bridging the gap until the Linear Chuo Shinkansen arrives, a prefecture-led automated shuttle pilot that still keeps a safety driver behind the wheel, and municipal open-data and smart-water-meter programmes that are each barely a few years old. It is a working city, not yet a showcase one.
The atlas documents 6 projects in Nagoya, the earliest dating to 2011: 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (6 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Nagoya is actually doing.
Computed from the 6 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Nagoya's approach to automation has been to build the safety net first and the automation second. The purpose-built Sakura-dori line opened in 2011 with automatic train operation, one-person crews and full-height platform screen doors together from the start. The much older Higashiyama line — the city's original subway, opened in 1957 — only qualified for one-driver running after screen doors were fitted at every station between September 2015 and February 2016; automatic operation began with the September 2015 timetable and one-person working phased in from July 2016 to full coverage a year later. Trains remain driver-supervised, not driverless, and in December 2024 an incident briefly halted the whole Higashiyama line despite the screen doors. Automating an old, busy subway meant two years of doors before any of it counted.
The utility side has been in trial for six years and shows no sign of leaving it. The waterworks bureau began piloting smart water meters under a March 2020 agreement with the regional electricity utility, reading them over that utility's existing electricity smart-meter network instead of sending anyone to check; an initial trial reached 124 apartment units by May 2021, a parallel 2022 agreement tested cellular low-power communication for the same purpose, and in June 2026 the bureau opened a new recruitment round for roughly a hundred single-family homes ahead of a planned smartphone service showing hourly and daily consumption. There is still no citywide rollout date. Utility metering pilots can stay pilots indefinitely without a mandate to scale.
The flood layer is the city's most useful public instrument and it is deliberately only an instrument. NICOS, run by the crisis management bureau, publishes real-time rainfall and river levels citywide, layering the city's own gauges with national ministry and prefectural data and live camera images of roads and rivers, so a resident can check conditions near home before deciding whether to leave. It publishes information and nothing more: pumps, floodgates and evacuation orders all still require a decision by city officials. That is a defensible design and it is worth naming rather than assuming, because the same dashboard in another city is sometimes described as though the readings act by themselves.
The two newest entries are both stopgaps that say so. Since October 2024 the prefecture and a consortium have run automated minivans on public roads through the centre of the city, first linking a startup campus with the main station and from October 2025 on a 9.8-kilometre loop, with up to four round trips a day, a safety driver in the seat and the prefecture describing the service as working toward rather than having reached driverless operation. In February 2026 the transport bureau opened a 5.6-kilometre busway between the station and the central district with articulated buses, real-time position tracking riders can check online and digital signage at each stop — running Friday to Monday only, and framed by the city itself as a stopgap ahead of a planned high-speed rail connection rather than a substitute for a subway. The open data catalogue relaunched in November 2024 on a platform shared with dozens of other Japanese local governments, making city datasets machine-readable for the first time; the city has published no dataset or interface usage counts.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2011 to 2026. Pick a dot to read what it was.
No start date on record: NICOS — Nagoya City Flood-Fighting Information System
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Nagoya's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Nagoya is unusually willing to describe its own projects as unfinished, and that candour is the most transferable thing here. The busway runs four days a week and the city calls it a stopgap; the shuttle keeps a driver in the seat and the prefecture says it is working toward driverless rather than claiming it; the subway is described as driver-supervised rather than automated. Each of those is a sentence other cities in this atlas have declined to write. What the record lacks is the follow-through those descriptions imply. The water meters have been in trial for six years across roughly two hundred households and still have no citywide date, which is the point at which a pilot needs either a mandate or an explanation. The open-data catalogue has been machine-readable for two years and publishes no usage figures, so nothing yet says whether making it readable mattered. And the flood dashboard, which is honest about being information only, sits in a city where the decision it informs has never been described in public at all.
Where Nagoya appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Two cities the atlas reads next to Nagoya — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Nagoya threads below, not counted out of them.
Two port cities a year apart on everything: data portals relaunched in consecutive years, water meters still stuck in pilot at both, and a Level 4 route each — Incheon's on the road, Nagoya's on a shuttle loop.
Two cities that kept piloting the automated shuttle for years instead of declaring it driverless, and two municipal open-data catalogues on the same model — Nagoya's on a shared national backbone, Tallinn's on its own.
Every editorial link from Nagoya'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 Nagoya, Japan.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/nagoya/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.