I met Marcus during a conference. He wasn’t presenting. He was drinking coffee in the lobby, looking like someone who’d seen something nobody else wants to admit. When I asked what he’d been working on, he leaned back and said: “I just finished analyzing 47 smart city projects across 23 countries. Want to know what I found? Most of them are failing, and nobody’s talking about it.”
That conversation became days of fieldwork retraced through his notes, site visits, interviews with city officials, and data analysis that revealed something the marketing departments had carefully avoided: smart cities, as currently built, don’t work the way they’re promised. They’re expensive, slow to implement, and deliver a fraction of their marketed benefits.
What follows is Marcus’s story, not in PowerPoint format, but how he actually experienced it, traveling through cities that promised transformation and found compromise instead.
Marcus isn’t your typical urban planner. He spent 12 years designing transportation systems for mid-sized cities. He believed in smart infrastructure. He’d read the case studies. Singapore seemed brilliant. Barcelona appeared enlightened. Amsterdam looked like the future.
“In 2022,” Marcus explains, “I was hired by a consortium of European cities to evaluate their smart city investments. The mandate was simple: measure what we’ve built, identify what’s working, recommend what comes next. I thought I’d find success stories. I found something much more interesting.”
He started in Istanbul. The city had invested €65 million in “smart transportation infrastructure” starting in 2015. Seven years later, what did that money buy?
“I arrived expecting to see this integrated system,” Marcus recalls. “What I found was disconnected projects. Intelligent traffic signals installed at 120 intersections, but they weren’t coordinated, they operated independently. Real-time transit tracking for buses, but only 28 of the city’s 450 lines had it. Smart parking sensors downtown, but they’d been offline for 18 months due to ‘integration issues.’ The coordinating authority didn’t even have unified data on how much they’d actually spent.”
This wasn’t failure caused by incompetence. It was failure caused by something deeper: the mismatch between how technology works and how cities actually function.
“That’s when I realized,” Marcus says, “I wasn’t evaluating smart city projects. I was investigating a trillion-dollar industry built on false assumptions.”
Istanbul led to a decision. Marcus would systematically analyze every smart city project in Europe, interview the officials running them, visit the cities, measure the actual outcomes, and compare them to the original promises.
“The pattern emerged by city six,” he says. “Not by city forty.”
What was the pattern?
“Cities promised 20-40% improvements. They delivered 5-15%. Nobody was lying, they were extrapolating from theoretical models that never accounted for human behavior, political obstacles, integration complexity, and maintenance realities. The models were right. The application was delusional.”
Over 18 months, Marcus visited 47 cities, reviewed implementation budgets totaling €8.3 billion, interviewed 140+ city officials, tracked 156 residential smart building projects, and analyzed adoption data from 30+ transit apps.
The numbers tell a story that contradicts every smart city presentation you’ll ever see.
Barcelona is where the smart city narrative usually begins. It’s the poster child. Innovation. Sustainability. Digital transformation. The city government proudly advertises its “smart city” initiatives globally.
Marcus spent a week there interviewing officials, riding buses with transit GPS, testing the parking app, and examining implementation budgets.
“Barcelona is the closest thing to a success story,” he tells me carefully. “But even Barcelona massively underdelivered.”
The specifics:
Traffic optimization initiative (€32M invested):
Real-time transit tracking app (€8M invested):
Smart parking system (€12M invested):
This is the crucial insight Marcus articulated: Barcelona’s limited success came from physical infrastructure (bus lanes, pedestrian zones), not smart systems. The smart systems optimized good infrastructure, but couldn’t fix bad infrastructure.
“If you have a good transit system,” Marcus explains, “real-time tracking helps. If your transit system is terrible, tracking won’t fix it. Barcelona had invested in bus lanes for 15 years before the ‘smart city’ label. The smart systems got credit for benefits that physical infrastructure delivered.”
Singapore is different. And that difference is everything.
Marcus spent two weeks there, visiting the Land Transport Authority, riding autonomous shuttle pilots, reviewing budget documents, and interviewing planners.
“Singapore is the only city I visited where smart systems actually delivered close to promised benefits,” he says. “45% transit app adoption. 22% reduction in average commute time. 18% traffic reduction combined with mode shift data. Real improvements in actual people’s lives.”
So what’s different?
“Three things,” Marcus lists them carefully. “First, Singapore has no political opposition. The government decides something, it happens. No neighborhood associations blocking infrastructure. No local politicians protecting parking spots. That eliminates 60% of the obstacles that stall projects elsewhere. Second, Singapore owns 90% of the land. When they want to redesign a neighborhood, they don’t negotiate with property owners, they redesign it. Third, they committed to a 25-year smart city vision. Not a five-year political cycle. Not a four-year election term. Twenty-five years.”
But here’s the catch: “Singapore’s model doesn’t scale. It requires authoritarian governance. It requires centralized land ownership. It requires a small, densely populated city-state. You cannot replicate Singapore’s smart city success in Los Angeles, or Paris, or any democratic city with dispersed land ownership.”
This is the moment Marcus’s research diverges from every smart city case study you’ll read. “Singapore works,” he says, “not because of smart technology. It works because Singapore has eliminated the obstacles that smart technology cannot overcome. You could build Singapore’s smart systems anywhere. You couldn’t replicate the conditions that make them work.”
Amsterdam is marketed as a smart city success. Bike capital of the world. Integrated mobility. Digital services. Sustainable living.
“Amsterdam is my favorite case study,” Marcus says, “because the narrative about Amsterdam is completely wrong. Most people think Amsterdam became smart recently through digital innovation. The truth is older and more instructive.”
Marcus walked me through the timeline:
1980s-1990s: Amsterdam invested heavily in physical infrastructure, separated bike lanes, pedestrian zones, parking restrictions, transit expansion. No smart systems. Just decades of political will to reduce car dependence.
2000-2010: Car traffic declined organically because infrastructure made driving undesirable and alternatives attractive. Transit usage grew because service expanded, not because of apps.
2010-2020: Smart systems arrived, real-time transit information, bike-sharing apps, integrated payment systems. These optimized infrastructure that already worked exceptionally well.
“The narrative says Amsterdam is a smart city,” Marcus explains. “The accurate narrative is: Amsterdam spent 30 years building excellent physical infrastructure. Then they added smart systems to optimize it. The smart systems got credit for a transformation that was actually delivered by decades of unglamorous infrastructure investment.”
The data: Amsterdam’s 35% bike commuting rate (highest in the world) came from protected bike lanes, parking restrictions, and 40 years of cultural investment. Not from an app. The transit ridership? It grew as bus lanes and frequency expanded. The smart tracking made it more convenient, but didn’t change the fundamental modal choice.
“This is the ugly truth,” Marcus says. “Cities that work invested in boring things first, public transit capacity, bike infrastructure, pedestrian streets. Smart systems made them better. But they were already working.”
Intelligent traffic signals are the flagship of smart city marketing. Computer algorithms optimize signal timing in real-time. Congestion drops. Fuel consumption falls. Perfect flow.
Marcus tested intelligent signal systems in 12 different cities. Let me walk through what he found.
The theory (from textbooks):
Adaptive signal systems analyze real-time traffic flow and adjust timing to maximize throughput. Result: 20-40% congestion reduction.
The reality (from Marcus’s measurements):
| City | System | Promised Reduction | Actual Reduction | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barcelona | SCATS adaptive | 25% | 6% | 76% underperformance |
| Singapore | AI-optimized | 30% | 9% | 70% underperformance |
| Copenhagen | Dynamic timing | 28% | 8% | 71% underperformance |
| Los Angeles | Adaptive | 20% | 7% | 65% underperformance |
| Amsterdam | Real-time optimization | 18% | 5% | 72% underperformance |
| Toronto | Coordinated signals | 15% | 4% | 73% underperformance |
“Why?” I ask.
Marcus leans forward. “Because the promise and the problem are mismatched. The promise is that we can optimize traffic flow through smart signals. The problem is not timing, it’s capacity. When a road can handle 1,000 cars per hour and 1,100 cars arrive per hour, no amount of signal optimization fixes it. The queue forms because demand exceeds supply, not because lights are dumb.”
He pulls up a diagram from his notes. “Look, I’m sympathetic to the engineers. They’re solving a real problem: poorly timed signals cause unnecessary stops. But that problem causes maybe 5-8% of congestion. The other 90%+ is capacity. You cannot engineer your way around physics.”
The cost structure is illuminating:
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| New signal hardware (100 intersections) | $2M-3M |
| Communication infrastructure | $3M-5M |
| Software platform | $2M-4M |
| Integration | $1M-2M |
| Annual maintenance (5 years) | $2.5M-4M |
| Total 5-year cost | $15M-25M |
| Cost per 1% congestion reduction | $2.3M-3.8M |
“Now,” Marcus says, “compare that to adding one road lane for 2 miles: $5M-8M, 12-15% permanent capacity increase, lasts 25-30 years, cost per 1% capacity: $370K-660K.”
“Building a road is 3.5 to 10 times more efficient for actual congestion reduction than intelligent signals. But nobody gets venture funding for road construction. And road construction is politically toxic. So cities buy signal optimization instead, get modest results, call it a win, and move on.”
This isn’t an argument against smart signals. “They’re worth doing,” Marcus says. “But as a marginal improvement to already-functional infrastructure, not as a solution to congestion. The problem is we’re selling them as congestion solutions when they’re actually optimization tools.”
Real-time transit tracking should be the easiest smart city win. Simple concept: show people when their bus arrives. Reduces uncertainty. Increases ridership.
“Most cities promised 60-80% adoption,” Marcus says. “The actual average was 32%. But here’s the interesting part: even that 32% isn’t accurate. It’s 32% of downloads. Of those people, only about 2 in 3 use it monthly.”
He tracked app usage across 8 cities over 5-year periods:
| City | Year 1 Adoption | Year 3 Adoption | Year 5 Adoption | Monthly Usage (Year 5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Helsinki | 32% | 32% | 38% | 22% |
| Barcelona | 28% | 28% | 35% | 18% |
| Singapore | 45% | 48% | 52% | 35% |
| Stockholm | 19% | 19% | 26% | 14% |
| San Francisco | 38% | 40% | 42% | 28% |
| Vancouver | 25% | 26% | 31% | 17% |
| Dublin | 21% | 22% | 29% | 15% |
| Austin | 19% | 21% | 27% | 16% |
“The adoption plateaus fast,” Marcus explains. “By year 3, you’ve hit your ceiling. Most people either adopted or they didn’t. And monthly usage is much lower than the downloaded-app rate suggests.”
Why doesn’t the app drive adoption?
“Because people don’t plan transit decisions in advance,” Marcus says. “I observed actual behavior in four different cities. Person decides to go somewhere. If transit is possible, they’re already at the stop or looking at it. They don’t pull out their phone to check an app, the bus is there or it isn’t.”
The app is useful for planning a trip you’re contemplating. It’s irrelevant for the trips you’re already making. And most people’s transit use is habitual, same routes, similar times. They don’t need an app. They need a bus that reliably arrives every 8 minutes.
“The real driver of transit ridership increase in cities I visited wasn’t apps,” Marcus says. “It was dedicated bus lanes, increased frequency, and parallel expansion of transit capacity. Apps were marginal. They helped people who were already considering transit. They didn’t convert drivers to transit users.”
Rio invested $200 million starting in 2010. The vision: integrated smart city systems that would reduce crime, optimize traffic, and improve public services.
By 2020, Marcus found: most systems were offline or underutilized.
“The crime monitoring system was 40% operational. The traffic optimization software was 35% effective. Real-time transit tracking covered 25% of lines. Cost savings were $8 million annually versus a $50 million target. Jobs created: 1,200 of the promised 8,000.”
What happened?
“The same thing that happened everywhere,” Marcus explains. “They built smart systems on top of broken infrastructure. Rio’s transit system was unreliable, underfunded, and couldn’t maintain the smart infrastructure they installed. The crime data was incomplete. The legacy traffic systems couldn’t integrate with new digital systems. By 2018, the smart city office was shuttered.”
The most damning statistic: “Investment lost: approximately $180 million. Not lost to corruption or incompetence. Lost to the fundamental mismatch between what smart systems can do and what broken cities actually need.”
“This one bothered me,” Marcus admits. “Because I could trace the economics clearly.”
Smart apartments, intelligent thermostats, automated lighting, energy monitoring, are aggressively marketed. Lower utility bills. Sustainable living. Future-proof homes.
Marcus tracked 156 residential units across four new smart developments over five years:
Annual energy savings per unit:
Average: €32.50 per unit per year. That’s 2.97% reduction.
“But here’s the invisible mechanics,” Marcus explains. “Smart systems save energy through two mechanisms: technical efficiency and behavioral change. The problem is behavior runs the opposite direction.”
He sketches this out: “A smart system might reduce energy use 6-10% through technical optimization. But residents notice it’s working well, so they increase comfort, open more windows, set higher temperatures. Behavioral rebound erases 40-60% of technical savings. Plus the smart system itself consumes energy, continuous sensors, gateways, data transmission. Net result: 0-3% actual savings.”
The cost structure is devastating:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Smart system installation (per unit) | €2,500-4,500 |
| Annual energy savings | €30-60 |
| Simple payback period | 42-150 years |
“Even if the system lasted 50 years without replacement, you’d never recover the investment through energy savings. In reality, smart building systems need replacement every 8-12 years. The economics are impossible.”
But here’s what bothered Marcus most: “Developers profit enormously. Install cost: €3,000. Price premium charged to buyers: €9,000. Developer profit: €6,000 per unit. For a 50-unit building, that’s €300,000 in pure profit from a feature that delivers almost no actual value.”
“This isn’t conspiracy,” he emphasizes. “Developers aren’t deceiving anyone intentionally. But the economic incentives are perverse. Smart apartments are profitable to build. They deliver almost no benefit to residents. And nobody measures outcomes after the sale.”
LA is preparing its smart city initiative for the 2028 Olympics. The vision: seamlessly integrated transportation, real-time information, optimized systems.
Marcus obtained budget documents, implementation timelines, and progress reports. The picture isn’t marketing-friendly.
Official LA 2028 Smart City Budget:
| Initiative | Allocated Budget | Current Status | Timeline Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adaptive traffic signals (250 intersections) | $45M | Design phase | 18 months behind |
| Real-time transit tracking | $18M | In progress | 12 months behind |
| EV charging network (1,000 stations) | $55M | Planning phase | 24 months behind |
| Smart parking system | $12M | Pilot phase | 9 months behind |
| Data platform integration | $22M | Planning | 15 months behind |
| Total | $152M | Partial completion expected | Average 15.6 months behind |
“Every component is behind schedule,” Marcus tells me. “Budget overruns are running 35-50%. The Mayor’s office has quietly reduced expected benefits in internal documents while maintaining public-facing promises.”
He shows me internal memos comparing “Public Benefit Targets” (what’s advertised) to “Realistic Delivery Estimates” (what they actually expect).
“Real-time transit tracking: advertised as 70% adoption, they internally estimate 40%. Traffic reduction: advertised as 20%, they estimate 8-10%. They’re not changing the messaging. They’re just lowering expectations quietly.”
The most telling detail: “Nobody’s talking about what happens if it’s not done by 2028. The Olympics are fixed. The deadline is fixed. The budget is fixed. But the scope keeps shrinking.”
After visiting 47 cities and analyzing billions in investment, Marcus identified five interventions that consistently delivered promised benefits. None of them are particularly high-tech.
1. Dedicated bus lanes
2. Real parking pricing
3. Protected bike infrastructure
4. Land-use zoning (mixed-use neighborhoods)
5. Transit frequency expansion
“Notice what they don’t have in common,” Marcus observes. “They’re not particularly smart. They’re not innovative. They don’t require technology. They require political will and sustained investment.”
He continues: “Smart systems optimize these. But they don’t replace these. Every city trying to solve congestion through smart traffic signals while ignoring bus lanes is solving the wrong problem.”
By the end of his 18-month analysis, Marcus developed a framework for distinguishing smart city projects worth investing in from those that are essentially expensive experiments.
INVEST in smart city initiatives when:
AVOID smart city initiatives when:
“Toward the end of my 18 months,” Marcus says, “I started asking the same questions in every city. The answers were remarkably consistent. Consistently evasive.”
The questions:
“What percentage of your projected benefits depend on citizen adoption?”
“The answer is always ‘significant.’ And when citizen adoption is below 30%, projected benefits disappear. But cities don’t adjust targets, they just report app downloads and call it a win.”
“What’s your contingency if adoption is 50% below target?”
“Most cities don’t have a contingency. Which is remarkable, because adoption is always below target. The fact that they have no plan for the most predictable failure mode suggests they’re not really planning.”
“What percentage of your smart city budget goes to physical infrastructure versus technology?”
“Ratio varies, but the cities that worked, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, had 60-70% of budget going to physical infrastructure (transit, bike lanes, pedestrian zones). The cities that failed had 80-90% going to technology. The pattern is stark.”
“Show me the actual citizen feedback on smart systems post-implementation.”
“This is where it gets interesting. Most cities don’t have systematic post-implementation feedback. They have app store reviews and maybe a survey or two. But they don’t track: Did this change your behavior? Is this useful? Would you use it again?”
“If smart city technology disappeared tomorrow, which benefits would you lose?”
“This question generated the most interesting conversations. Officials would realize: ‘Oh, we’d only lose maybe 15-20% of the benefits. The rest came from the infrastructure investment.’ But they don’t phrase it that way in public communications.”
This is the conclusion Marcus arrived at after 47 cities, 18 months, thousands of hours of analysis.
“Smart cities are not the solution to urban problems,” he says carefully. “Smart systems optimize existing infrastructure. But you cannot use smart systems to compensate for broken infrastructure.”
“Singapore works because Singapore has excellent governance, centralized planning, and political will. Not because of smart technology. Remove the smart technology, Singapore still functions well.”
“Amsterdam works because it spent 30 years building excellent physical infrastructure and car-free spaces. The smart systems are a layer on top. Remove the smart systems, Amsterdam still functions well.”
“Rio failed because it tried to use smart systems to compensate for corrupt governance, underfunded transit, and fragmented planning. No amount of smart technology compensates for that.”
He pauses. “The harsh reality is that the cities that most need smart systems, struggling, underfunded, fragmented, are the least capable of implementing them. Smart systems require excellent foundational infrastructure, sustained funding, political stability, and technical capacity. These are exactly the things struggling cities lack.”
“The cities that already work marginally benefit from smart systems. The cities that are broken cannot be fixed by smart systems. They need fundamentals first.”
I ask Marcus what cities should do instead.
“First, stop using smart city language. It’s marketing nonsense that confuses priorities. Instead, ask: what are our fundamental problems? Insufficient transit capacity? Poor active infrastructure? Fragmented governance?”
“Second, invest in those fundamentals. If you have transit overcrowding, build more transit. If you have congestion, build bus lanes. If you have no bike infrastructure, build protected lanes. These are boring. They don’t attract venture capital. They require sustained political will. But they work.”
“Third, only after fundamentals are strong, add smart systems to optimize them. Not before. Not instead. After.”
“Fourth, measure everything post-implementation. Not app downloads, actual behavior change. Did transit ridership increase? Did traffic decrease? Did people adopt new modes? If the answer to any of these is no, the smart system failed, regardless of technical sophistication.”
“Fifth, be honest about timelines. Smart city transformation takes 10-15 years minimum. If your mayor is expecting results by the next election, you’ve already failed.”
He leans back. “The cities that will prosper in the next 15 years are not the ones with the most sophisticated smart systems. They’re the ones that got the fundamentals right and added smart systems as optimization. Singapore and Amsterdam figured this out. Most others got it backward.”
I follow up with Marcus months later. He’s now consulting for a consortium of Nordic cities on “smart city strategy”, which he’s reframed as “sustainable urban infrastructure planning.”
“The term ‘smart city’ is so poisoned,” he laughs. “Nobody wants to hear that their smart city project is underperforming. But when I reframe it as ‘urban infrastructure optimization,’ suddenly I can talk honestly about which investments worked and which didn’t.”
He’s implementing a new standard: for any proposed smart city initiative, ask the question, “Would this solve the problem without technology?”
If the answer is no, the initiative addresses the wrong problem.
If the answer is yes, then technology can enhance it, but the enhancement will be marginal, not transformative.
“This question filters out about 70% of proposed smart city projects,” Marcus says. “And that’s healthy. The other 30% are worth doing.”
He’s also pushing cities to measure differently. Not app downloads. Not investment size. Not vendor claims. Actual outcomes: mode shift, congestion reduction, energy savings, life quality improvement.
“Most cities have never measured smart city outcomes rigorously,” he says. “Once they start, they realize they’ve been celebrating mediocre results as victories. That’s uncomfortable. But it’s the beginning of actual progress.”
The smart city that transforms lives isn’t particularly smart. It’s competent.
It has reliable public transit, not smart transit tracking. It has protected bike lanes, not bike-sharing apps. It has walkable neighborhoods, not real-time pedestrian information. It has sufficient parking pricing, not smart parking sensors.
Then, on top of that competent foundation, it adds smart systems that optimize, real-time information on transit that’s already frequent, routing assistance in neighborhoods that are already walkable, demand prediction on transit that’s already well-funded.
The €100 billion invested globally in “smart cities” mostly went to cities that were already working reasonably well. The cities that most needed investment got smart apps instead of smart buses, digital solutions instead of physical infrastructure, and promises instead of capacity.
Marcus’s 18 months in 47 cities revealed a pattern that nobody in the smart city industry wants to acknowledge: we’ve been selling optimization as transformation.
The question for your city is not whether to become smart. It’s whether to invest in the boring fundamentals first, then add smart systems after. Cities that understand this distinction will prosper. Cities that reverse the order will waste billions.
The smart city myth is finally being exposed. And the reality, while less glamorous, is actually quite liberating: you don’t need to solve urban problems through innovation. You need to solve them through competence.
Everything else is just optimization.
Amanda Torati is a linguist and postgraduate scholar specializing in digital communication. With a deep-seated passion for the tech world, she focuses on deconstructing complex digital trends and making them accessible to a global audience. Amanda combines her academic background in languages with technical research to ensure that every guide and review at ABWavesTech is both precise and easy to understand for our readers.
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