How deep is the market adoption of smart cities technology where you live?

In Leeds, United Kingdom, the bus stops have finally been updated with digital displays that should show the next bus that's coming, in combination with a live map to your phone that shows where the bus currently is.

It's not always correct, there's some purposeful fudging of the data by the bus company as there are 'ghost' buses which are 'running based on the timetable' but aren't actually there, but others are connected via GPS, it states whether it is or not.

The UK has a slow adoption of APIs for this type of thing. It's basically in London and nowhere else in the UK which is depressing where everything is smarter and better connected. The rest of the country struggles.

I'd say there's no real other 'smart city' technology aside from potentially transport here.

I think there's some smartness in the street lighting where I am, although it's been a while since I tried finding out from the local council. There is smart metering using LoRa and SigFox (split across the country from memory) but that probably doesn't count as smart cities tech maybe. 

Schools have had some focus due to Coronavirus, and as I understand, most monitor CO2. There's a slow realization for people that the environment and air quality saves lives, so perhaps there will be more implementation and visibility of such monitoring in the future if people pressure their local government/councils.

I'd like to see monitoring of all rivers/streams, online. Here there's been more sewage released into UK rivers than the size of Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and it occurs all the time, for more than a decade (and the fines are a fraction of US fines for pollution, so the water companies just continue with it).

In Chicago we have bus and train tracks via a smart phone. They are decent overall, but sometimes they are just non-functional. 

I know the City of Chicago has a Smart Cities Initiative team. They say they are working on something. But as a citizen, I am unaware of anything that has materialized. 

I'd like to see a pedestrian and bicycle avoidance system. I think it's needed, especially in our congested areas downtown. 

Our city has been working on deploying Smart Water Meters since 2019 and expects to complete the project this year.  I’ve had my meter for almost two years and have yet to see the benefit of it.  They are not going to allow customer access to the data until the whole system is deployed.  Not sure why it takes so long to deploy 12,000 meters...

I’ve had electrical net metering for my solar system since 2018 and that works great for monitoring my usage.  My only complaint is the latency of the data update on their site - one or two days.  I wish I could get direct access to the meter, but I guess there’s concerns about hacking.  I don’t even have direct access to my inverter data, but the latency there is one to two hours.

I know that in my city (Castelo Branco, Portugal), the bus stops finally have working the digital displays that shows the time for the next bus to arrive.

They also have air quality sensors spread around the city  - although the API or the data is not publicly available (still don't know why) .

They also have public lighting with some kind of sensors and on top of the newer light posts they also have some sensors that send readings of the energy consumption.

Don't know if free WiFi also counts, but on the more crowded areas, some parks and public pools, WiFi is free.

The adoption has been slow - for the more standard sensors - air quality monitor, temperature, etc.. they have adopted them for some time now.

Deployment of 'smart meter' technology has been mixed across the country, the implementation didn't account for poor penetration of the frequency of the communication of the gas meters to the electricity meters (I think they're some 800mhz frequency) and they fail to penetrate the brickwork, from the gas meter to communicate with the electricity meter, to them communicate to the fuel provider via a cellphone network backbone or similar. So it part fails. And no two companies use the same standard of meter apparently.

There's some vague intelligence with the lighting, though mainly timers, street lighting is supposed to be off after midnight in some areas, and it isn't.

I'm aware there's intelligence behind the traffic signals for the roads though, such as if speed detectors are aware of a car approaching the city at high speeds then traffic signals further along the route will adjust purposefully to intend to slow them down with red signals, and road signals on one part of the city are aware of the state of others elsewhere in the city, but I don't know a great deal of this. We have an 'institute for transport studies' at the University of Leeds that may work on the awareness and development of it, which is weird considering Leeds has a somewhat terrible transit system.

Ottawa has 6 bus apps and the traffic lights are getting smarter with more roadway sensors to control traffic lights to ease congestion areas.

The city is allocating a 16 km, 1866 acre site designed as a test track for autonomous vehicles.

They are planning to put sensors in street lights to help traffic logistics.

Some traffic signals can let drivers know ahead of time when the next light will switch.

There are some traffic cones that can alert vehicle drivers when a cyclist is approaching in a bike lane, so they know when it is safe to cross a bike lane.

The traffic lights also have proximity sensors - but that started before the generalization of IoT - for the light to change when a car approaches and now they have timers - to let the drivers know the time remaining for green light - but in some, that doesn't work very well - I see 24s remaining and the light turns green

And the same everywhere - speed sensors .

In an adjacent county back in 2014 I was working on a similar project. It used the Traveline Nextbuses transport API. We had digital signage displays on campus and later at the main city bus station showing the bus departure information. The real time tracking was slow in coming as the old bus fleet weren't equipped with that technology. I recall that there were issues in getting the centralised database updated to reflect the local timetabling changes. There were also issues with certain figure of 8 type bus routes that the centralised database didn't cope with very well so required additional client side tweaking to avoid confusion.

There were a number of other issues such as lack of access to DSL at the bus station and it being located in a 3G mobile data blackspot... along with the usual many layers of bureaucracy.

I've noticed similar things too.. we are so used to real-time stuff, but the rest of the world deals in IT systems that provide information daily, or say half daily, and even hourly is extreme : ) They are just not designed to provide data or perform well at more frequent rates, so if you end up needed info from a couple of sources, you could well be looking at once-per-day updates which can blow some use-cases out of the water : (