Philadelphia

A Philadelphia department can run only what the city controls. The list shows where the other levers sit.

• Transit: SEPTA is a regional authority that depends on the State; in 2025 it survived a fiscal crisis only after the governor let it spend $394m of capital money on operations for two years.
• Cameras on streets: speed cameras exist because a State law allows them, corridor by corridor; the Philadelphia Parking Authority runs them.
• Surveillance: the Council President calls rules on licence-plate readers a State matter for now, so in September 2026 City Council asked Harrisburg to regulate or ban them.
• Water: the city owns its water department, but its stormwater plan is enforced by a consent order with the State’s environment department.
• Broadband and Wi-Fi: the city’s cable franchise with Verizon obliges it to install free Wi-Fi at more than 108 city sites, 51 of them done by April 2025; with other sites, 105 were live.
• Big infrastructure and digital-equity money: mostly Washington, which in 2025 cancelled the city’s $11.9m digital-equity grant and rescinded funds for the Chinatown Stitch, a plan to cover the expressway that divides Chinatown.

Inside City Hall, digital work sits in the Office of Innovation and Technology, led since April 2024 by Melissa Scott, a city technologist since 2015, with a Chief Data Officer on its executive team. The 2019 smart-city roadmap has moved to the Managing Director’s Office, where it is filed as archived.

The catalogue where most of the city’s open data is listed is not the city’s. OpenDataPhilly, built by a local software firm in 2010, has been run by volunteers since December 2023, with its remaining costs paid by that firm’s founder; it lists 320 datasets published by the city.

The Philadelphia Energy Authority, a municipal body, runs whole-home repairs with energy upgrades: 427 homes were finished by April 2026, with more than 5,000 households waiting. Ben Franklin Technology Partners, a State-funded investor, approved $6.5m for 28 local companies in 2025. Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania supply many of the city’s evaluations, and the Amistad Law Project, a civil-rights group, testified for the Council’s resolution against plate readers.

From our library

City Council passes resolution calling for regulation or ban on Flock cameras (PhillyVoice, 24 Sept 2026)

Council’s call to regulate plate readers.

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Cherelle Parker, a Democrat, won the 2023 election and took office in January 2024. City Council has 17 members, ten elected by district and seven at large, and its two minority seats are held by the Working Families Party. Parker frames her technology aims as a “smart, interconnected government” that delivers services better. Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, faces re-election in November 2026, and the divided State legislature failed to agree long-term transit funding in 2025.

The city’s 2019 smart-city roadmap, launched by executive order with a smart-city director and an advisory committee and developed with a $200,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, now sits in the archive; we found no published account of what it achieved. At its launch the city’s chief information officer, Mark Wheeler, said it acknowledged that “digital access and adoption remain significant hurdles”.

That hurdle lost its money in 2025. In January Washington approved $11.9m for the city’s digital-equity programme, with 18 non-profits and universities, for low-cost internet, devices and skills; in May the federal government ended the whole national programme before a contract was signed.

From our library

Millions for public Wi-Fi, digital skills classes in Pa. cut as Trump targets 'racist' broadband program (Spotlight PA via WPSU, June 2025)

How federal digital-equity money was withdrawn.

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Council held its first hearing on AI in October 2025. The chief information officer and the mayor’s chief legal counsel promised staff guidelines by the spring, but could not say how data would be kept from federal immigration enforcement without a warrant. We could not confirm that the guidelines have been published. “They’re trained to give answers that are pleasing to people, that doesn’t necessarily mean correct answers,” Sorelle Friedler, a Haverford College computer scientist, told the hearing.

Plate readers are the live dispute. The police say they run fixed and vehicle-mounted readers but no Flock cameras. Asked whether the city could write its own rules, the Council President called it “a state-related issue at this particular point in time”. In September 2026 Council passed a resolution, unanimously, asking the State to ban or regulate them; both candidates in the November 2026 governor’s race have backed bans.

Transit money is the argument with the most at stake. SEPTA cut services in August 2025 and a court ordered them restored; the two-year transfer that followed ends in mid-2027, with a $192m deficit and a repair backlog that has doubled in a decade to $10.2bn.

Green City, Clean Waters, the water department’s 25-year plan to cut sewer overflows mostly with green stormwater infrastructure, met its fifteen-year greening standard in 2026: more than 3,860 greened acres against 3,812 required, across over 1,100 projects. Its overflow-volume and sewer-lining targets are late; the department obtained a ten-month extension after finding contaminated soil at one site, and its evaluation goes to the State in August 2027.

From our library

15 years of Green City, Clean Waters

Fifteen years of the city’s green stormwater plan.

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Speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard, one of the city’s deadliest roads, cut speeding violations by 95% and fatal and serious-injury crashes by 21%, by the city’s figures; a University of Pennsylvania study estimated just under one life saved a month. A State law made them permanent in December 2023 and allowed five more corridors, each needing a city ordinance, and a school-zone pilot to 2028; in January 2025 the mayor signed a bill to extend them to a second corridor, Route 13.

Cameras on SEPTA buses now ticket cars parked in bus lanes, with a parking officer reviewing every capture. Since May 2025 they have run on 152 buses, where speeds rose 3–6%, and from February 2026 on 30 trolleys.

Zero Fare, a city pilot that gave free transit cards to residents in deepest poverty without any application, carried 4.3 million trips in its first year, with 64% of the cards in use. Its federal recovery money ran out in 2025 and the mayor’s budget proposal left it out; Nicolas O’Rourke of the Working Families Party said dropping it “betrays a serious anti-poverty strategy”. It was kept, and the city’s 2027 budget maintains it.

Wireless Philadelphia is the city’s cautionary tale. In 2008 EarthLink switched off the city-wide Wi-Fi it had built for $17m after fewer than 6,000 people subscribed, against an expected 100,000; the city declined to take it over. Today’s free Wi-Fi comes site by site through the cable franchise instead.

Gunshot detection has been tested here. In a Temple University experiment with the police, published in 2018, acoustic sensors raised gunshot-related incidents by 259% but brought no significant rise in confirmed shootings: more work for officers, no more shootings found. Whether the police use such sensors today we could not confirm.

From our library

A partially randomized field experiment on the effect of an acoustic gunshot detection system on police incident reports (Ratcliffe et al., Journal of Experimental Criminology)

A field experiment on acoustic gunshot detection.

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Philly311 still runs on its old app; the city’s public data logged 518,841 cases in 2025. In August 2025 the technology office asked suppliers for ideas for a new app, with a first version targeted for May 2026, and said duplicate requests are still handled by hand, “a known bottleneck”. We could not confirm that the app has launched. Indego, the city-owned bike share, had a record year in 2025 with more than 1.3 million trips and 36 new stations.

Philadelphia comes 99th of 148 in the IMD Smart City Index, a residents’ survey. Its residents come 26th of 27 European and American cities we compared on whether public safety is not a problem, and only 41.1 out of 100 that reporting a maintenance problem online gets it fixed quickly; yet 71.2% say they are comfortable with face recognition to lower crime.

The results Philadelphia can show sit where a rule made the city count: cameras that sharply cut speeding on Roosevelt Boulevard under a State law, and a stormwater plan whose milestones a State order enforces. It has also done things on its own: it kept Zero Fare when the federal money ran out, and its own bike share had a record year. What failed shared one feature: a network handed to a company’s business model, a roadmap with no one counting its results, a grant that depended on Washington. What the city can change alone is how it measures.