The trouble is that most of these contracts are signed without a standardized evaluation framework. This means many vendors will underdeliver. Some already have. The vendors in this space aren’t necessarily bad actors, but the category is new and the technology is just obscure enough that procurement officers are often forced to evaluate platforms using criteria the vendors themselves wrote. It’s a classic procurement trap: Cities sign contracts based on “sunny day” demos, only to receive deliverables that don't match the sales pitch. By the time the gap is visible, the budget is spent and the vendor is already pitching to the next county over. The problem is evident not just in street-level imagery like digital twins, but across the rapidly expanding smart cities sector as a whole. The U.S. smart cities market has roughly doubled in value over the last five years and continues to grow rapidly. Similar risks appear in other emerging technologies that cities are adopting, including Internet of Things sensors for traffic, air quality and parking; license plate recognition systems; and AI-powered predictive maintenance. Without rigorous scrutiny, these deals frequently lead to underperforming systems, vendor lock-in and wasted budgets. This pattern is repeatable, but it’s also preventable. Asking potential vendors the following seven questions won‘t guarantee you pick the perfect partner, but they will ensure the wrong one has nowhere to hide. 1. Why are you pushing for a sole-source procurement? 2. What are your actual hardware uptime statistics? Hardware fails. Cameras go down. GPS locks drop. Software pipelines break. Any vendor operating in the field has uptime data. Ask for it specifically. If your vendor responds to an uptime question with miles driven, images captured or parcels processed, they have answered a different question than the one you asked. That is not an accident. Demand