418,000 assets, one map, and why it matters

Toronto has been collecting infrastructure data for decades. Catch basins from the 1840s. Fire hydrants. Traffic signals. Sewer networks. Transit shelters. Litter bins. Power outage feeds from Toronto Hydro. Road closures updated every hour.

All of it is public. All of it is free. It’s sitting on open.toronto.ca right now.

But here’s the thing. If you’re a resident who just watched water pool into the street after a storm, you don’t know that data exists. If you’re a city worker who gets dispatched to fix a drain, you don’t know there’s a road closure two blocks away that’ll double your travel time. If you’re a councillor trying to understand why your ward keeps flooding, you don’t have a map that shows every catch basin and sewer manhole in one view.

The data was always there. It just wasn’t connected.

What changed

Over the past week, I pulled 11 public datasets into SolveTO and built them into a single interactive map. Every asset is clickable. Every asset is reportable. Every report includes the infrastructure context around it.

418,000+ assets in total. But the numbers aren’t the point. The connections are.

What a connected report looks like

Let me walk you through what happens when someone reports a flooded street.

A resident sees water pooling at an intersection. They open SolveTO, tap the nearest catch basin on the map, and say “this drain is blocked, water is flooding into the road.” Fifteen seconds. Done.

The city doesn’t get a vague complaint. They get a report with everything they need to act. The exact location. A photo. A clear description. And the kind of context that would normally take someone 20 minutes to pull together manually.

Compare that to a 311 call: “There’s flooding somewhere near Main and Danforth.” Someone on the city side has to figure out which drain. Pull up a map. Match the description. Hope they got the right one.

That’s the gap this fills. One report with everything attached, ready to act on.

The same thing works for Toronto Hydro

A streetlight goes out on a residential street. It happens all the time. Nobody calls it in because who has time to find a phone number, describe a location, and wait on hold?

But a resident walking by can tap the pole on the map, say “light is out,” and a report goes directly to the right place. Everything the crew needs to respond, in one message.

Before that, it was just a dark street nobody reported.

Why this matters beyond reporting

I want to be honest about what I’m trying to do here.

This isn’t just a reporting tool. Reporting is the action, but the real goal is something bigger. I want residents to know their city better.

When you know what’s around you, you stop just complaining and start reporting with context. Your voice carries more weight because the information behind it is specific, verifiable, and actionable. A city worker reads that report and thinks: this person knows what they’re talking about. Let me act on this.

That changes the dynamic from frustration to cooperation.

The bridge

Here’s what I believe. The gap between residents and the city isn’t about anger or apathy. It’s about information. When a resident reports “there’s a pothole on my street,” that’s frustration. When a resident reports with precise location, photos, and context that makes the problem immediately actionable, that’s cooperation.

SolveTO is the bridge. It takes publicly available data that already exists, presents it in a way residents can actually understand, and turns every report into something the city can act on immediately.

Not residents versus the city. Residents working with the city. Both sides getting what they need. Both sides saving time.

The data was always there. Now it’s connected. And every report that flows through it makes the next one more useful.

solveto.ca