Obsession or Stubbornness?
How one pothole turned into a kind of intelligence for a whole city, and where to get the full slides.
What I'm building, what I'm learning, and why civic tech matters.
How one pothole turned into a kind of intelligence for a whole city, and where to get the full slides.
Fly over a living night map of Toronto and Mississauga drawn from over a million of the city's own data points. Every resident report glows and replays through time, so you watch the city fix itself, one fix at a time.
SolveMILTON is live. A Milton resident can report a problem at a park, school, fire station, town facility, or parking lot in under 30 seconds, and the report already knows where it is and what surrounds it. Here is what that actually changes.
A Toronto resident reported a dangerous crosswalk, then asked the real question: why is noticing the city's broken infrastructure a resident's job at all? Here is the honest answer, and the one thing that actually moves a fix.
Three months ago I built SolveTO to report one pothole on my street in thirty seconds. It turned into 850 reports and two cities. Here is what happened, and why people use it.
Toronto's plan to fix 311 is dated 2027. A book from 2019 explains why it was late before anyone wrote it, and why the deck reads like a spec sheet for a product that already runs today.
Toronto's 311 system is marking requests as 'Completed' when nothing was fixed and the issue was sent to someone else. That is not a closed loop. That is a relabeled problem.
The City of Toronto presented its plan to modernize 311. Submit and track on your phone, AI, closing the loop. The target is 2027. SolveTO has done all of it since February. So I am not here to fight. I am here with an offer: do not build it twice.
A campus, a business district, a hospital ground. Each one is a small town with sidewalks, lights, benches, and people who notice when something breaks. They deserve the same tool a city uses to stay accountable.
You report a pothole. The city fixes it. Nobody ever tells you. That silence is why people stop reporting, and it is the part of SolveTO I am building next.
Get occasional updates on what we're building and how Toronto is improving.