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Toronto is best known in this field for a project that never got built — Alphabet's Quayside, abandoned in 2020 after a fight over who would hold the data. What the city actually runs is quieter and more revealing, and the recurring theme is that Toronto often does not hold the controls. Its fare card belongs to a provincial agency, its electricity meters and tariffs were mandated and priced by the province, and in November 2025 Ontario repealed the statute under Toronto's speed cameras outright — after peer-reviewed research had shown they cut speeding by 45 percent. Where the city does hold the controls, it holds them completely: it owns its bike share and publishes the trip data under its own bespoke licence.
The atlas documents 10 projects in Toronto, the earliest dating to 2004: 1 with a documented success, 1 documented failure, 8 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (2 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Toronto is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
The city's data habits are older than its data politics. Toronto opened one of Canada's first municipal data portals in November 2009 and, the same September, launched a 311 line that answers around the clock in more than 180 languages. Both have the same shape twenty years on: substantial, current, and quietly incomplete. The open data catalogue held 554 datasets in July 2026 with records edited the same day, and it carries a genuinely well-drafted bespoke deed, the Open Government Licence – Toronto — yet only 115 of those 554 records actually name it, and 284 are tagged 'License not specified'. The 311 extract publishes a status but no closure date, so the service-level targets the city does publish, on a separate dashboard, cannot be timed against the data.
Between 2009 and 2019 the province wrote most of the infrastructure. Ontario announced a smart meter for every home in 2004, legislated it in 2006, and reached 4.8 million meters by 2014; Toronto Hydro, which the city owns outright, moved customers onto time-of-use rates from June 2009 at prices the Ontario Energy Board sets. The province's own Auditor General found in 2014 that the rollout had cost close to CAD 2 billion against an initial CAD 1 billion projection, and that the business case — written after installation began — overstated the benefit by at least CAD 512 million. The PRESTO card followed the same pattern: built and run by Metrolinx, a provincial agency, and bought by the TTC as a managed service under an agreement that can simply expire in 2027.
The city's own best work in this period was measurement. In November 2017 Toronto barred private cars from driving through King Street and evaluated the result with a rigour almost no street intervention receives anywhere: monthly public dashboards built from streetcar GPS, Bluetooth travel-time detectors, video counts and Moneris card-payment data, so that both the transit gains and the disputed effect on restaurants were tested with the same instruments. It went permanent in 2019. Meanwhile Line 1 was resignalled with moving-block train control, finishing in September 2022, seven years past the original contract's target; refreshingly, nobody oversold it — the trains still carry an operator, and what automation actually removed was the guard at the rear.
Since 2020 the pattern has been the city losing arguments it had already won on the evidence. Speed cameras began ticketing in July 2020 and grew to 150 systems in signed school-area zones; a SickKids and Toronto Metropolitan University study across 204 locations found speeding down 45 percent and the 85th-percentile speed down 10.68 km/h. Vandals then sawed cameras down repeatedly — sixteen in a single night in September 2025 — and Ontario's Bill 56 repealed the enabling law, ending all ticketing on 14 November 2025, with a clause pre-emptively barring municipalities from suing over the vendor contracts the repeal breaks. By June 2026 the city measured speeds up at 101 of 104 former camera sites. King Street tells a smaller version of the same story: a 2023 University of Toronto study counted about 6,800 illegal movements a day, under 0.3 percent of them ticketed, and the travel-time gains have been eroding ever since.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2004 to 2022. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Toronto's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Two dates decide what Toronto controls next. On 1 September 2026 the TTC abolishes its monthly passes and switches to automatic fare capping — free travel after 47 paid trips a month, falling to 40 in 2027 — which moves Toronto from the Chicago and Boston side of that argument to the Los Angeles side, three years later. And the PRESTO agreement can end as early as 2027, with the TTC already running a request for information on replacing it; whether the city takes its fare system back is the clearest test of the pattern this page describes. Against those, the speed cameras are not coming back without a change of provincial government, and the province has offered CAD 10 million for traffic calming instead of the enforcement it removed. The quieter question is whether the city fixes what it does control: the Digital Infrastructure Strategic Framework adopted in 2022 has produced one documented compliance table in one procurement, the public sensor and AI registries it trailed have not appeared, and four in five open datasets still do not name the licence they are published under.
Where Toronto appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Toronto — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Toronto threads below, not counted out of them.
Two North American cities of the automated-then-not: both resignalled their metros and still keep an operator in the cab, both promise open data their own metadata contradicts, and their speed cameras went opposite ways.
Canada's cleanest natural experiment — the same systems under different owners: a metro with nobody aboard against one that kept its driver, and a bike-share the city owns outright against one whose data belongs to the operator.
The automation timeline read backwards: Miami has run a driverless mover since the eighties and struggles to keep the hardware alive, Toronto resignalled decades later and kept the driver — and their fare products head opposite ways.
Every editorial link from Toronto's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Toronto, Canada.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/toronto/ (last verified 2026-08-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.