Articles filed under Data Stories


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A Decade of Progress on City-Owned Buildings and Facilities

This post explores the trends in renewable energy installations on City-owned buildings and facilities in Toronto over the past decade.

UrbanToronto: Seeing the Future of the City with Data

A great example, partnership and arguably a great use-case of how open data is used in big Cities. One of […]

How the City is Winning the War Against Lead Contamination in Drinking Water

Back in 2011, Toronto’s City Council took action by approving a strategy to reduce lead in our drinking water. Fast forward to 2014, and the City began to take action. Read on for more analysis.

Exploring Equity in Child Care: A Data-Driven Analysis of Access and Demand

This post explores issues of equity, access, and demand surrounding licensed child care spaces
throughout Toronto’s 25 wards.

Disease Outbreak Concerns in Toronto’s Long-Term Care Homes

Following the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 pandemic proclamation in 2020, 81% of deaths from COVID-19 in Canada occurred among long-term care residents. Since Toronto recently experienced high influenza and COVID-19 activity, it is critical to evaluate disease outbreaks in Toronto healthcare facilities.

How Fast Can You Go Places Using the TTC?

Welcome to our newest blog post, where we’re exploring a game-changer in Toronto’s public transit scene! Meet time2reach, an interactive transit map created by university student Henry Nguyen.

Open Data for Open Water Swimmers

Dive into the world of ‘Open Water Data,’ a must-have digital companion for every open water swimmer and enthusiast. Developed by Mitch Bechtel, this platform offers real-time data on water quality, temperature, and weather conditions for beaches in Toronto and around the globe.

BikeSpace – Mapping Toronto’s bike parking needs

BikeSpace is a crowdsourced web app where cyclists can anonymously report bicycle parking issues across Toronto. The application allows users to pinpoint where new and better bike parking could be added – in both private and public locations.

When Pandemic Met Data – A Journalist’s Journey into the Open Data Portal

In this blog post: Matt Elliott, Publisher of City Hall Watcher newsletter and Toronto Star contributor, shares his experience of how the city’s Open Data Portal transformed his reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Decoding Transit Delays: A Data-Driven Dive into the Toronto Transit Commission (2014-2022)

Kaviani offers a deep-dive into the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) public transportation system. His comprehensive data analytics report scrutinizes subway, streetcar, and bus delay times from 2014 to 2022.

Measuring Sound from the Bedroom Window

In this captivating blog post, Ingrid, a local resident, shares her personal journey of uncovering the impact of noise pollution on her life and her quest to better understand and quantify its effects.

Portal Analytics

The Open Data Team, known for handling vast amounts of data, was surprised to find themselves analyzing their own dataset statistics. Upon reviewing the numbers and charts, they realized they had much to learn about their portal’s performance and impact.

Guest Post: Using Folium to Visualize Distribution of Public Services in 140 Toronto Neighbourhoods

Lisa Chen reached out to the open data team with the visualizations she created from two open datasets: Toronto Neighbourhood Boundaries and Youth Wellness Resources.

Towards a Data Quality Score in open data (Part 2)

In my first story on Open Data Toronto’s Data Quality Score (DQS), I shared why data quality matters to us and what the DQS is at a high-level; in this story, I walk through the steps of exactly how we created it so it is more detailed and a little more technical. Read on if that’s your jam.

Open Data: A product approach

Open data at the City of Toronto has been up and running for a decade this year, with an amazing and active community. However, this is not the case everywhere, and outside of our exceptional community, open data is still unknown by many. Why?

Towards a Data Quality Score in Open Data

Traditionally, Open Data Toronto program performance has been tied to the number of datasets in the catalogue. Today, however, catalogue size is less relevant primarily because it fails to measure progress towards the program’s vision of enabling anyone, anywhere, to improve life in Toronto with open data. To solve this issue, we created a score to assess data quality and what it measures.

Analyzing Lobbyist Data

The Office of the Lobbyist Registrar ensures the public disclosure of lobbying activities and oversees the regulation of lobbyists’ conduct. The City of Toronto publishes this data through the Lobbyist Registry Disclosure Site and through the Open Data Portal.

Strategies for working with new data

We’re excited to present our first community story by Sharla Gelfand, which looks at how to start working with open data in R.

Exploring Toronto voter statistics using Golang

Yizhao Tan takes us through how to use the GO programming language to better understand voter turnouts and patterns in Toronto.

Measuring Walking Times Across Toronto to Nearest TTC Stop

In this tutorial, we analyze walk times from every address point within the City of Toronto limits to the closest Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) Stops. TTC stops can include subway, LRT, street car and bus. The analysis uses Pandana to perform the network distance calculations on a new open data set called the “Pedestrian Network” that our team created in conjunction with Transportation Services to better understand walkable access to various amenities across Toronto.

Towards Data Analytics: Data literacy in R

Data is everywhere, and is a critical component in every faction of work. Understanding data is essential for evidence based decision making. Within most organizations Excel is King, the application that is used to collect, share, manipulate, analyze, and communicate information from data.

Exploring Bike Share Ridership

The weather is finally warming up and Torontonians are venturing outside to catch some sun. One thing is for certain: we love our bikes, and we’ll ride them everywhere. The Open Data team’s own Yizhao Tan decided to work with the open data provided by the City to better understand how Torontonians use bike share. Learn more about how Yizhao uses data visualization and analysis libraries, as well as data cleaning tools, to demonstrate how to turn cycling open data into insights.

Exploring Cleared Building Permits

The City of Toronto publishes data on building permits going as far back as 2000. Excited about this, we at the Open Data Team asked ourselves: how might we learn from the Cleared Building Permits? Could we use it for improving our understanding of Toronto and how we deliver services to the community?