In February I built SolveTO to fix one small thing that drove me up the wall. There is a pothole I had been swerving for months, because reporting it to the city took longer than living with it. So I made a way to report it in about 30 seconds. Take a photo, and the report writes itself and reaches the city and your councillor, with the location and the details already filled in. I figured this was my own private annoyance.
In March I filmed reporting the same pothole two ways, side by side. Mine took three taps and thirty seconds. The city’s form took five pages and more than twenty fields. That post passed 115,000 views, and the replies were all the same: people naming their own street, their own form they had given up on. The annoyance was never mine alone.
Within weeks, hundreds of Torontonians were using it. Three months in, more than 850 reports have reached the city across several departments, every one of them starting from the single report I filed for myself.
Why people use it
They did not show up for the novelty. They showed up because it respects the two things the old way wastes, your time and your attention. Thirty seconds, not ten minutes. The AI reads the photo and writes the report, so you do not fill out a single field. Your name and your details stay private, while the issue and its status stay public, so your neighbours can see what is broken on the street and whether it ever got fixed. It is fast, it is honest, and it puts the follow-up the city has never closed out in the open where everyone can see it. That is the whole reason it spread.
From one city to two, and every town after
People outside Toronto started asking when it was their turn. A couple of weeks ago the first answer went live. SolveSAUGA is live in Mississauga, and it is still one platform, one login, one feed. The same thirty seconds works whether the pothole is in Toronto or Mississauga, because you should not have to relearn how to report a problem for crossing a city line on your drive home.
It does not stop at two. A pothole is a pothole in a town of five thousand and a city of three million, so the same platform fits either one, and every place in between, anywhere in the country. The map already crosses city lines. The next town is the easy part.
It was never only cities
Here is the part most people walk right past. A city is just the largest version of the problem, and the problem does not stop at the curb.
A university campus is a small city. Its own roads, its own lights, its own broken things, and no fast way for anyone who notices to report them. So is a golf course, a private club, a factory, a school, a shopping centre, a sprawling park you can trace on a map. The facilities manager walking that ground every morning sees exactly what a resident sees on their street: something broken in front of them, and no quick way to log it, send it to the right person, and prove it got fixed. The BIA manager keeping a commercial strip clean lives it. So does the residents’ association that meets to talk about their own block, with no budget and no mandate, just neighbours who care enough to show up.
There are far more campuses, clubs, malls, and managed properties in this country than there are city halls, and every one of them has the same problem at its own scale. The same engine that runs a city runs your campus, your club, your property, on your map, in your name, kept private to you. Whatever ground you manage, this runs on top of it.
What comes next
What comes next is bigger than two cities. The goal was never Toronto, and it was never only Mississauga. It is a country where you can report a broken thing in thirty seconds no matter which town you are standing in, where a report in Halifax works the same way it does on Bloor Street. We are two cities into that. The map was built to hold the rest of Canada, and the deeper intelligence underneath it is built to serve a whole country, not one city hall.
What I can promise is simple. I listen. I read every email and every message, I write back, and when something is broken I fix it. The features people lean on most are the ones someone asked me for. Mississauga is here because people wanted it, and that is how this grows, one real conversation at a time.
So this is the invitation. If your town should be next, if you run ground the public walks across, or you just want to point at the thing on your street that nobody has fixed, write me or DM me. One pothole started this. Tell me about yours, and let us see how far across the country it goes.
