“This will be a game changer and will establish Toronto as a leader in running a truly smart city.”
– John Tory, Mayor of the City of Toronto

Yesterday I registered for a hackathon called TrafficJam that’s taking place this October 2 – 4, 2015 here in Toronto. It’s being organized by Evergreen CityWorks and the City of Toronto, with the goal of fixing Toronto’s traffic troubles.

Tickets are free, but going fast. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I would encourage you to sign up today. And if you do register or are already registered, drop me on a line so we can connect. I’m excited to see what kind of solutions we’re all able to come up with over the course of a weekend.

But as I was registering and reading through the website, I couldn’t help but think about some of the traffic problems that we won’t be solving over the hackathon weekend, namely the politicization of transportation planning in this city.

As an example of that check out a post by transit blogger Steve Munro called, The Vanishing Relevance of SmartTrack. 

SmartTrack is the transit platform that Mayor John Tory ran on last year. And this post explains why it is unlikely to achieve its pitch promises.