Hack the Count: Turning Window Sensors into Street Safety Evidence

When Ontario removed roughly 700 automated speed enforcement cameras from school and community safety zones in 2025, neighbourhoods lost one of their few sources of hard evidence about speeding. What happens when residents start collecting that evidence themselves?

This talk introduces CIVIC (Community-centred Infrastructures for Visible and Inclusive Cities), an urban living lab in London, Ontario. Residents host low-cost, privacy-by-design Telraam traffic sensors and noise monitors in their own windows. These sensors count cars, cyclists and pedestrians and estimate speeds, all without storing images. Professor Carrie Mitchell will walk through how the network was built, what the data shows, and how residents and city staff are using it to make the case for traffic calming. She’ll also cover what’s hard: data gaps, privacy trade-offs, and keeping a volunteer sensor network running. Finally, she’ll ask what it would take to scale community-owned street data across Ontario, and where civic technologists can help.

Speakers

Carrie Mitchell

Carrie Mitchell is an Associate Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo, where she studies urban climate resilience, community-based planning, and, more recently, road safety governance. She is the founder of CIVIC (OurCIVICFutures.ca), an urban living lab funded by Waterloo’s Global Futures Fund that is deploying privacy-by-design traffic and noise sensors with residents and community partners. Before joining Waterloo, she spent five years at Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) managing urban environment and climate research across Asia. She lives in London, Ontario.