Current Events forecast future trends

I recently spoke to information agents at city hall. I was asking them for the contact information for the Director of City Open Data and Business Intelligence.

The response I got was bureaucratic, “ you have to fill out a freedom of information request form” they said. 

 Rather than just looking up the information in a directory I had to jump through hoops. What I wanted was to access this information through the city web site. Unfortunately in 2026 you cannot get there from here.

After getting over the initial flabberghast I thanked them and left to ponder the matter.

I have been promoting the use of Arificial Intelligence in city management for some time now. It is pretty clear that this is a contentious matter. In my Unpublished opinion piece about implementiong AI at city call, half agreed with me and the other half disagreed.

So many decisions at city council claim that their decisions are informed by data. 

My concern is that the recent decisions regarding Road Safety, for example,  are based on five years of data. 

What happens when the five years are not indicative for current trends because of anomalous patterns due to covid?  Those decisions will be poorly informed. Further, informing decisions on historical information, however data driven risks overlooking immediate events. It is current events that truly dictate future trends.  This might include the loss of a crossing guard to a distracted driver.

Another problem can be the use of larger numbers to numb the impact of smaller but more recent events. Staff will say, “numbers are high but since the city is growing the number per 100,000 citizens is dropping”.

Bill 56 which caused cities to remove automatic Speed Enforcement cameras was a real surprise to me. It was so obvious to many that the cameras caused people to slow down. It is also apparent after half a year that their removed caused drivers to speed up.

My view is that even though fines were no longer legal, it still makes sense to reach out to drivers to inform them that they were speeding and that their behaviour was unacceptable. (use email or letter). 

You could also accumulate the information for use when their driver’s licenses were to be renewed.

My view is that even though the sudden provincial decree to stop using speed camera fines stopped the revenue flow it did not prevent us from using the cameras to reach out to the speeders and tell them that their speeding was not appreciated and unacceptable.

All that data about the speeders could be used to inform driver's licence renewals and insurance renewals.

Rather than throwing up our hands and saying "C'est la province... pas ma faut" find ways to use the data!

Not only will purely data driven decisions lead to worse decisions they will also lead you to questions that are irrelevant and the waste of time.

There is a group in Ottawa that consists of Business Intelligence experts that gather and discuss decision support technologies including Artificial Intelligence. We need to team our city staff up with this group to help find ways to improve not only the AI infrastructure but also the manner in which that data is used to make better decisions.