Home Examples Toronto Grid Pulse

LIVE EXAMPLE - OPEN DATA

Toronto's grid, street by street

Every streetlight pole, active development application, City-run EV charger and street tree the City of Toronto has on record, mapped on its real streets and set against what Toronto Hydro announced in 2026. Four simple questions lead the way, each with a narrated 42 second tour.

Map of Toronto at night. Each glow is one of the City's 213,618 streetlight poles, most still sodium orange, with four question buttons above: where are the streetlights, what is being built, where can you charge an EV, and where do trees line the streets. A card at right shows Toronto Hydro's $577 million plan to switch every streetlight to LED by 2035.Explore it live (opens in a new tab)

Streetlight poles, active development applications, City-run EV chargers and street trees on City of Toronto streets and neighbourhoods. Data: City of Toronto Open Data, Open Government Licence - Toronto. Toronto Hydro figures from its public announcements. Narration voiced with ElevenLabs. Not endorsed by the City of Toronto or Toronto Hydro.

213,618

streetlight poles in the City's topographic mapping

4,439

active development sites, from 6,411 applications

117 of 158

neighbourhoods have no City-run EV charger

688,335

City street trees across 158 neighbourhoods

What the data reveals

STREETLIGHTS

Downtown has 3.2 times the average streetlight density

Downtown Yonge East has 1,073 poles per km², against a citywide average of 334. West Humber-Clairville has the most poles overall (7,489), spread across a large area.

GROWTH

Clairlea-Birchmount has the most active sites

191 of 4,439 active development sites. The top five neighbourhoods hold 17% of the city's pipeline, and 2,191 sites propose 20 storeys or more.

EV CHARGING

117 of 158 neighbourhoods have no City-run charger

City-run charging is concentrated downtown: the Yonge-Bay Corridor alone has 73 ports. Only 10 sites offer Level 3 fast charging.

TREES AND STORMS

Central neighbourhoods have the most street trees per km²

Forest Hill South leads with 2,490 street trees per km², about 2.3 times the city average of 1,078. St Lawrence-East Bayfront-The Islands has the fewest: 251.

INTERACTIVE

How to explore it

Pick a question

Four buttons, four layers of real City data. The headline on the map answers each question in one sentence.

Watch the narrated tour

Every question has its own 42 second tour. The map moves with the narration, and the words appear on screen as captions.

Click anything

A development site opens its applications and a link to the City's file. A neighbourhood shows all four measures and its rank out of 158.

Switch to neighbourhoods

Shade all 158 City neighbourhoods by the current question to compare areas at a glance.

Find a place

Type a neighbourhood, an address or a charger location and the map flies there.

Read it as text

A sortable table lists every neighbourhood with every measure. Click a row to see it on the map.

About the data

Every figure on this page and on the map is counted from the City of Toronto's published open data, and every Toronto Hydro figure links to its public source.

  • Source: City of Toronto Open Data, pulled October 22, 2026, under the Open Government Licence - Toronto.
  • Streetlights: Topographic Mapping - Poles, subtypes "Street Light Pole" and "Street Light and Traffic Signal Pole": 213,618 poles. Toronto Hydro reports 173,000 luminaires; the two inventories count different things.
  • LED plan: the 2030 (60%) and 2035 (100%) milestones are Toronto Hydro and City targets. Years in between follow an even path, and which poles turn white first is illustrative, because the real conversion order is not public.
  • Development: Development Applications (26,648 records). Active means not Closed, Refused, Inactive, Appeal Dismissed or OMB Refused: 6,411 applications on 4,439 sites. 108 active applications have no location and are not mapped. Applications within 3 m of each other are shown as one site. Coordinates are converted from NAD27 MTM zone 10 (EPSG:2019).
  • Height and units are read from each application's own description where stated, and shown per site only, not as a city total.
  • EV charging: City Operated Electric Vehicle Charging Station Map: 82 sites with 382 Level 2 and 23 Level 3 ports. It does not include every charger in the Green P network.
  • Trees: Street Tree Data, 688,335 City-owned street trees, counted per neighbourhood.
  • Roads, rail and hydro corridors: Toronto Centreline (TCL). Hydro towers are the "Circular Hydro Tower" subtype of the poles layer (376). Hydro corridors carry high-voltage transmission lines operated by Hydro One.
  • Toronto Hydro figures (LED plan, September storm, demand forecast, connection times and EV charging) come from public announcements and reporting, linked in each panel of the map.
  • Narration voiced with ElevenLabs.
  • A one-page guide to every part of the map: Guide to the page (PDF).
  • Not endorsed by the City of Toronto or Toronto Hydro.

Have assets, programs or projects to map?

Streetlights, outages, connections, capital projects or facilities: we put them on a real map people can explore, with narrated tours, filters and every figure traceable to its source. Tell us about your data.

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