City Data and the Little Laws of Life

It’s no secret, and no puzzle, that lawyers’ attention generally follows the money. Indeed, with the possible exception of criminal law as romanticized on TV, the public’s view of law itself is shaped by this legal currying of currency and its sources.

But that same public’s actual encounters with the law often happen in areas that have a tiny bar or no bar at all. One of these is with respect to municipal by-laws. In a city of any size, there will be thousands of these laws regulating much of the activity and paraphernalia of everyday life: where and when to park your car, when to clear ice off the sidewalk, what you and your dog may do and where you may do it, whether and how you may ask strangers for money, whether there should be speed bumps on your street, or whether you may open up a night club in that spare room.

This skein of statutory stuff was until recently extremely difficult to search. Lately, though, cities have taken to putting their by-laws online, where, with varying degrees of trouble, affected citizens might actually find and read them. (Interpreting them correctly remains another matter. [tippy title=”This” reference=”” header=”off”]Certain land described by W. Kowalenko, O.L.S., City Surveyor, as follows, namely:
PIN 21208-0335 (LT) PART OF LOTS 10 & 11, PLAN 361, BEING PART 6 ON PLAN 66R24255
PIN 21208-0336 (LT) PART OF LOTS 2 & 13 AND PART OF LANE, CLOSED BY EP119371, ASIN EP119353 (EXCEPT EASEMENT THEREIN), PLAN 361, BEING PART 5 ON PLAN 66R24255
City of Toronto and Province of Ontario Land Titles Division of the Toronto Registry Office (No. 66)
is dedicated for public lane purposes.[/tippy], for an example picked at random, would likely cause most folks some difficulty because of its technical language.)

It’s a part of the general move towards putting government data online, and ideally online in formats that make it useful for mashups and other repurposing. Vancouver seems to be leading the way in Canada. That city has joined with Toronto, Edmonton, and Ottawa to develop an “open data framework” that “aims to enhance current open data initiatives in the areas of data standards and terms of use agreements.”

Each of these cities has put some datasets online, some of them in formats that can be displayed on Google Maps or Google Earth, others in formats that lend themselves to spreadsheets.

The by-laws are not directly involved in these data catalogs, being found in separate web locations. Vancouver again leads the way in usability: its by-law site lets you search the text of the laws or see an alpha list or a category index. Toronto doesn’t organize the access to by-laws as clearly. There is a site that lets you search the text of by-laws, but it’s part of a general search facility for all of Toronto’s online information, controlled by a drop-down list. The identified by-law page actually expects you to pick a year before seeing a list of otherwise unordered by-laws.

Edmonton offers an alpha list of by-laws as does Ottawa.

All of this is encouraging — and revealing clearly that we have a way to go yet before the citizen and the city have the best working relationship possible with current information technology.