Imagine roads without reckless driving, parking lots without diagonal parking, and a city where signalling and traffic lights are not optional. A place where the daily rev-and-race finally ends.

AUTOWA is a community reporting project working toward safer, friendlier streets. Right now, bad driving in Ottawa often goes unaddressed because it's under-reported, high-volume, and buried in manual bureaucracy.

Automation is the solution - but municipal automated enforcement was made illegal by Doug Ford's government. So we're building the tools that will put low-cost, community-driven reporting directly in the hands of the public.

This lets everyone advocate for Vision Zero, not "Vision acceptable collisions, injuries, and deaths".

AUTOWA is working toward a free, community-deployable speed-enforcement camera that runs on a phone or laptop. Today, it's a web app that collects vehicle photos to train our machine-vision system.

The project is growing in phases:

• Collecting training material to make the robot smarter
• Building the infrastructure so anyone can use it easily
• Putting the tool in the hands of community groups
• Using aggregated data to advocate for better local policy

Since COVID, it seems Ottawa's streets become incredibly lawless. It only takes a few minutes of driving, walking, or biking to witness a traffic violation — and only a minute more to see the next one.

Our work isn't anti-car; it's anti-reckless behavior. We want streets that feel safe, fair, and useable for everyone.

Our goal is to show, what we already know, that big problems can be solved through technology and community effort. We don't need endless talking, endless bureaucracy, endless studies or sky-high consulting costs.

While our leadership may have slowed down on road safety, that doesn't mean the rest of us have to. We're taking this as far as the law allows.

Anyone can submit a plate or image from anywhere, but our current features are focused on roads in Ottawa.

If you're a politician, community group, or advocate interested in bringing this to your city, feel free to reach out - we're always open to conversations about expansion.

Licence plates in Canada have been deemed by the courts as publicly observable property, with no expectation of privacy. Their purpose is to be seen, and they do not directly identify an individual - only the vehicle, which itself has no privacy rights.

The general rule for photography in Canada is that it's legal as long as there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. When it comes to people or buildings, you also cannot profit from someone's likeness as the main subject without permission. None of this applies to photos of vehicles visible from public property.

On private property, such as parking lots, taking photos is also not illegal. However, property owners or their agents can enforce how their property is used, including asking someone to stop or vacate. Please use discretion.

To help keep our collection clean, we ask that you avoid submitting:

• Photos with cars and home addresses visible in the same shot (e.g., driveways)
• Avoid faces of people and children. Please crop so only the vehicle and the infraction are visible
• Anything connecting the owner to vehicle. At this point we are not setup to handle legally protected privacy content