Road patrol plan built on Ontario's Minimum Maintenance Standards
A class-by-class patrol plan for Vaughan's 1,043 km of municipal roads. Every route can be finished in one sitting, every class is patrolled before its MMS deadline, and the work fits in a fraction of the patrol capacity Vaughan already has.
Why we are changing the routes
Ontario Regulation 239/02 sets how often each class of municipal road must be patrolled, and meeting it is what gives Vaughan its statutory defence when a defect leads to a claim. The obligation is per class: Class 3 arterials every 7 days, Class 4 collectors every 14 days, Class 5 local streets every 30 days.
Today's patrol routes in Citycare are large areas that mix every class. A 143 km area takes five to six hours at patrol speed, so it can't be finished in one shift, progress carries over from crew to crew, and busy roads are patrolled no more often than quiet ones.
This plan replaces areas with routes built per road class. Each route starts and ends at 2800 Rutherford Rd, takes three hours or less with travel, covers one class so Citycare repeats it on that class's schedule, and is driven in a set order so the patroller simply follows it to 100%.
What we set out to achieve
Compliance by design
Each class has its own routes and recurrence, so no class can fall behind.
Routes a crew can finish
Three hours or less, so completion is a clear 100% and the next shift starts fresh.
Less capacity than Vaughan has
Patrol takes a few hours of each shift, leaving most of every shift for other work.
Every kilometre counts
Roads driven on the way to a route are recorded as patrolled and taken off other routes.
In this plan
The standard: O. Reg. 239/02
Minimum Maintenance Standards for Municipal Highways. Patrolling frequency depends only on a road's class.
Patrolling frequency, s. 3 Table
| Class | MMS frequency | Vaughan km | Citycare repeat |
|---|
No Class 1 roads in Vaughan; Class 6 is outside the regulation (s. 2(3)). Each repeat is slightly shorter than the legal limit, so a route done a day late is still compliant. Citycare starts the next occurrence from the date the route was completed.
How a road gets its class, s. 1 Table
| Daily traffic | 91–100 | 81–90 | 71–80 | 61–70 | 51–60 | 41–50 | 1–40 km/h |
|---|
Excerpt. A busy, fast road gets a low class number and is patrolled more often.
Driving the road is patrolling
Patrolling a highway "consists of observing the highway, either by driving on or by electronically monitoring the highway" (s. 3(3)). A patroller driving a Citycare route with the app running does exactly that, and every street is time-stamped as it is driven.
Vaughan's road network
From the City's own road centreline file: 7,440 segments with MMS class, ownership, asset status, traffic counts, speed limits and side of Highway 400.
Roads Vaughan must patrol
City-owned, active roads of Class 2 to 5. The 22.7 km with no class in the file are treated as Class 5 until confirmed.
Left out, and why
| Network | km | Reason |
|---|
Regional roads and highways are still used to travel between routes, but never counted as patrolled.
Vaughan's classes, checked against the regulation
| Class | Same as MMS | Stricter | Less strict | No data |
|---|
Each segment recalculated from its traffic count and speed limit.
What this tells us
Vaughan's classes are sound. Where they differ from the table they are almost always stricter: about 530 km, including 327 km of Class 5 streets that would be Class 6 on traffic alone.
Only 8.4 km are less strict than the table (2.2 km of Class 4 computing as Class 3, 6.2 km of Class 5 computing as Class 4). We kept Vaughan's classes everywhere and flag these for review.
Many traffic counts date from the 1980s to 2000s. New counts could move roads in either direction.
The engineering behind the routes
Patrol routing is a well-studied operations research problem, close to plow and salt routing. These are the steps we ran on Vaughan's network.
Speeds used
| Road | km/h | Counts as patrol |
|---|
Averages including lights, stops and observation. Citycare trip data will confirm them; at 15 km/h on local streets the Class 5 workload grows by about a third.
Operating context, as discussed with Vaughan
Two ways to organize a shift
Same rules, same depot, same three-hour limit. The only difference is where the patroller takes lunch.
Scenario A: two separate loops
Each route is a loop from the office and back. One loop before lunch at the office, one after.
Scenario B: one loop split at lunch
Each shift is one loop cut at a lunch stop: AM from the office to the lunch stop, PM from the lunch stop back. One return trip saved per shift.
Scenario C: scenario B with Vaughan's first feedback
Same lunch-split shifts as B, with the two changes Vaughan officials asked for.
Side by side
| Measure | Scenario A | Scenario B | Scenario C | C against B |
|---|
Driving hours per week, by class
Every route leg
What the comparison shows
Scenario B is more efficient, but modestly: about 6% fewer driving hours (36.4 against 38.9 a week) and about 100 km less driving each week, with full coverage in both.
The gain is small because 2800 Rutherford Rd sits near the centre of the city: returning to the office at mid-day costs only 20 to 40 minutes, and B saves one such trip per shift.
Where B gains: a full Class 5 shift patrols 57 to 71 km of new residential streets, against 50 to 60 km for two separate loops in A.
Scenario C, with the West district running from Langstaff Rd and no 407, needs 35.7 driving hours a week, about 2% less than B and 8% less than A, and about 45 km less driving a week than B. Starting west routes in Woodbridge more than makes up for leaving the 407 out.
What stays the same
Both fit in roughly one patroller-shift a day with the existing pickups, under 20% of the patrol capacity described to us.
In B, three loops are too short to split (Class 2, the last Class 3 and the last Class 4, 1.7 to 1.8 h each). They pair up as a morning loop and an afternoon loop in one shift.
In A, 29 of 31 routes stay on one side of Highway 400. In C every route stays in its own district by design.
In C, splitting by district leaves a few part-shifts: one Class 2 loop per district (0.7 and 1.1 h), and a 45-minute Class 5 loop in the East district once every 28 days.
Tick to show a route. Press play at the right of a route to drive it street by street.
December 2026
A full month simulated with the Citycare recurrences. Each route comes due a set number of days after it was last completed and goes to the shift with the most free time that day. Class 5 local streets are kept to the day and afternoon shifts.
Every shift, every day: patrol time and time left
Three 8-hour shifts a day, one patroller each. Each bar is one shift: patrol driving, office and lunch, and the time left for other work.
Month by personnel
Each cell is one 8-hour shift drawn left to right, from start of shift to end. Coloured blocks are the routes driven, in their class colour. Grey is office time and lunch. The empty part is time left for other work. Click a shift to see it hour by hour.
Why one route on some shifts and two on others
Each route comes due on its own schedule, every 3, 6, 13 or 28 days after it was last done. A shift only gets the routes that are due that day, so some shifts carry one route and others two. No shift ever gets more than two route legs, about 6 hours of driving in 8.
Month by route
A coloured cell is the day the route is patrolled. Click it to see that shift.
The road patrol plan pays for Category A in about two months
Vaughan runs six patrollers a day, two per shift, three shifts, every day of the year. Today each spends about two-thirds of the shift patrolling. With class-based routes in Citycare, the same MMS coverage takes about one hour per patroller per shift.
Five-year cumulative value against the Category A contract?
What changes, and why it pays?
Today’s patrol areas mix every road class and take five to six hours each, so every patroller spends most of the shift driving, and busy arterials get no more attention than quiet crescents.
The new plan builds routes per MMS class, each under three hours from 2800 Rutherford Rd, repeated on that class’s legal schedule. Roads driven on the way to a route count as patrolled. The whole city is covered with about 5.2 hours of driving a day, plus route prep.
The freed time stays with Roads: potholes, signs, debris, sweeping, or less overtime and contractor spend.
In this analysis
Patrol time: two-thirds of every shift down to about one-seventh
Same six patrollers, same 24/7 coverage, same MMS deadlines. What changes is how much of each 8-hour shift the patrol itself consumes.
One patroller’s 8-hour shift?
Today: two-thirds of the shift, as described by Vaughan. New routes: route driving plus office prep before each route, spread across the six patroller-shifts of a day.
Where patroller time goes with the new routes?
Share of all paid patroller hours in a year (6 shifts a day × 8 h × 365 days).
Patrol hours per year?
Kilometres driven per year?
Why the drop is larger than half
Going from two-thirds of a shift to one-third would already halve patrol time. The routes do better because the full city needs only about 5.2 hours of driving a day once every route is sized to its class and its MMS frequency. Shared across six patroller-shifts, that is under one hour of driving each, plus prep.
Cost and payback
Annual patrol cost today against the new routes, the payback on the Category A contract, and every assumption behind the numbers.
Annual patrol cost, labour and fuel?
Where the annual savings come from?
Fuel is cash the City stops spending. Labour is capacity returned to Roads, valued at $45 an hour.
Five-year view?
| Year | Savings, as designed | Conservative | Category A | Net |
|---|
Category A is counted at its full year-one value every year, plus the 3% CPI cap. Renewals carry no implementation, survey or training fees, so the real net is higher.
Two ways to read it?
The conservative floor assumes patrol only drops from two-thirds to one-third of each shift, halving today’s patrol time and fuel. Even then, Category A pays back in about three months.
Assumptions
- Patrollers: 2 per shift (east and west of Hwy 400), 3 shifts a day, 365 days. Today each patrols two-thirds of an 8-hour shift, as described by Vaughan.
- Labour: $45 an hour, applied to patrol hours only.
- New routes: 1,897 h of route driving a year from the plan (all classes, travel from 2800 Rutherford Rd included) plus 471 h of office prep before routes, from the December 2026 simulation.
- Distance: 56,171 km a year from the plan. Today’s distance assumes the same average patrol speed as the new routes, about 29.6 km/h.
- Fuel: pickup trucks at 17 L/100 km and $1.45 a litre. CO2 at 2.3 kg per litre of gasoline.
- Investment: the Category A contract, $79,925 excluding HST for year one, carried at full value each year with a 3% CPI increase.
- Not counted: lower vehicle maintenance and wear, overtime avoided, and inflation in wages or fuel. Each would raise the savings.
Points to confirm, and next steps
Points to confirm with Vaughan
Next steps
Sources and assumptions
City of Vaughan road centreline file (November 2026). Ontario Regulation 239/02, Minimum Maintenance Standards for Municipal Highways, current consolidation. Municipal boundary: OpenStreetMap contributors. Route model, sequencing, schedule and figures by Baseline. Hours are planning estimates at the speeds shown in the method.