Updated December 5. Today, we're starting a series of interactive maps of home prices in the GTA, broken down by 86 real estate areas, which will get more complex as time goes on.
Updated December 5. Today, we're starting a series of interactive maps of home prices in the GTA, broken down by 86 real estate areas, which will get more complex as time goes on.
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| RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR |
So it seemed like as good a week as any for two maps based on the 2006 census: household spending on newspapers and household spending on the Internet.
There are several pockets of high newspaper readership in the GTA. In Toronto, one is in the high-income corridor along Yonge north of Bloor, and another along the Kingsway. In the 905, there is one in southern Oakville, and others in Woodbridge and Unionville. There are consistently higher rates of newspaper spending in the outer 905.
Spending on the Internet tracks income very closely, with the income map of Toronto duplicated almost perfectly. Rural areas are fairly consistently in the $2-300 range.
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| STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR |
Maps:
One of the limitations on our online mapping projects has been that maps with large numbers of polygons (or two-dimensional shapes, as seen in a map of city neighbourhoods) are slow to display, especially in IE. Another was that the polygons themselves had to be created by hand. This meant that the 200-odd postal codes in the GTA were about the outer limit of what we could display. More ambitious maps, like one depicting all the electoral districts in the province, were impractical both for us to create and for a reader to load.
So I was delighted when Sanjay Singh of Pitney Bowes Business Insight approached us with alternative way of creating this kind of map which elegantly solves both problems. Without going into the details, it involves two techniques which I had tried at different times but not together, which turns out to be the key.
For the first week of Map of the Week 2.0, we have a map showing smoking patterns in the GTA (unfortunately not including Durham for now) by census tract. Just over a thousand areas are represented. This map loads much more quickly than our .xml format in Firefox and IE, but if there are any unexpected issues please let us know in the comments.
The map shows average annual expenditure on smoking.
Back in August, we created a smoking map covering the whole province by health region (identical to city/county/regional municipality in most cases). That map showed a concentration of smokers in rural and northern areas, and the GTA map shows something of the same pattern within our own region.
Rural/deep suburban regions spend much more on tobacco than the rest of the GTA, with the highest tobacco spending being around Kettleby. There is a pocket of very low tobacco spending in northern Brampton, interestingly.
Within Toronto, Lawrence Park, Hogg's Hollow, chunks of Forest Hill and the Bridle Path all have higher-than average tobacco spending, while the traditional low-income V seems to have lower rates. Looking more closely at neighbourhoods, there does seem to be a rough positive correlation between income and tobacco spending.
Here is an appeal made to readers before Christmas, 1909:
Updated Nov. 10 - see note below.
Maps:
I have identified almost 200 individual homes in Riverdale and the neighbourhood immediately north of the Danforth where the worst fears of the householder - wife, parent or sibling of a Canadian soldier overseas during the First World War - were realized a boy came to their front step with a dreaded telegram, instead of the man whose return they hoped for. For some, the news was final; for others, a long hospital vigil ended when a young man lost a painful struggle with the damage from shrapnel or gas.
The map gives an idea of the extent of cultural trauma which led to the Remembrance Day rituals, by looking at how the war scarred one neighbourhood. A large-scale disaster can sometimes seem incomprehensible; it is often only by looking at particular cases that we start to grasp a sense of what happened.
The war harrowed Riverdale on a mercilessly intimate scale:
For every actual death, there were many more families which lived with their dread, silently or otherwise. What it was like to live in the neighbourhood by the fall of 1918 is hard to imagine at this point; our only really good tool would be fiction.
The map was prepared from the excellent database at the Canadian Great War Project site. The search process was very cumbersome, and it wasn't possible to search for soldiers from First Ave., south of Gerrard between Logan and Broadview, or Strathcona Ave., off Pape south of the Danforth.
I have added several streets north of Riverdale’s traditional boundary at the Danforth.
Every marker links to up to three documents: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission page for the soldier, the Department of Veterans Affairs page, which often links to other resources such as press clippings, and images of the soldier's attestation papers, prepared when he enlisted. Not all markers have all three links. The address on attestation papers is not always the address of next of kin at death, which is what the map is based on.
If you live in Riverdale and the area a few blocks north of the Danforth (pictured at left), you may want to consider the following:
It’s rooted in personal things: our attitude to home, history and culture play a part.
A home pinpointed on the map may be where you now live. Whether you want to know this is for you to decide.
Thanks to commenter John McLean for pointing out two soldiers from Eastmount Ave., north of the Danforth, who belonged on the map – when I looked into it more closely, I ended up adding four from Eastmount and three from Muriel Ave., near Pape and Danforth.
I’d place Private Russell Devall (http://ow.ly/B7Ni) on the on the map if I had a street address – we know his parents lived on Muriel, but not exactly where. His attestation papers aren’t on line.
I've been getting around to this since spacing.ca's excellent post on Elmbank, the rural community that once existed on the Pearson airport site. After its expropriation in the 1930s, visible signs of the village (south of the present-day control tower ) vanished, though archaeologists removed a 622-grave cemetery from the airport grounds in the fall of 2000. (link, link, link, link (.pdf).)
The archaeologists reported:
Specific conditions and diseases, such as osteoporosis, arthritis, tuberculosis, periostitis, and various forms of cancer were observed on a number of adult remains. Some adults, and especially the remains of children, exhibited non-specific signs of chronic disease and/or nutritional stress that cannot be attributed to one specific disease or episode of disease. These findings of chronic disease in adults and children are not unusual in populations that pre-date modern Western medicine with antibiotic treatment and knowledge of basic hygiene, sanitation, and balanced nutrition.
Numerous instances of fractured bones, arthritis, and spinal column disorders, as well as the robust appearance of the skeletal muscle attachments in many males and females, all indicate a life of hard work for both sexes. This finding mirrors observations of other historic Ontario populations.
Just under half of the analyzable crania showed evidence of a pathology of the eye socket indicating malnutrition. The presence of this pathology decreased with the age of the individuals and it was seen more frequently among females than among males. No severe cases of this pathology were seen among the wealthy.
The observation of disease and traumatic injuries on skeletal remains provides insight into the overall health status and occupational hazards of the population. By recording the frequency of individuals manifesting certain disease markers, as well as fractures and dislocations, it is possible to reconstruct the everyday struggle endured by the nineteenth-century pioneers buried at Elmbank cemetery.
The overlay is an 1878 sheet which covers roughly the north half of modern Mississauga. It came from this project.
The file will open in Google Earth, Google Maps’ three-dimensional cousin, which can be downloaded here. The map overlay is contained in this .kmz file, which you can right-click to download.
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| PETER POWER/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO |
Our online mapping capabilities have improved in many ways over the last year and a half, and I sometimes look at maps created early in the project and think about redoing them in a more sophisticated way.
One example is the map series I created last August showing commuting patterns in different parts of the GTA, using electoral boundaries to show 48 areas. Three maps showed motorists, transit users and cyclists-and-pedestrians. The maps have been popular every time they've been linked to.
With more advanced tools, I can now create a much better version of these maps broken down into 194 areas, with pedestrian commuters and cyclists on distinct maps. The data comes from the 2006 census.
StatsCan's other categories - commuters who are motor vehicle passengers, motorcycle riders, commuters by taxi or 'other' - do not have their own maps.
We see distinct tiers, with the highest driving rates on the rural outskirts of the 905, lower (but still high) in the built-up suburbs around Toronto, lower in the 416 and much lower in the downtown core.
Income does have some relationship to the map - a cluster of five neighbourhoods roughly centred on the Rosedale Golf Club have driving rates over 60%, high by Toronto standards, despite being bisected by the Yonge St. subway. M3B, which contains part of the Bridle Path, has the highest driving rate and the second-lowest transit use rate in the 416.
The transit map is roughly the inverse of the driving map, with the exception of the downtown core. The subway lines are shown for reference. Almost all the high-transit-use postal codes are on a subway line, with two out of three of the exceptions (South Riverdale and Parkdale) served by major streetcar lines.
High transit use stops abruptly at the boundaries of the 416. The 905's highest postal codes for transit use, L5A and L4X, are in Mississauga within reach of Kipling station.
Cycling rates are high in the bottom of the inverted T of the old City of Toronto, more or less, minus downtown itself. In the east end, the escarpment south of the Danforth seems to have defeated some potential commuter cyclists. Leslieville/western Beaches seems to have less than half the proportion of cyclists as Roncesvalles, which is about the same distance from downtown - why? Let us know in the comments.
The pedestrian map is almost exactly the missing centre of the cyclist map. In M5G, bounded by Queen/University/College/Yonge, a majority walk to work.
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| CANADIAN PRESS |
Map: Average annual drug charges per 1,000 residents, 2004-2008
This week continues our occasional series of neighbourhood crime maps with a look at drug charges.
The most obvious thing about the map is the higher rates of drug charges more or less downtown, roughly in an area bounded by Queen/King, Bathurst, Bloor and Parliament, more or less. The missing piece of information is how many of these charges were laid against residents of any given neighbourhood, and how many against people from outside.
Looking more broadly at the city, we see the familiar check-mark shape extending diagonally down though the west end, through the downtown and up again through Scarborough. This appears on many other maps, including this one and this one.
The rate is averaged over five years because of significant year-to year fluctuation in many areas.
The map shows five years of data for all 140 neighbourhoods, as seen below:
I’ve been working at the Star as a Web editor since 2001.
In 2005, colleagues Brett Smith, Chris Carter and I started to explore the possibilities of the Google Maps API as a news tool for thestar.com:
We had one of the first homicide maps on a North American news Web site, in early 2005. Later, we started mapping home towns of Canadians killed in Afghanistan and marijuana grow houses busted in the city. We were the first in the city to link to live traffic camera images on an interactive map.
Our splash page for the last provincial election was built around a Google Map, which for the first time displayed polygons, or two-dimensional shapes.
For all that, we’ve barely scratched the possibilities of the medium, which brings us to Map of the Week. The concept is that the weekly maps will work as stand-alone features, not necessarily connected to a story or to content in the paper, though opportunities to link them would be exploited as they arise, as I expect they will.
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