-30-

This project has ended. I am leaving the Star to pursue another opportunity, and my last day is today.

Thank you for your interest, and your patience as I slowly figured out the technology.

The blog itself had a total of about 1.4 million lifetime page-views, and you left just under 1,000 comments.

I would like to thank Star editors Neil Sanderson and Marissa Nelson, whose early support was essential to the project; Sanjay Singh, whose advice revolutionized the way I create maps; my wife Catharine Tunnacliffe, who was a source of enthusiasm and fresh ideas when my own waned; and the Information and Privacy Commissioner's investigators, whose careful and fair-minded handing of disputes was very helpful - several maps would not have been published without their help. I filed a total of 53 access-to-information requests for Map of the Week.

The access-to-information process can sometimes be antagonistic, but much more typically I found myself dealing with public servants who were interested and enthusiastic about the project, and often had not seen their own agency's data mapped.

I can be contacted through patrickcain.ca.

Here are some highlights of the last few years:

	Bedbugs Reports of bedbugs form a surprising pattern across the map of Toronto. Link to the map
	Organ donor registry A look at Ontario’s organ donor registry shows that Toronto has the lowest rates in the province. Why? Link to the map
	Toronto Centre by-election A detailed, fully interactive poll-by-poll look at the Toronto Centre by-election shows the voting patterns of this unique riding. Link to the maps
	Childbirth A map series looks at aspects of childbirth in the GTA, from homebirth to maternal age. Link to the maps
	Same-sex marriage What neighbourhoods do same-sex married couples come from? Two maps show how patterns differ between men and women. Link to the maps
	The Riverdale First World War project About 200 residents of Riverdale were killed in the First World War. This home-by-home map hints at the scale of a neighbourhood’s trauma. Link to the map
	Infectious disease Reports of infectious disease, broken down by the patient’s postal code, show TB, hepatitis and several STDs. Link to the maps
	Dog ownership Over 20 maps look at everything to do with dog ownership in Toronto, broken down by postal code. Link to the maps
	Impaired driving Where are Ontario’s worst postal codes for impaired driving charges? These maps will show you. Includes age graphs of drunk drivers. Link to the maps
	Real estate A growing and popular series of maps tracks trends in the GTA’s real estate market. Link to the maps
	Street racing A map of drivers charged with street racing shows very different patterns from the drunk driving map. Why so many in Caledon? Link to the maps
	Passports A map of rates of passport holding shows some revealing patterns. Link to the map
	Historic map overlays 1878 maps overlay the modern streetscape of Toronto, and the present Pearson airport site. Link to the maps
	Gun ownership A map series looks at gun ownership in the GTA by postal code. Link to the maps
	Neighbourhood crime maps A growing series of crime maps based on City of Toronto-defined neighbourhoods. Link to the maps
	Neighbourhood project We asked readers to define their Toronto neighbourhoods. This was the result. Link to the maps
	Smoking Maps show smoking patterns regionally in Ontario and in the GTA by census tract. Link to the maps
	Military recruiting Which neighbourhoods do the GTA’s military recruits come from? Maps break it down by postal code. Link to the maps
	Traffic safety Maps using a year’s worth of pedestrian and cyclist accidents show where Toronto’s danger spots are. Link to the maps
	Education Maps look at admission to the six campuses of the GTA’s three universities, and at where Toronto high school dropouts live. Link to the maps
	Agriculture Where farms have been lost in Ontario over the past ten years. Link to the map

Nuclear explosions, 1945-1998

Hat tip to the Map Room: a global map video of 2,053 nuclear explosions from the American desert tests in 1945 ('I am become death, the destroyer of worlds') to 1998. It is supposed to run at a rate of one second a month, but the 1945 segment is slowed down for some reason. As Jonathan Crowe points out, the pace picks up from the late '50s or so.

Map of the Week: Car ownership

TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

Map: Cars as a percentage of households

These maps looks at cars as a percentage of households from the 2006 census.

The map shows a large area of low car ownership stretching from about Jane and Weston Road southeast along the Danforth to Victoria Park. The Yonge St. high-income corridor has higher rates:

This map of the 20 highest census tracts (of about 1,000) for car ownership is not all that surprising. Clusters in Newmarket, Markham and north Oakville account for most of them.

---

However, this map of the 20 lowest census tracts wasn't exactly what I expected. One tract is in northeast Scarborough, at Morningside and Ellesmere. Another is at Jane and Weston Rd. Several cluster roughly along St. Clair from Scarlett Rd. to Old Weston Rd. Clearly this map has at least as much to do with income as anything else - not all of these areas have very good transit connections, though some do. Here we see the 1000m subway radius map superimposed on the car map. The neighbourhoods along the Bloor-Danforth line do have much lower car ownership, at least between Vic Park and the Humber, but this is less true of the YUS line, especially north of Lawrence.

A few tracts have household car ownership rates over 80% despite being within 1000 metres of a subway station: Rosedale, the part of Forest Hill west of Avenue Rd. and St. Clair, Lawrence Park, York Mills and the Kingsway. So the income-to-car-ownership relationship goes both ways.

The Arctic sun

I've gone back to the on again-off again project of learning the Google Earth touring and movie functions properly. Here we simulate what sun and sky look like at the summer and winter solstices in Igloolik, Nunavut. Each video represents a 24-hour period:

---

---

The eventual point of this is to produce a chronological Google Earth movie with the movement of sun correct for the time of day.

Map of the Week: Transit spending

CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

Map: Average annual household expenditure on transit

This week's map looks at household transit spending on transit in the GTA by census tract.

The basic pattern is familiar: transit spending is high in areas built at a streetcar scale and lower downtown - which was built to a pedestrian scale - and in the post-1945 suburbs, built to a car scale.

Transit spending is higher in the west end north of Bloor and up as far as Eglinton than along the Danforth - it's not clear why.

There are pockets of (relatively) high transit use in parts of Mississauga and Brampton, and also around York University, on both sides of Steeles.

---

Map: Average annual household expenditure on transit with 1000m overlay

Transit spending has a less clear relationship to the subway lines than I would have expected. Here is a mashup of the radius map from last week (1000m radius around subway stations) with transit spending:

After a certain distance from the core, the existence of a subway line seems to have little effect on transit use. The upper horns of the YUS system, the Bloor/Danforth line west of the Humber and east of Vic Park (and the LRT) and the Sheppard line have no effect on the underlying map. Here is another zoom:

Click on the map links for fully interactive versions.

Google's transit planner

Google's transit planner, which would be useful if it worked consistently, doesn't seem ready for prime time.

Here we have a suggested transit route from the foot of Dufferin St. to the Logan/Danforth area. The reader is told to:
- take a GO train to Union from the Exhibition station
- take another GO train to the Richmond Hill GO station
- take a York Region bus to the Unionville GO station
- take the 25D TTC Don Mills bus south from Unionville all the way to Pape station.

Total estimated time: 2 hours, 48 minutes. I had a theory that it was ignoring the TTC, but then why does it use the 25D bus?

The walking route is much more what you would expect, and comes in at about two hours.

G20 map for mobile devices

Have a look at our G20 map for mobile devices, tentatively out of beta, produced with a lot of trial and error over the last few days. We will be updating it as events warrant. Please leave suggestions and comments - it's the first map I've tried to get to work on a mobile device (we used an iPhone for testing).

The KML file is usable in Google Earth.

Map of the Week: Distance from the subway, a radius map from downtown, and why drunk drivers live far from the subway

Map: 1000-metre radius from TTC stations

This week's maps come out of discussions I've had with friends who are moving or are thinking about moving. At least in much of the 416, one thing to think about with a house is how close (or far) it is from the subway.

Earlier in the week, I asked readers about the longest walk to the subway that they would tolerate. The average response was about 15 minutes. With an average adult walking pace of about 80 metres a minute, that works out to 1200 metres.

However, it isn't just a matter of drawing a 1200m circle around a subway station - walking tolerance depends on age, physical ability, weather, visual pleasure in the street (or lack of it), length of the transit leg of the commute and other factors. Also, a crow-flies distance may or may not reflect actual walking distance.

For what it's worth, I ended up with 1000m radius circles around each subway and LRT station.

One problem I encountered drawing this map is that once five or six circles start to overlap, the underlying map is blotted out. I've dialled down the opacity so that even downtown (Bay and Dundas, for example) the street grid is at least dimly visible. Stations further from downtown become subtler, but a black border should make them easier to spot.

A radius map from King and Yonge The second map looks at distance from downtown, measured in 1000m circles from King and Yonge. The map looks a bit sinister, but has nothing to do with the G20 (or an electric stovetop). Again, the exercise has its limitations: downtown isn't equally accessible from every equivalent distance. Hopefully it is useful as a rough tool.

Map: 1000-metre radius from TTC stations overlaid on an impaired driving map The third map mashes up some data we already have, overlaying the 1000m subway radius map with 2007 licence suspensions for impaired driving. While there are postal codes with low drunk driving rates not all that close to the subway, there are almost no postal codes with the highest drunk driving rates close to the subway.

Kites, redux

A reader passes on a link to the Facebook group for Go Fly A Kite - G20 Edition, set up by people who plan to make a point of flying kites during the G20.

A G20 map

Map: A world of security in the heart of the city

I produced a map yesterday intended as an online equivalent of a graphic designed for the paper, showing various features of the security arrangements for the G20 (including a rumoured detention facility in Leslieville).