Map of the week: Where the campers are

This week's map (link) is much simpler than last week's, and to a certain extent inspired by the weekend's heat wave: the percentage of the population in the GTA that received a provincial park camping permit last year, by postal area.

Durham Region is strongly represented.

Pickering, Ajax, Whitby and especially Oshawa are full of campers, it turns out, as is the Yonge St. corridor between Richmond Hill and Newmarket. There are also outdoorsy neighbourhoods downtown, where the Ontario park system is popular in High Park, the Beaches, the U of T area and the Islands.

The GTA's most enthusiastic campers can be found in M8X, in the Bloor St. W. and the Humber area of the former city of Etobicoke, where 4.4% of the population was issued a park permit last year.

The Ministry of Natural Resources issued almost 271,000 park permits last year, of which about 74,000 went to GTA residents. About 14,000 park users came from Quebec, and 4,500 from Manitoba. Over 16,000 came from the U.S., the largest groups from New York and Michigan.

Nerd box

This week, we’re displaying most of the suburban (but not rural) communities in the GTA. There are a total of 177 postal areas displayed, with just over 2,000 individual points. With this big a map, we’re pushing the limits of how many polygons GoogleMaps can display. (The issue isn’t the number of polygons so much as the points it takes to display them, which is why the maps are roughly drawn.)

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Comments

[Anita Warburton]

I havn't car-camped in a provincial park since I was a kid. I mostly hike around T.O.'s different park systems. I notice alot of poeple make use of metro parks on the weekends to have large scale familly and organized picnics which require permits. It would be interesting to make a postal code map of T.O. for these permit holders. I guarentee the opposite results!