Map(s) of the Week: How we commute

YVONNE BERG/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

One project with three maps this week, all about commuting in the GTA: what proportion of commuters are motorists, transit users or walk or bike to work in different parts of the region. Click on the image at left to start the series.

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Nerd box: I've been wondering for a while how to tap the rich mapping potential of the 2006 census.  The best local data (economic, social, cultural, educational and so forth) is organized by census tracts, but mapping data by individual tracts would be enormously labour-intensive, particularly in creating the polygons in the first place. Also, even if we went through the exercise of creating polygons of all the census tracts in the GTA, I doubt the map would load. 

Then it turned out that StatsCan had tabulated all the same data by electoral districts, which are much more manageable shapes, while still small enough to give a sense of local identity. As an added benefit, we had already mapped all 47 ridings in the GTA for the last provincial election, and the boundaries were ready to be reused. As a further added benefit, it gives us the chance to map data about, for want of a better word, the personality of each district during a federal election.

Once again, I've used Google's Charts API to create individual pie charts for the ridings. Creating these in Excel was fairly painless.

Comments

[Tim]

Love the transportation map, today. After reading all the articles about Listeria, I began wondering if it would possible to map the main meat processing plants in S. Ontario/Canada or North America. From what I understand, I don't think that there are that many. It would be interesting to show a circle demonstrating the extent of where their food goes, though I suspect this data may not be attainable.

Keep up the great work. I love it!
Tim

[ydzabelishensky]

Thanks for the great maps of farmland loss and commuting modes. Together, the maps show the huge challenge -- and opportunity! -- of stopping urban sprawl by making our cities and regions more pedestrian/bike/transit oriented.

Having said this, I would have loved to see a similar map of telecommuting, which can reduce driving despite the sprawl. Actually, two types of maps would be great:

(a) maps of percentages of people who telecommute by electoral district (map 1: one day/week; map 2: two days/week, etc. up to every working day)

(b) map of organizations and company head offices with policies that 1) permit or 2) promote telecommuting.

I'm not sure if the data exists and/or if it is mappable, but it's nice to dream :-)

[Mark Kuznicki]

Great transportation maps! I would love to embed them on the blog at Metronauts.ca and link to your work here. Is there a way we can do that? The work you do can be part of a great number of conversations if the maps are easily embeddable. Thanks!

[Richard Yun]

A few years ago a colleague posed the idea of having people write down the postal code of their primary work location on their income tax forms.

That way you would have the individual's home postal code and main work postal code (not necessarily the head office of the company). With this information you could map where people needed to travel from and to. This could then be used by pubic transit, transportation and other planners to determine bus routes, road upgrades, where to put more high density housing, etc. I recognize that on an individual basis the information can change easily but overall, it could provide a good picture.

[Eve]

Wow, this map really highlights just how much an extra token is driving people (pardon the pun) to use their cars rather than transit. The percentage of motorists jumps from under 50% to above 90% north of steeles! I recognize that there is a lot of error from averaging over such large areas, but it definitely shows that Vaughan needs to push the TTC to allow those above Steeles to travel into the city without having to pay twice as much.

[peter robertson]

FYI Links to the previous maps don't work