Map of the Week: Parking tickets

PETER POWER/TORONTO STAR

This week's map shows all Toronto addresses where more than 1,000 parking tickets were written in 2008.

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The city's two top addresses for parking tickets last year were Sunnybrook, with 8,875 tickets, or 24 a day, and the Sherway Gardens mall in Etobicoke, (across the street from the Trillium Health Centre) with 7,095 written, or nearly 20 a day. Here are the top 10:

1) 2075 BAYVIEW AVE              8875
Sunnybrook
2) 25 THE WEST MALL               7095
Sherway Gardens mall, across the street from the Trillium Health Centre
3) 1750 FINCH AVE E                5670
Seneca College - Newnham Campus
4) 20 EDWARD ST                  4440
World's Biggest Book Store
5) 60 MURRAY ST                  3041
Near Mount Sinai and Princess Margaret
6) 25 ST MARY ST                2780
Near Yonge and Charles
7) 2401 YONGE ST                2571
Near Yonge and Eglinton
8) 1265 MILITARY TR             2497
U of T Scarborough campus
9) 110 ELM ST                      2307
Hospital for Sick Children
10) 3030 BIRCHMOUNT RD    2269
Scarborough Hospital - Grace Division

The city as a whole had about 2.8 million parking tickets written last year.

Hospitals seem to attract parking violators, or parking enforcement, depending on your point of view. This also applies to hospitals outside the downtown core - Sunnybrook, Toronto Western, the East General and especially St. Joseph's (see below) all have icons. The Distillery District also seems to get a lot of attention, though whether the area has an epidemic of illegal parking or is just a short walk from 51 Division is an open question.

The map below is live - use all the available features, and click on an icon for more information.

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Click to open a map in a new window centred on:

Bloor between Avenue and Yonge
Yonge and Eglinton
Dundas between Yonge and University
Adelaide between Yonge and University
Distillery District
St. Joseph's Hospital

Nerd box:

The map is our first attempt to embed a working map in the blog itself, instead of a separate XML file. Please leave a comment if it doesn't work with your browser or seems unusually slow to load. For users of earlier versions of IE, I'd be curious to know if it it loads faster - this is the hope on this end. The KML used in this map is a recognizable cousin of the XML we've used up until this point, but there are differences. One of the more complicating ones is that our files have used a lat/long convention, while as far as I've been able to tell so far KML works in long/lat. So a lot of our existing resources can't be as easily converted as I had hoped. From experience, the solution will end up being something cludgy involving Word, Excel and Notepad, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Information obtained from the City of Toronto under access-to-information legislation.

Map of the Week: Grow operations

TARA WALTON/TORONTO STAR

Map: 2008 marijuana grow operations

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Marijuana grow op busts in Toronto were down in 2008, at 145 compared to 256 in 2007 and 254 in 2006.

However, the pattern is similar (see the 2007 map or 2006 map for comparison), with grow operations concentrated in parts of the city where low income meets low density.

We see the northern tips of the V or check-mark shape visible on other maps (for example the homicide map or map of low household incomes)

As before, grow ops are most strongly concentrated in northern Scarborough and the Hwy. 400 corridor north of Hwy. 401, which gives 31 Division and 42 Division the city's highest rates.

Map of the Week: Military recruiting

REUTERS

Map: Regular force enrolments

Map: Reserve force enrolments

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This week, we look at military recruiting in the GTA, using 2007 enlistment data.

Reporter Allan Woods looked at recruiting a few days ago:

The military has tempered force projections and launched massive recruiting drives but it still can't increase its numbers enough to meet repeated government pledges, a new report finds.

While the rest of the country trembles in fear of layoffs and unemployment numbers soar, the demand for soldiers, technicians and other specialists in the Canadian Forces outpaced actual growth for yet another year, the Department of National Defence said in an annual report to Parliament.

The first thing to say is that recruiting rates in central Ontario are very low by the standards of some other parts of the country. A0A in eastern Newfoundland, for example, had 55 residents join the regular force in 2007, for a rate per 1,000 of 1.15. B1H, in New Waterford, N.S., had a rate of 1.7 per 1,000, and B1P, in Sydney, had a rate of 0.93 per 1,000.

The GTA's highest rate, on the other hand, was in M3K (0.54 per 1,000), which is perhaps a special case, since it contains the former Downsview military base. (Most were reservists transferring to the regular force).

Other than Downsview, the area's highest rate was in Aldershot (L7T) with eight regular force recruits (0.49 per 1,000).

I will admit that the regular force enrolment map did not look at all like what I expected.

Leaving Durham aside for a moment, regular force enrolments in the GTA are concentrated in high-income neighbourhoods more than anywhere else.

In the 416, after Downsview, the highest postal codes are:

M5N, northwest of Avenue Rd. and Eglinton

M8W, in southwest Etobicoke

M4P, north of Eglinton and Mount Pleasant

M4S, south of Eglinton and Mount Pleasant

M8X, the Kingsway

M6P, High Park and the Junction

In the 905, excluding Durham, the highest postal codes are:

L7T, Aldershot

L7J, Acton

L7N, south-central Burlington

L6K, south Oakville

L3Y, Newmarket

By regional standards, regular force recruiting is stronger in Durham, with rates over 0.2 in Whitby, Oshawa and rural areas to the north.

Toronto recruits seem strongly concentrated in the combat arms. M5N's six recruits, for example, were three combat engineers, an infantryman, a supply technician and a logistics officer. A0A's recruits, on the other hand, included 11 truck drivers, four cooks, eight vehicle technicians, six combat engineers and two infantrymen.

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TORONTO STAR FILE

It's harder to see a pattern in the reserve enlistment map, and it may be that the numbers are too small.

Leaving aside low-population L0H and L1Y with their one recruit each, reserve recruiting is highest in:

M5S, University of Toronto downtown campus

L9N, Holland Landing

L0B, Scugog

L7T, Aldershot

L3Y, Newmarket

L7S, central Burlington

M3C, Flemingdon Park

L7L, Burlington along Appleby Line

L4B, Richmond Hill

M4E, the Beaches

L1T, north Ajax

L5H, lakeshore Mississauga west of Mississauga Rd.

Passing the quarter-million mark

As far as I can tell, someone looking at an impaired driving map around 1 p.m. today was this blog's 250,000th reader. We've had an average of about 1,000 readers a day since we launched last June.

This week's map will appear in a few days.

Map of the Week

will appear next week.