Map of the Week: Bedbug reports

Map: 2009 bedbug reports

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This week's map looks at bedbug problems reported to Toronto's public health department as a rate per 1,000 households by postal code.

The map shows a clear pattern, with bedbugs concentrated in a cluster of neighbourhoods in the east downtown, and then stretching into the east end as far as southwestern Scarborough. Parkdale also has high rates.

Shoreline Etobicoke and the Jane/Finch-Black Creek areas are also afflicted, at a lower level. The Annex, the Junction/High Park and Cedarvale also pop out on the map as one-offs.

The data was released by the City of Toronto in response to an access-to-information request.

Map of the Week: Military recruiting, redux, with video

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

This is Part 2 of the map I produced back in February showing regular force enlistment rates by postal code in Ontario.

We have the data for the whole country, along with a complete set of .kml boundaries, but for various reasons (the main one being that even the .kmz file is still too large to display) I can't produce a national map in our usual method.Yet.

So today we have a national map of regular force recruiting rates presented in Google Earth video, based on 2007 data.

The map shows some clear patterns - many people join the regular force from Atlantic Canada (which for anybody who has spent time with soldiers will not be much of a revelation), especially from the greater area around Halifax and the St. John Valley in New Brunswick. Fewer join from PEI, Newfoundland, Cape Breton and the north shore of New Brunswick. I expected higher rates in Cape Breton and Newfoundland.

There was some data missing in the Fredericton area, hence the visible hole in the map.

Quebec has lower rates, with the very visible exception of Quebec City and the area to the north, through and past Valcartier.

Ontario has a similar pattern - low enlistment rates, except for an area of the Upper Ottawa Valley stretching north from Petawawa. Trenton, Kingston, Barrie and Meaford are also pockets of high enlistment.

The West has very low enlistment rates, except for three pockets: Brandon, a large area around Cold Lake, and Victoria and the south shore of Vancouver Island.

As some readers will have already guessed, what all these areas have in common is a visible normal military presence, something that is otherwise unusual in Canada. (Edmonton, which is an oddity as a large city with a major regular army presence, has fairly low enlistment rates).

I'm still figuring out how to present Google Earth video, so be nice. I know the audio quality could be better.

Mouseover the image below to start:

Map of the Week: Passports

TORONTO STAR

Link to the map

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This week's map is the first of two looking at the percentage of passport-holders by neighbourhood, using postal codes as a proxy for neighbourhood.

So what does a passport map represent?

It seems to be a map of who has the resources for international travel, maybe or maybe not including the United States. (Windsor and Sarnia have fairly low rates of passport-holding, although the areas of New Brunswick along the U.S. border are high.)

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Here are some screenshots of parts of the map. First, Toronto. High passport rates are seen along the Yonge St. corridor, in the west end, and along the northern tier of Scarborough. Low rates are found in the familiar check-mark shape of the low-income map of Toronto - this is recognizably an income map. The interactive version is worth a detailed look.

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Next, Hamilton and Brantford. Inner-city Hamilton has lower rates than the suburbs, with rates falling the closer you get to the harbour. Brantford is an island of low rates.

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Next, for want of a better term, the near north. The Hwy. 60/400 corridor shows higher rates than the rest of the region, with Sudbury showing much higher rates than North Bay. Petawawa pops out as having higher rates than the rest of the Upper Ottawa Valley.

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Ottawa shows a clear progression from urban to suburban to rural, with the suburbs showing high rates, and the inner city more mixed.

I've been trying to figure out what to do with the increasingly stale population FSA population figures from the 2006 census. Areas where there has been serious population growth, like the downtown condo districts, show obviously wrong results when data a few months old is divided by the 2006 population. For this map I have excluded some of these, as well as any FSA with a population below 2,000. I'm not sure it's a good solution, but it's the best I've been able to come up with for now.

Bike maps, redux

Hat tip, once again, to BlogTO: ridethecity.com offers a bike route planner based on OpenStreetMap, better (as far as I can tell) than what Google is offering cyclists in the United States.

It came out of some road-testing pretty well just now - I like the fact that they include off-road bike paths like the Don Valley bike trail.

My only quibble, and it's a small one, is that all the downhill routes I tested were shown as having an elevation gain; presumably they mean an elevation change.

Derek Flack at BlogTO writes:

Case in point: I'm not convinced that the above suggestion of using Davenport to get from Christie and Dupont to Bloor and Bedford is optimal. From both a safety and speed standpoint, I tend to think it makes more sense to cross through the Annex to U of T using Barton and other side streets. Not only is such a route less trafficked, but it involves less elevation gain, a factor Anderson says Ride the City tries to take into account when recommending routes.

A route planner favouring residential back streets would be useful. I used to have a similar route to the one described (Christie and Dupont to downtown) and also ended up weebling though Seaton Village.

Designing a really useful bike route planner is a lot harder than making one for drivers or pedestrians, since cyclists' preferences vary so much. Some people ride on Lakeshore (which I tried once for a block and found terrifying) and others will ride only on empty streets on nice days.

I don't know much about the back-end programming of this kind of thing, or whether this would be horrendously difficult, but it would be useful to have an option that favoured local streets while respecting one-way rules, while also crossing main streets at lights or pedestrian crossings, where possible.

Bike directions in Google

Google now offers directions for cyclists, but only in the United States.

We may not be missing anything for the time being, though - when Google says the feature is in beta, they really mean it.

There's more at BoingBoing's discussion thread.

(h/t to the Map Room.)

Map of the Week: The adoption disclosure registry

Map: Adoptees
Map: Birth parents

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This week's maps look at Ontario's adoption disclosure registry, mapping birth parents and adoptees by postal code, as a rate per 1,000 of population.

There are over twice as many adoptees (28,300) on the registry as birth parents (12,990):

About 86% of the people on both lists are still Ontario residents.

Some of our maps show an immediate, obvious pattern; these really don't, except that both are more small-town and northern than not.

Birth parents cluster in the mining belt of northeastern Ontario (North Bay, Eliot Lake, Timmins and Kirkland Lake all have clusters). In the south, inner-city Hamilton, the St. Catharines-Thorold-Niagara Falls area, London, Brantford, Sarnia, Peterborough and Oshawa have clusters; Ottawa has a cluster centred in Vanier and Westboro. Toronto doesn't really pop out on the map at all.

The adoptees are more scattered, though there are clusters in Sudbury, North Bay, Kirkland Lake and Timmins. In the south, the same St. Catharines-Thorold-Niagara Falls area pops out, as does K-W, Sarnia, Peterborough, Belleville, Kingston and Ottawa.Once again, Toronto has no visible cluster.

The data was released by the Ministry of Community and Social Services in response to an access-to-information request.

A roundup of maps elsewhere

1) Michael Holloway at bikingtoronto.com links to a feature at sportdistancecalculator.com which calculates and charts altitude on bike routes. Here we see a route with red for uphill, blue for flat and green for downhill:

Next, we have all the data:

It also works for off-road paths.

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2) Next from Steve Munro and blogto: nextbus.com now covers some TTC routes - I only see the Queen's Quay/Spadina streetcars, but several others, including the King car, are promised.The data for this comes from GPS units on buses and streetcars reporting their positions. The main use seems to be for mobile devices, but there is a Google Map-based app as well.

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3) Just south of Withrow Park, the map shows a Riverdale neighbourhood attraction. Make of it what you will.

Map of the Week: The Toronto Centre byelection

TORONTO STAR STAFF

Map: Conservatives
Map: NDP
Map: Liberals
Map: Turnout

This week's maps are a detailed poll-by-poll look at the February 4 byelection in Toronto Centre.

(On the back of an envelope: the byelection was called when George Smitherman resigned from the Legislature to run for mayor. Former Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray won for the Liberals with 47%, fending off a strong challenge from New Democrat Cathy Crowe's 33%. Tory Pamela Taylor polled 15%. The riding is historically Liberal, federally and provincially.)

Our election-night story is here; the results are here.

Most discussions of Toronto Centre mention the riding's sharp contrasts - the leafy streets of Rosedale, the hardscrabble poverty of Moss Park, the exuberance of Church and Wellesley. It is sometimes said to contain the richest and poorest postal codes in the city, which is close to true (richest and fourth-poorest).

So it's not at all surprising that the party maps show clear patterns - Toronto Centre can be summed up as Tories at the top, New Democrats at the bottom, and Liberals all over the place.

First, the Tories (map). Conservative voters in the riding cluster in Rosedale, Moore Park and the Yorkville condos, and become very scarce a few blocks south of Bloor. A condo in the Bay St. canyon at Charles St. went Tory, but that's about it.

Next, for contrast, the NDP (map), who have an almost completely inverted map. New Democrats are strong in Cabbagetown, Ryerson, Victoria College, Moss Park, Corktown and especially in the St. Lawrence co-ops, where several polls showed strong NDP majorities, some above 70%. North of the Rosedale Valley ravine, the party has almost no presence.

The Liberals (map) have a strong presence in all parts of the riding, crossing socioeconomic boundaries, which seems to be the basis of their secure long-term lock on it.

Turnout (map), at 26%, was not exactly a civics-class ideal. Cabbagetown had a higher turnout rate, as did the St. Lawrence complex and the area north of Bloor. South of Bloor, high-turnout polls show strong results for the NDP.

Just for fun, I used Google Earth to split the polls to make Toronto Centre two ridings, divided by Bloor Street. This kind of exercise has its limitations: if they really were two ridings, other factors would also be different, like the personalities of the candidates and the resources parties would be willing to put into the election. With that in mind, here are the graphs:

North of Bloor

South of Bloor

All polls in all four versions of the map have an individual pie graph, as seen below:

The blank spaces on the map are polls which exist geographically but had no voters.