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:

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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.

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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).

Southern Ontario bear incidents

BILL SANDFORD/FOR THE TORONTO STAR

Map: Southern Ontario bear incidents

There have been a number of encounters with black bears in southern Ontario this spring. One almost ended tragically for a Severn man, who was lucky to survive being mauled by a black bear in May. Two other people in the Orillia area were recently chased by bears.

On the other side of the coin, two bears have been shot dead by police, one in London, the other north of Peterborough.

Other encounters have been more benign: a bear toured downtown Cannington for a while last weekend, pausing to eat the contents of a grease bucket behind a sports bar, before being gently nudged out of town by police cruisers.

The map shows about a dozen incidents.

G20: The kite exclusion map

KEITH BEATY/ TORONTO STAR

Map: the G8/G20 air exclusion zones

The federal government released a document today outlining airspace restrictions during the summits. The two affected zones are circles with a 15 nautical mile* radius centred on a point east of Huntsville and another around Dundas West and Royal York Road. The Toronto area covers more or less all of the city, and quite a lot of the 905.

The regulations forbid most forms of aviation, broadly defined, including parasailing and kite-flying. The small print is here (pdf).

The reasoning behind the kite rule isn't obvious - my own kite-flying has posed a rather limited risk to national security (or so it seemed at the time). It also isn't clear whether there's any serious will to enforce this, but I guess we may find out.

* or 17.2 statute miles, or 27.6 kilometers

Maps elsewhere

A roundup of maps elsewhere:

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A colleague passes on this remarkable visualization of crime rates in SanFrancisco seen as contours. At left is arrests for narcotics.

I don't know why I haven't come across these state-by-state maps of popular baby names in the U.S. before. Ethan is an interesting case. The U.S. map (left) shows Ethans spreading north up the Mississippi into the Midwest and also west into the prairie states. Ethans top Canadian lists (according to this roundup) in all Western provinces and Ontario, but the name falls off further east. American Avas cluster in the Upper Midwest and Pennsylvania. I thought this might be a German/Scandinavian thing, (as in fact it may be) but Canadian Avas lead in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. In Quebec, Avas don't make a top 25 list.

A question for readers

For an upcoming project: If you use the subway regularly, how many minutes walking time to the subway would be the outer limit of being acceptable?

Renovating the Afghan casualty map (2)

I did some more work on our Afghan casualty map this week. A screenshot can be seen at left.

Rethinking the map turned into a large job, but was overdue: first, better technology is available now than when we started the project; second, the template of the old map was eventually overwhelmed by the number of casualties, sadly. (There is a longer explanation in last week's post.)

The main changes are:

- We now map communities, not individuals. Communities which have lost more than one person in Afghanistan have a numbered icon with a popup window with the names, pictures and other details of everybody from that place.

- To help deal with the crowds of points in the national map, we now offer regional maps, all of which draw from the same KML data file: Newfoundland, the Maritimes, Southern Quebec, Southern Ontario, Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Alberta and Southwest B.C.

- The new maps are much larger.

The Guardian Data Blog

The UK only recently got a North American-style access to information system (the new New Yorker has a quick summary of this) and journalists and others have been taking advantage of the sudden opening of what was until recently a very closed official culture.

The British parliamentary expense scandal, in which taxpayers found they had unknowingly picked up the tab for, among other things, an MP using a moat-cleaning service, was one legacy of this. Another is the wonderful Guardian Data Blog, which has earned its place in my RSS reader many times over.

A post today on gun ownership, which lists absolute numbers of registered firearms by police jurisdiction (Hampshire, Merseyside, West Yorkshire and so forth) was a good example of what we try to to with online interactive widgets of one kind or another - tied to a news event, created quickly, locally customizable and so forth.

It's also a good example of why I often find the blog frustrating. Without knowing the populations of the areas involved and therefore a rate, we really don't learn anything about the pattern of gun ownership in England and Wales. Dorset has about half the number of firearms that London does, which offhand I would assume means Dorset, with a much lower population, has a much higher rate, which would make sense, being a rural area. But why not add a population column and show the reader the math?

The other thing it needs is a map - enough said.

Update: The table now has rates by 10,000.

G20: Mapping the security cameras

The Toronto police announced yesterday that they have finished installing dozens of security cameras for the G20 summit. The number was originally reported as 77, but the final list has 67 locations.

Two locations are described as 'Bremner and Lakeshore,' an intersection that doesn't exist as such. Openfile.ca journalist Bethany Horne also picked up on this. Both of us ended up with a best guess as to the intended location.

In any case, our map is here.

Maps elsewhere: Peel's biking/walking map

Ken Chiu at Peel Region draws our attention to the trail and bike lane map at walkandrollpeel.ca.

Chiu explains:

The (Peel) municipalities provided the map data - the GIS and web folks collaborated with the urban planners. What you have here are all known trails, bike lanes, and paths in Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon. And similar to using Google Maps, the user interface is the same regardless of which municipality you search an address for. This is not like most cycling maps (with the exception of Google’s upcoming efforts) where if you do a search in another city, it’s a totally different user interface, or the results are different.

You can enter an address, and out comes all the trails, bike lanes in the area. You can also select some of the named-trails (i.e. Waterfront Trail, Caledon Trailway, etc.) and the maps will show you where the trail is. Hover your mouse over the trail lines, and you’ll receive info about the trail. Hover your mouse over the trail-types in the legend and a description of that that trail-type is displayed.

There are advance features in the Advance section where you can plot/draw your route, and it will calculate your distance. There’s also a calculator to estimate how long it might take to cycle that route you drew.

Peel's planners are looking for feedback - feel free to leave some here.