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.