Map of the Week: Car ownership

TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

Map: Cars as a percentage of households

These maps looks at cars as a percentage of households from the 2006 census.

The map shows a large area of low car ownership stretching from about Jane and Weston Road southeast along the Danforth to Victoria Park. The Yonge St. high-income corridor has higher rates:

This map of the 20 highest census tracts (of about 1,000) for car ownership is not all that surprising. Clusters in Newmarket, Markham and north Oakville account for most of them.

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However, this map of the 20 lowest census tracts wasn't exactly what I expected. One tract is in northeast Scarborough, at Morningside and Ellesmere. Another is at Jane and Weston Rd. Several cluster roughly along St. Clair from Scarlett Rd. to Old Weston Rd. Clearly this map has at least as much to do with income as anything else - not all of these areas have very good transit connections, though some do. Here we see the 1000m subway radius map superimposed on the car map. The neighbourhoods along the Bloor-Danforth line do have much lower car ownership, at least between Vic Park and the Humber, but this is less true of the YUS line, especially north of Lawrence.

A few tracts have household car ownership rates over 80% despite being within 1000 metres of a subway station: Rosedale, the part of Forest Hill west of Avenue Rd. and St. Clair, Lawrence Park, York Mills and the Kingsway. So the income-to-car-ownership relationship goes both ways.

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.

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?

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: Commuter cycling by census tract

RENÉ JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR

Link to the map

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In retrospect, I made a mistake in publishing the latest commuter map when I did, based on postal-area data, when better census-tract level data was about to become available.

In particular, the cyclist map needed another look, in the form of a census-tract-level presentation.

Based on having toiled up the Withrow Park hill many times, I was working on a theory that the escarpments in the west and east ends (north of Davenport and south of the Danforth) might be barriers to commuter cycling, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Nearly all Toronto's bike-commuter-heavy census tracts are

within 7 kilometres of Yonge and King, south of Bloor/Danforth;

within 6 kilometres of Yonge and King, north of Bloor/Danforth;

but exclude the central core itself, where as we saw earlier pedestrian commuters dominate.

Topography doesn't seem to have much to do with it.

Eight of the region's top 10 census tracts for commuter cyclists are in a single area of the west end (the other two are the southern fringe of Leslieville and the Islands). Six of these tracts actually form a solid block:

Here is a top 10 list:

5350002	Ward's and Algonquin Islands	29.10%
5350059	Harbord/Spadina/Bathurst/College	17.10%
5350047.01	Queen/Lansdowne/Sorauren/CPR	13.90%
5350055	Bloor/Dovercourt/Ossington/College	13.70%
5350058	Bathurst/Grace/Harbord/College	13%
5350001	Leslieville south of Queen	12.30%
5350056	Christie/Bloor/Ossington/College	11.90%
5350042	College/Dovercourt/Dundas/Grace	11.80%
5350041	Dundas/Grace/College/Bathurst	11.60%
5350044	Dundas/Dovercourt/Dufferin/CPR	11.50%

Outside the pre-1945 city, the only area with noticeable numbers of bike commuters is the former Downsview military base.

Map of the Week: How we commute, redux

PETER POWER/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

Our online mapping capabilities have improved in many ways over the last year and a half, and I sometimes look at maps created early in the project and think about redoing them in a more sophisticated way.

One example is the map series I created last August showing commuting patterns in different parts of the GTA, using electoral boundaries to show 48 areas. Three maps showed motorists, transit users and cyclists-and-pedestrians. The maps have been popular every time they've been linked to.

With more advanced tools, I can now create a much better version of these maps broken down into 194 areas, with pedestrian commuters and cyclists on distinct maps. The data comes from the 2006 census.

StatsCan's other categories - commuters who are motor vehicle passengers, motorcycle riders, commuters by taxi or 'other' - do not have their own maps.

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Map: Drivers

We see distinct tiers, with the highest driving rates on the rural outskirts of the 905, lower (but still high) in the built-up suburbs around Toronto, lower in the 416 and much lower in the downtown core.

Income does have some relationship to the map - a cluster of five neighbourhoods roughly centred on the Rosedale Golf Club have driving rates over 60%, high by Toronto standards, despite being bisected by the Yonge St. subway. M3B, which contains part of the Bridle Path, has the highest driving rate and the second-lowest transit use rate in the 416.

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Map: Transit users

The transit map is roughly the inverse of the driving map, with the exception of the downtown core. The subway lines are shown for reference. Almost all the high-transit-use postal codes are on a subway line, with two out of three of the exceptions (South Riverdale and Parkdale) served by major streetcar lines.

High transit use stops abruptly at the boundaries of the 416. The 905's highest postal codes for transit use, L5A and L4X, are in Mississauga within reach of Kipling station. 

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Map: Cyclists

Cycling rates are high in the bottom of the inverted T of the old City of Toronto, more or less, minus downtown itself. In the east end, the escarpment south of the Danforth seems to have defeated some potential commuter cyclists. Leslieville/western Beaches seems to have less than half the proportion of cyclists as Roncesvalles, which is about the same distance from downtown - why? Let us know in the comments.

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Map: Pedestrians

The pedestrian map is almost exactly the missing centre of the cyclist map. In M5G, bounded by Queen/University/College/Yonge, a majority walk to work.