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.

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.)

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: 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.

Map of the Week: Bike accidents

(July 11: The pedestrian and cycling accident maps worked fine on their own as embedded maps, but something about displaying them both on the same page made many browsers very unstable. They’re now linked below.)

Map: Bicycle accidents, 2008

This week, we map 1,068 bicycle accidents reported to Toronto police in 2008. The data came to us from the Toronto transportation department, which analyzes accident reports they receive from the police.

Bike accidents seem to cluster in the area west of downtown, especially on College between Spadina and maybe Dufferin, and Queen between Spadina and Ossington. Dundas, King and Bloor have fewer, though Bloor between Avenue and Bathurst has more. To the east, the Bloor cluster ends abruptly at Jarvis.

(The equivalent part of the east end, which is similar in urban design, has far fewer bike accidents, though accidents do cluster on the Danforth between Pape and Broadview.)

Bay between College and Bloor also seems to have a cluster, as do major streets in the downtown area south of Dundas and north of Adelaide or so.

Time didn’t allow an overlay showing bike lanes. (Maps can be found here and here) Informally, though, accidents seem to cluster where bike lanes aren’t, and vice versa. Exceptions seem to be the College bike lane and a stretch of the Dundas St. E. bike lane west of Pape, where there is nearly one accident per block.

110 intersections had more than one accident (the great majority with two). Here are the top nine:

7     Bay and Dundas
7     College and Crawford
5     Queen and Broadview
5     Yonge and Dundas
4     Bloor and Bathurst
4     Bloor and Keele
4     Spadina and Dundas
4     Islington and the Queensway
4     King and John

Nerd box:

The large number of points created a challenge. Our normal method of loading them into an XML file created a map which was slow to load and reload at a different zoom level, and also slow to manipulate, even in Firefox. In IE it was worse.

Our alternative, loading a KML file into Google MyMaps, failed when it refused to keep loading somewhere in the mid-hundreds. MyMaps has limits, but it’s sometimes hard to see what they are other than by trial and error.

We ended up with Geocommons, the free service that the Vancouver Sun used for its parking ticket map.

In IE, it takes anywhere from 9 to 17 seconds to load, but as far as I can tell stays loaded once that has happened. The main difference, as far as I can tell, is that it uses Flash.

In any case, the look and feel of the map is different from what you may be used to seeing – let us know what you think in the comments.

The full-sized map can be seen here.

Next week, we will look at pedestrian accidents.