Map of the Week: Driver testing

COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR

A story by reporter Daniel Dale in Sunday's paper looked at the wildly varying failure rates at driver test centres:

Ontario drivers who take their road tests in Brampton fail at nearly five times the rate of drivers in Sault Ste. Marie.

Drivers who test in Oakville fail at twice the rate of drivers in Kingston. Drivers who test in north Toronto fail at twice the rate of drivers in Sarnia. Even within the GTA, drivers who test at some locations fail significantly more often than drivers at others.

The rumours that have circulated for years among the province's driver's ed students are correct: there is indeed such a thing as a relatively easy or relatively difficult place to take a road test, government figures obtained via a freedom of information request confirm.

Dale's data (link (.pdf)) lends itself well to online mapping. Here is a map of Ontario's 55 driver testing centres, ranked in order by failure rate.

Map of the Week: Impaired driving in the GTA

TORONTO POLICE HANDOUT

In this week’s first map, we look at impaired driving in the whole GTA, including some rural areas we haven't included before. (Last week's map, which looked at impaired driving across Ontario, is here.)

The region's highest rates of impaired driving are in rural areas of Halton, York and Durham, beginning with Scugog Township, rural Milton, Georgina and Uxbridge. The only exception to the pattern is downtown Oshawa, in the #2 spot. After that, we have Bowmanville and south Pickering, followed by King, an area of Brampton along the 401, and western Oshawa.

In Toronto itself (separate map), impaired driving is concentrated in northern Etobicoke and eastern Scarborough. The highest incidence is in Downsview.

The most obvious relationship here is with car dependency, with the highest impaired driving rates being in the areas with least access to high-quality public transit.

Only one of Toronto's 68 subway stations is in an FSA which had over 1.0 suspensions per thousand, and that one (Kipling) is on the extreme southeast corner of M9B. In fairness, we could also include M8Y, which is across the street from Old Mill and Royal York stations, but that ends the exceptions.

Toronto's impaired driving rates are low by regional standards (and even lower by provincial standards).

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Note: We've been steadily expanding the postal areas depicted on our maps - there are now nearly 200. If the maps take a long time to load, you may find they display better in Firefox.

Map of the Week: Impaired driving, part 1 (updated)

CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR

This week starts our two-part series on impaired driving.

The map shows the top 20 of Ontario's 523 postal areas for driver's licence suspension for impaired driving in 2007. I excluded two low-population areas.*

There are several distinct clusters:

Northwestern Ontario stands out, with Sioux Lookout (#1 on the list), Kenora and Fort Frances all in the top 20.

Communities in the Muskoka-Parry Sound area have four places in the top 10.

Two postal areas in and around Brockville are in the top 20.

Both of Cornwall's two postal codes are on the list.

Preston and a nearby Cambridge postal code are #20 and #19, respectively.

The information was obtained from the Ministry of Transportation under freedom-of-information legislation. It is taken from the database that supports this program (scroll down to Immediate Licence Suspension).

Using the FOI process sometimes seems to imply some tension between a journalist and a branch of government. That is certainly sometimes the case. However, in this instance, the MOT very helpfully threw in the age and sex of the suspended drivers, data I hadn’t thought to ask for.

Here is what we learn from this extra information:

The male-female ratio is about 7:1 (14,551 to 2,365).

The age graph is surprising. There are very few teenagers. The graph rises steeply at 20, peaks at 23, declines gently after that point, then starts to rise again at 40, hitting a second peak at 45. After that point, it shows a clear second decline.

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Click on the chart to see the full image.

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Update: It occured to me to create the age graph for female drunk drivers (who, it bears repeating, are a small minority at just under 14% of the total). The age graph for male drunk drivers is perhaps not surprisingly similar to the one above. The graph for women, on the other hand, has some differences:

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Click on the chart to see the full image.

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Women drunk drivers turn out to be more middle-aged than their male counterparts. While the highest age group for male drunk drivers is 23, the highest age group for female drunk drivers is 43.

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In part 2, which may or may not run next week, we will look at the impaired driving map of the GTA.

Map may display better in Firefox.

* L0H (Gormley), with five suspensions and a population of 713, and K1P (central Ottawa) with two suspensions and a population of 396.

Thanks again to Star computer-assisted reporting editor Andy Bailey for his help with the data.

Map of the Week: Crime

MICHAEL STUPARYK/TORONTO STAR

This week’s maps depict Toronto crime rates by police division, drawn from from this page.

The six maps cover sexual assault, assault, robbery, breaking and entering, auto theft and theft over $5,000.

The available crime data covers the period from January 1 through August 28 of this year, so the crime rates per 1,000 should not be read as annual crime rates. Its usefulness is showing how crime, or at least reported crime, varies between neighbourhoods.

Downtown’s 52 Division (which has a resident population of about 41,000, far lower than the average of about 161,000) is included on the map out of consistency, but this is one case where looking at a ratio of residents and reported crime breaks down. There's disproportionately people and activity compared to the resident population.

There are certain patterns. Breaking and entering is concentrated in 55, 51, 52 and 14 Divisions, in the central city. The city's northwest (23 and 31 Divisions), on the other hand, seems to suffer more car theft.

The Toronto police publish this disclaimer about the data.

Map(s) of the Week: Gun ownership, week 2

This week, our series on gun ownership in the GTA continues with three more maps:

Percentage change in the firearms licence rate, 2004-2008

This is a map showing which GTA neighbourhoods have had their gun licence rates rise, fall or stay stable over the last four years.

The firearms licence rate has generally fallen or remained stable through most of the GTA over the last four years. Across the area, the gun license rate fell from 16.1 per 1,000 to 14.5 per 1,000 over the period.

The licence rate rose by more than 5% in 18 FSAs, with L4L (Woodbridge) L4J (Thornhill) L4S (northeast Richmond Hill) and L3Y (Newmarket) topping the list.

There are some odd cases. L4H (Kleinburg) and L5W (the Derry Rd. W. and Mavis Rd. area of Mississauga) are under 30% of their gun licence rate in 2004. What seems to have happened in Kleinburg (where population increased from 7,710 to 49,799 over the four-year period) was that the gun licence rate has moved from a rural level of 67 per 1,000 to a suburban level of 16 per 1,000. The actual number of licence holders in L4H has increased.

L6C (Unionville) and L7A (northwest Brampton) show similar patterns.

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Proportion of gun owners who hunt

One question about firearms ownership is what, if anything, the weapons are used for, and how that might vary by neighbourhood.

The question is hard to answer from public records, but one point of comparison is Ontario hunting permits.

This map shows the percentage of firearms licence holders who took out Ontario hunting permits in 2007, making the assumption that they fall into the same group. I realize that that creates problems with bow hunters, who need hunting permits but may not also be firearms owners.

Several patterns emerge. The proportion of hunters is highest at 73% in L4H (Kleinburg), followed by L4L (Woodbridge), M6E (the area off Dufferin between Eglinton Ave. W. and St. Clair Ave. W.) and M6M (Keele St. and Eglinton Ave. W.) and L6A (Maple).

At the other end of the scale, we see a string of high-income neighbourhoods in the central city where gun owners seem to seldom hunt. In Toronto, the map strongly resembles the income map of the city - perhaps wealthy people are more willing to keep a valuable firearm even though it isn't being regularly used.

At the bottom of the list we have M4Y, centred on Jarvis St. and Wellesley St. E., where as few as 14% of registered gun owners seem to have hunted last year.

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Hunting permits

L4H (Woodbridge) leads the  map of 2007 provincial hunting permits, with 24.2 residents per 1,000 having bought one last year.

The fishing and camping maps showed that Oshawa and nearby towns lead the region in outdoor recreation, and the hunting map shows the same pattern. Three of the top six FSAs for hunting permits are in Oshawa (L1H, L1G, L1J), and north Pickering (L1Y) is also in the top six.

Map(s) of the Week: Gun ownership, week 1

RICK EGLINTON/TORONTO STAR

This week's map is the first installment in a two-week series on gun ownership in the GTA. It shows firearm licence holders as a percentage of the complete population (all ages) by postal area.

Next week, we will compare the 2008 data in this map with equivalent data from 2004 to see where in the GTA gun ownership is rising and falling. As well, we will map hunting permit data to look how the relationship between hunting and gun ownership changes between neighbourhoods.

In the 905, gun ownership is highest in the Woodbridge area of Vaughan (L4L), the rural area north of Pickering (L1Y), Newmarket (L3Y), and Oshawa (L1G, L1J, L1H).

Gun ownership rates are generally lower in the 416 area code. Lawrence Park (M4N) leads the city, followed by the area near the former Downsview military base (M3K), the southeastern corner of Etobicoke (M8W) and the Royal York Rd./Bloor St. W. area of Etobicoke (M8X).

Information was obtained under the federal Access to Information Act from the Canadian Firearms Centre. For some low-population FSAs with fewer than 40 licence holders, the RCMP censored out the number. For the 166 FSAs, we have partial data for seven, no data for six, and complete data for the remainder. The total of licences in each case come from adding together the two types of firearms licences: possession and acquisition licence holders registered after 1991 and holders of the grandfathered possession-only licences obtained before then.

Click on the image to see the map.

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Map of the Week: Fatal workplace accidents: January 2007-June 2008

TORONTO STAR FILE

The week has been busy with election coverage, so the map is being published a few days later than planned.

This week: the province's fatal workplace accidents from January of last year through June. The information was taken from Ministry of Labour reports prepared at the time and obtained under access-to-information laws.

Map of the Week: Propane facilities

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Ontario's Technical Standards and Safety Authority released a revised list of the province's propane facilities today.

Here are the largest ones in the Greater Toronto Area, licenced to hold over 5,000 U.S. gallons of propane.

Circles indicate a 1.6 kilometre radius around the facility, the distance Toronto mayor David Miller has urged they be kept from residential areas.

Propane map update

Sorry about the confusion over the propane map yesterday. The plan was to create a map of the larger propane facilities in the GTA (those licenced to hold over 5,000 U.S. gallons) with a 1.6 kilometre radius around each of them.

The 1.6 km radius was based on Toronto mayor David Miller's proposal to keep large propane facilities that distance away from residential areas. One thing the map was meant to show was what that meant in actual neighbourhoods. (Are there large propane facilities near houses, and if so, where?)  I can't help but notice that 1.6 km is almost exactly a mile, but be that as it may.

So I produced a map based on the TSSA's list of these facilities in Toronto, York, Durham, Peel and Halton, which turned out to be a very time-consuming process for various reasons, starting with the difficulty of dealing with the .pdf file that the TSSA had released.

At the same time, reporter Henry Stancu was driving around the city trying to find the installations on the TSSA's list:

(The TSSA) also released a list of filling-tank depots around Ontario yesterday. But the list appeared to be inaccurate when the Star made its own checks of six large facilities listed as licensed to store just under 19,000 litres of propane. One business didn't appear to exist at the listed location; a second was a petroleum storage facility that an employee said had no propane. A third was a townhouse development.

A TSSA spokesperson acknowledged last night the agency had not had enough time to verify the list and said it hoped to make an updated list available Friday.

To make a long story short, we ended up delinking the map once we found out it didn't depict anything useful.

As a citizen, I'd prefer it if the agency in charge of safety at these facilities actually seemed to know where they all are, but that's just me.

The best I can do is to hope to make a new map based on this updated (ie. accurate) list, assuming it eventually appears. 

GTA propane facilities map will return....

Ontario's Technical Standards and Safety Authority released a list of propane facilities in the GTA Wednesday, which the Star's local checks found to be inaccurate. We are currently reviewing the information to update our map and will bring it back as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Map of the week: Fatal traffic accidents

Click on the image for map.

PAWEL DWULIT/TORONTO STAR

This week's map (link) is the start of a new permanent map project, which will map fatal traffic accidents in much the same way we now map homicides.

As with the homicide maps, it takes a couple of years' worth of data for patterns to be very clear, but a few things stand out.

One is how relatively safe the 400-series highways actually are. Could it be consistency of driver behaviour?

We can also see some problem intersections. Three people have died at Taunton Rd. and Lake Ridge Rd. in Whitby this year, in two separate accidents.

Another is how dangerous rural roads can be. Even bearing in mind the cautions about generalizing from small sample sizes, the pattern is still very clear:

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GTA communities: 2008 road deaths to date per 100,000

                                                                   

East Gwillimbury	14.24
Milton	12.98
Halton Hills	5.43
Caledon	5.26
Scugog	4.66
Whitby	1.8
Brampton	1.61
Toronto	1.32
Clarington	1.29
Oakville	1.21
Markham	1.15
Ajax	1.11
Mississauga	0.75
Richmond Hill	0.61
Burlington	0.61
Vaughan	0.42