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| RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR |
As the map shows, the deaths have been distributed between the central city, the inner suburbs and the 905. Do you see a pattern? Let us know in the comments.
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| TORONTO STAR STAFF |
As I said in an earlier post, our tools for producing online maps have become much more sophisticated over the last year and a half, and it’s tempting to go back to some of our earlier data and give it the presentation it deserves.
This week, we’re taking another look at our drunk driving maps, which have been consistently popular since they first appeared. They were based on license suspension records from the Ministry of Transportation for the whole of 2007, which showed the age, sex and postal area of accused drunk drivers. (The age graphs of male and female drunk drivers are worth a look.)
The do-over has two main improvements:
- For the first time, we have a map video, produced with the movie feature of Google Maps 5. I had some trouble getting the audio tracks to appear on the movie file; thanks to multimedia editor Scott Simmie for attaching them.
- The map displays 513 Ontario postal codes, showing patterns across the whole province. It uses boundaries I bought from Statistics Canada, very helpfully converted to .kml by Sanjay Singh at Pitney Bowes. I simplified some of the polygon shapes to speed loading, in the Lake of the Woods area, Manitoulin Island and Long Point. This whittled the zipped .kmz file down to about 800K, which is still much larger than anything we’ve tried to display before. It loads acceptably fast in IE and Firefox, but let me know in the comments if it seems slow. Unusually, it actually seems to load faster in IE.
Here is the video:
So, on to the data. The map shows a strong pattern of higher drunk driving rates in rural and northern areas, especially around Georgian Bay (on all sides – Bruce and Grey Counties, Manitoulin, Parry Sound-Muskoka) and lower rates in rural and suburban areas in the GTA, London and Ottawa.
Here is a top 20 list. It differs (though not enormously) from the previous one because it uses FSA population estimates from the 2006 census, which weren’t available at the time.
Here is a top 10 list:
| P0P | Manitoulin | 0.49% |
| P0A | Burks Falls/Sundridge | 0.43% |
| K8H | Petawawa | 0.43% |
| P0C | Georgian Bay shore south of Parry Sound | 0.40% |
| P8T | Sioux Lookout | 0.38% |
| K6K | Rural area north of Cornwall | 0.35% |
| P0X | Whitefish Bay | 0.34% |
| P0G | Georgian Bay shore north of Parry Sound | 0.33% |
| P1L | Bracebridge | 0.32% |
| P1P | Gravenhurst | 0.32% |
| N0A | Nanticoke/Cayuga | 0.31% |
| P0B | Muskoka Lakes | 0.30% |
| P2A | Parry Sound | 0.29% |
| K0E | Rural areas east and west of Brockville | 0.28% |
| N0C | Grey Highlands/Flesherton | 0.27% |
| P9N | Kenora | 0.27% |
| N7T | Rural area south of Sarnia | 0.26% |
| N0H | Bruce Peninsula | 0.26% |
| N3H | Preston | 0.26% |
| P5A | Eliot Lake | 0.26% |
… and a bottom 10 list:
| M6B | Toronto: Glencairn/the Allen | 0.06% |
| N9B | Windsor: university area | 0.06% |
| M4X | Toronto: St. Jamestown | 0.05% |
| M6J | Toronto: Queen/Ossington | 0.05% |
| M1V | Toronto: L'Amoreaux/Agincourt | 0.05% |
| M4W | Toronto: Rosedale | 0.05% |
| K1J | Ottawa: Beacon Hill | 0.05% |
| M4V | Toronto: Casa Loma/southern Forest Hill | 0.04% |
| M3C | Toronto: Flemingdon Park | 0.04% |
| M4P | Toronto: North Toronto (N of Eglinton/Mount Pleasant) | 0.04% |
| M6A | Toronto: Lawrence Manor/Lawrence Heights | 0.04% |
| M5A | Toronto: Regent Park/St Lawrence/Corktown | 0.04% |
| M6G | Toronto: Little Italy: Seaton Village | 0.04% |
| M4S | Toronto: Mt. Pleasant/Davisville | 0.04% |
| N9G | Windsor: Dougall Ave/Howard Ave area | 0.04% |
| M5R | Toronto: Annex | 0.04% |
| M4Y | Toronto: Church/Wellesley | 0.04% |
| M2K | Toronto: York Mills | 0.04% |
| M4H | Toronto: Thorncliffe Park | 0.03% |
| M2H | Toronto: Hillcrest Village | 0.02% |
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| CHARLA JONES/TORONTO STAR |
Map: Pedestrian accidents, 2008
This week, we look at 2008’s pedestrian accidents. A total of 1,932 were reported to police last year.
Outside the downtown core, pedestrian accidents are concentrated on Eglinton between Brimley and Markham Rd., Sheppard between Kennedy Rd. and Warden, Yonge between Steeles and the 401, and Mount Pleasant south of Eglinton.
Here are the top eight intersections for pedestrian collisions:
9 BATHURST and KING
6 BLOOR and LANSDOWNE
5 CHURCH and JANE
5 COLLEGE and SPADINA
5 JANE and WILSON
5 KEELE and LAWRENCE
5 LAWRENCE and MARKHAM
5 STEELES and YONGE
For local areas, the map works best at the highest or second-highest magnification.
Nerd box:
The larger numbers involved forced a different presentation from last week’s bike collision map. This map only shows locations where two or more pedestrian accidents happened during the year, with circles of different sizes indicating the number.
I tried mapping all the accidents, but the map looked like this:
If you don't mind the visual clutter, a map showing single accidents is here.
It works best at the highest magnification and needs some patience, but does add new information. For example: Mount Pleasant between Roehampton (a block north of Eglinton) and Balliol (a block north of the cemetery) had 11 pedestrian accidents last year, or about one per 100 metres of roadway. Roncesvalles between High Park Boulevard and Queen also had more than I would have expected - eight, or one for every 112 metres of roadway.
What patterns do you see? Let us know in the comments.
(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.)
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.
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| PAWEL DWULIT/TORONTO STAR |
This week's map, showing Ontario's top 20 postal areas for street racing suspension rates, looks very different from the drunk driving map from a few weeks ago.
The drunk driving map was rural, small-town and northern, while the street racing map is strongly centred in the GTA. Only three communities on the street racing top 20 list are outside the GTA and Dufferin County: Petawawa, Aylmer, and Hanmer, north of Sudbury. (The only community to appear on both maps is Petawawa.)
There is a very strong pattern of high street racing rates in an area stretching northwest from Vaughan, covering all of Caledon and Orangeville and stretching into Dufferin County. Only part of this pattern was visible last week.
The street racing age graph is different from the drunk driving graph, with its two peaks in early adulthood and middle age - it simply peaks at 21 and declines.
17% of the drivers suspended for street racing were female, about the same proportion that we saw with impaired driving. Unlike drunk driving, the age graph for female street racers looks more or less identical to the age graph for male ones.
I omitted FSAs with fewer than five suspensions during the period. For the record, here are the areas dropped from the top 20 list:
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| AARON LYNETT/TORONTO STAR |
In the Greater Toronto Area, street racing (map) seems to be centred in the area of Peel between Orangeville and Brampton, spilling over into nearby areas of York Region around Kleinburg and Woodbridge.
The one standout exception to the general pattern is M5J, the postal area that takes in the waterfront condos downtown. This is, I hope coincidentally, the neighbourhood across Yonge St. from the Toronto Star. M5J has the third-highest rate in the GTA, and (not to give away next week's map) the fifth-highest rate in the province.
Other than M5J, there is no clear concentration in the 416 area code, other than M2L, in the Bayview and York Mills area.
One interesting thing is that this map doesn't have very much in common with the GTA impaired driving map. Accused street racers seem concentrated in one area, mostly, while impaired drivers are spread all over the GTA with higher numbers in more car-dependent areas.
Low-population L0L, along the 404 in Whitchurch-Stouffville, had only three suspensions during the period but is included on the map out of consistency.
Information was obtained from the Ministry of Transportation under access-to-information legislation.
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| TORONTO POLICE HANDOUT |
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).
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.
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| CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR |
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.
Click on the chart to see the full image.
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:
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.
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.
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| PAWEL DWULIT/TORONTO STAR |
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:
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 |
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