Healthy City Maps: Analysis

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Floor Space Index For Downtown Toronto

I am pleased to share the following interactive map that displays the estimated gross floor space index (FSI) for every parcel in downtown Toronto. This is based on the intersection of 3D massing data and parcel data obtained from the City of Toronto open data portal. Click on any parcel to see the FSI:

This work builds on the following maps that I published to Twitter last week:

In addition, I also conducted an analysis of the difference between the current as-of-right density allowed by zoning, and the existing built density. The maps below show the 'unbuilt' density for the central city area:

This is a highly experimental analysis so I am sure there are many minor issues with the exact accuracy of the data per parcel. For example this is gross density, based on the total building height, so it does not reflect the exclusion of mechanical areas or community spaces that usually exempt from traditional net FSI calculations used by the city for approvals. But overall, the patterns provide a starting point for understanding where redevelopment is most likely to occur based on the current zoning.

In addition, these data illustrate the fact that current zoning by-laws are out of date and do not reflect the Official Plan land use designation. If we want to encourage growth in the centre areas of the city, we must up-zone these areas to reduce the barriers to development. However, we need to have proper inclusionary zoning policies in place to ensure adequate supply of amenities including affordable housing and other community benefits that would traditionally be secured through Section 37 agreements negotiated at the time of rezoning.

I would love to hear your feedback on this project - contact me on Twitter @HealthyCityMaps or comment using the form below.

Transportation Options for Liberty Village

Liberty Village is a new residential neighbourhood in Toronto that emerged within the past 10 years. The area also has a rich industrial history and has recently evolved into a new hub for creative and technology start-ups and established businesses.

Despite this growth, there have been virtually no new transportation investments. Therefore, congestion on the 504 King streetcar and parking shortages are hot topics at water coolers across the city. To gain an evidence-based understanding of this problem, I conducted a substantial amount of spatial analysis related to transportation options to and from Liberty Village.

Where people who live in Liberty Village work, and

how they get there - see slide 30 for more information.

The presentation included below describes the history of urban development, summarizes relevant transportation planning policies, reviews current transportation behaviour, and a provides a detailed assessment of current and future infrastructure that supports walking, cycling, transit use and driving to and from Liberty Village.

This presentation is an expanded version of an interim presentation delivered to a studio course in the Master of Planning in Urban Development Program at Ryerson University. Findings of this report reflect the opinions of the studio group, and do not represent the opinions of the City of Toronto. All data are presented as drafts for review only, please send questions, corrections or comments to Anthony on twitter @HealthCityMaps. I would also like to thank my group members for the extensive involvement in this project.

Transportation Options for Liberty Village, Toronto from Anthony Smith

This short video clip includes a portion of this presentation focused on the current supply and demand of transportation options.

Healthy Built Environment Indicators of Community Wellbeing

I am currently working with DIALOG Design in Vancouver to create a new tool to measure how community wellbeing may be increased through evidence-based urban design, land use and transportation decisions. This decision support tool uses a Geographic Information System (GIS) to evaluate ten themes of healthy built environment indicators. Each indicator includes several sub-components such access to a grocery store or community center, access to a protected cycletrack or frequent transit network, and the total area of public parks and natural forest area per capita.

Each indicator is also linked through peer-reviewed literature to physical, social, mental and spiritual, financial, and ecological health outcomes. Results from this tool will be presented along with specific thresholds for each indicator to ensure results can be easily translated into real world impacts that can inform healthy planning decisions.

I am sharing this early draft to collect feedback on the content and wording. What do you like, what would you change? what do you think is missing? Please share your observations in the comment section below. I look forward to sharing much more of this work over the next six months as I develop this work into my masters research project.

Building Transit Equity in Toronto

I am pleased to share a new research paper called Toronto Transit Choices: Evaluation of the
Downtown Relief Line + SmartTrack Options (Click to download) that I crafted for Ryerson PL8105 - Planning for Sustainability last semester.

This project is a comparative evaluation of two important options for expanded heavy rail transit service in Toronto. To accomplish this task I developed a GIS database of the current subway network in Toronto, and two custom future scenarios: the 'Downtown Relief Line' (DRL) that has been planned for many years (the DRL has no formal route maps yet, so the route shown is an educated guess based on extensive research), and new Mayor John Tory's 'SmartTrack' line based on electrification of the existing GO network. The current subway network and the proposed routes are shown below:

Additionally, the following three maps highlight the population density, median household incomes and visible minority populations living in close proximity to each current and proposed network.

In the paper I also summarized these variables within 800 metres of the current network and each proposal, in order to compare and contrast who would benefit from expanded transit service. Among other conclusions, I recommended the City of Toronto prioritize the SmartTrack plan in the short term, and also continue ongoing development of the DRL in the longer term.

PL800 - Planning and Design Fundamentals

Below are my first three design projects from my Masters of Planning in Urban Development at Ryerson University. Each project required specific elements - some of which I did not agree were worth including. These are far from perfect, and I was always impressed by seeing my classmates work. Also big thanks to Kelly for being my partner on Site One. I am sharing these in the spirit of sharing and learning from one another. Please provide any comments you think of at the bottom, thanks!

Site One: Gould Street on Ryerson campus adjacent to the future Student Learning Centre

Site Two: HtO Park on the Toronto Waterfront, along Lakeshore Boulevard

Site Three: Bloor Street between Avenue Road and Yonge Street

This area recently underwent a $10 million dollar 'Transformation'. The two boards below were intended to be viewed sequentially.

Site Four: Cabbagetown Neighbourhood

Dogs of Toronto

I love dogs. I love data. I recently found an Excel file in the City of Toronto's Open Data Library that contains the number of pet licences per 3-digit postal code in 2013. Naturally, I wanted to SEE what the data looked like. The following three maps explore different dimensions of this dataset. First I explored the number of dogs per household, then the number of dogs per square kilometre of residential land, and finally the ratio of dogs to cats in each 3-digit postal code.

Overall, there are approximately 55,000 dogs and 25,000 cats registered in Toronto. It is important to note that not all pets are properly licenced, so these data may not be fully representative. In particular, cats may be under-represented due to lower licensing rates. For more open data exploration about pets, be sure to visit my previous post about the Dogs of Vancouver and don't hesitate to let me know if you have any questions!

2014 ESRI User Conference Presentation: WalkMap 1.0

Tomorrow I will present a 20 minute talk about walkability, urban design and active transportation. Here was my teaser tweet for the ESRI User Conference and click here to download my slides.

I am very happy that Vision Vancouver Councillor Reimer tabled a notice of motion yesterday called "Protecting Vancouver’s Public Green Space" which included the following statement:

"The Greenest City Action Plan adopted by Council in 2011 sets a target that every person in Vancouver lives within a five-minute walk (400 metres) of a park, greenway or other public green space by 2020"

My first thought when reading this was simple: how will this indicator be measured? Specifically, I recalled a recent diagram in the Oakridge rezoning application slides (a project I fully support, just for the record) that shows 400 metre buffers from surrounding parks:

The trouble with this diagram is the 400 metre buffers appear to originate from the park centroids. Alternatively, I beleive 'accessibility' has actually been measured based on a buffer from the outer edge of parks. In other words, if I leave my house and walk 400 metres and arrive at the edge of a park, I would consider it to be accessible. I decided to explore these two interpretations; the following map shows the area within a 400 metre buffer of park 'centroids' in medium green, and the area within a 400m buffer from park 'areas' in lighter green:

In addition, I also clipped each 2011 Census Dissemination Block to the 400 metre buffer from the edge of parks, and calculated the fraction of each block that was within the threshhold. The fraction of the area was then used to calculate a proportion of the population per block that has no park accessibility. For example if a block had 100 people and it was 75% within the buffer zone, 25 people were considered to have no access to a park. As a result of this analysis, I determined that 79,407 people or 13.2% of the population of the City of Vancouver live greater than 400 metres from the edge of a public park. These people are shown using the yellow proportional symbols in the map below:

I also reviewed the Greenest City progress report and noted the indicator the City has selected is significantly simpler.Their indicator is "Percent of city's land base within a five-minute walk to a green space". In other words their target is based on area instead of population. Which is fully valid, but I still wonder how if they are measuring their covered area based on buffers from the park centroids (as shown on the Oarkridge map) or from outer edge of the parks (which would yield a larger total covered area and I am fairly confident this has been done). At the end of the day, I do not mean to criticize the outstanding work the City is doing, I am simply trying to highlight how an oversimplified diagram can lead to ambiguous results.

I am excited to learn more about this motion as it is developed because I have been working on many projects related to this theme at Golder Associates Sustainable Communities Group over the past few months. For example, I have conducted extensive GIS analysis and visualization to support the City of Vancouver's ongoing Integrated Stormwater Management Plan (ISMP)and the John Hendry (Trout Lake) Park Master Plan.

I understand this Notice of Motion is referencing much more area than just parks, and exactly what should be considered 'greenspace' will likely be a topic for a future post. For example, community gardens and greenways are referenced in the Greenest City action plan as features that satisfy the 'greenspace accessibility' target. Alternatively, given my recent focus on stormwater management I would also suggest it may be equally important for the City to implement a 'no net loss of pervious surfaces' target to maximize onsite infiltration of rainwater.

I hope this post shows that GIS tools are not always as objective as they appear and it is important for policy makers to consider how various calculation methods can impact progress towards targets.

Happy New Years!

Ever wonder what one year in the life of a cartographer is like? Here is a selection of thirteen of my projects that have been published online this year - a link to the original, public source is provided below each map if you would like to learn more. These focus on work within British Columbia and represent the diverse cross-section of work. A few of these projects were completed out of curiosity on my own personal time, but most of this work was completed for the Planning and Landscape Architecture Group, in the Environmental Assessment Division of Golder Associates' Downtown Vancouver Office. Please do not hesitate to contact me to discuss how Golder can help you create similar awesome mapping projects! Please share this with your friends and feel free to connect with me on Twitter @AnthonyNSmith.

1. District of West Kelowna Recreational Trails Master Plan (RTMP)

I led the data management and map creation for this comprehensive trail planning project that was adopted by council in December, 2013.

Source: http://www.districtofwestkelowna.ca/index.aspx?page=707

2. Walkability Model for Metro Vancouver

I used open-source data to calculate this new walkability dataset - I will be expanding this work to cover all of British Columbia in 2014 so check back soon for more updates.

Green = More Walkable, Red =Less Walkable, No colour = Not Walkable

Source: http://healthycitymaps.blogspot.ca/2013/10/walkmap-preview.html

3. Transit Commuting Data from Statistics Canada National Household Survey

I have extensive experience downloading, cleaning and mapping data from Statistics Canada, but I was very excited to get new data for my home city about a topic that will be trending in 2014...

Source: http://healthycitymaps.blogspot.ca/2013/11/CommutingData.html

4. BC Commuter Challenge Results

I worked with Better Environmentally Sound Transportation (BEST) to analyze participation data for their annual behaviour change challenge.

Source: http://healthycitymaps.blogspot.ca/2013/11/CommuterChallenge.html

5. Carvolth Neighbourhood Concept Plan District Energy Feasibility Model

This model integrated conceptual land use designations and development parcels to quantify projected build out by building type. The energy requirements of these buildings were then combined to evaluate the feasibility of installing a district energy system.

Source: http://sei.info.yorku.ca/files/2013/04/YorkAlexBostonBCPerspective.pdf

6. Surrey Community Energy and Emissions Plan (CEEP): Building Energy Intensity and Vehicle Kilometres Traveled (VKT) Modelling

This CEEP provides a guide to reduce community energy spending and greenhouse gas emissions in the City of Surrey. Specifically these maps show energy intensity (measured in gigajoules per square metre of floor area) can drops by 1/3 due to higher standards in senior government building codes, capacity building, local building retrofit programs, and incentives and driving distance per household can drop by 7% due to more transit use and more walking and cycling. Overall, the lowest GHG emissions are in higher density areas well served by high quality transit and located close to employment and local services.

Source: http://www.surrey.ca/energyshift/files/CEEP_-_Part_2_Taking_Action_-_Buildings_District_Energy_and_Waste.pdf (Pages 61 and 85)

7. 2011 Census Population Density in the City of Vancouver

My goal with this project was to create a beautiful map template that could be used to map any city in Canada to assist with diverse planning projects undertaken by the Golder Sustainable Communities Group.

Source: http://healthycitymaps.blogspot.ca/2013/11/2011-census-population-density-at-three.html

8. Industrial Land Supply and Demand Study for the Regional District of Nanaimo (RDN)

The figures below show consolidated actual land use and identified industrial areas within the RDN.

Source: http://rdn.bc.ca/cms/wpattachments/wpID2851atID5413.pdf

9. Woodfibre Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Environmental Assessment Project Description

Woodfibre Natural Gas Limited is proposing to construct and operate a liquefied natural gas facility (LNG) located seven kilometres southwest of Squamish, British Columbia, on the northwestern shoreline of Howe Sound. The proposed project includes the development of a natural gas liquefaction facility and an LNG transfer facility to enable the export of the LNG product to global markets via marine vessels. It is expected to operate for approximately 25 years and to produce between 1.5 and 2.1 million tonnes of LNG per year. More Information here: http://www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca/050/document-eng.cfm?document=97109

Source: http://www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca/050/documents/p80060/97119E.pdf

10. BURNCO Aggregate Project Environmental Assessment Draft Application Information Requirements

Source: http://a100.gov.bc.ca/appsdata/epic/html/deploy/epic_document_355_36057.html

11. Future Land Use Maps for District of Mackenzie Official Community Plan (OCP)

I created these high precision legal GIS data layers and stylized these maps to be included in the new OCP.

Source: http://www.district.mackenzie.bc.ca/Files/Docs/MIM/DRAFT_OCP_District_of_Mackenzie.pdf (Pages 51 and 52)

12. Vancouver Community Gardens and Food Trees

I used open data from the City of Vancouver to created this map - it generated more online buzz than any other map I have ever created!

Source: http://healthycitymaps.blogspot.ca/2013/11/vancouver-community-gardens-food-trees.html

13. Climate Change Impact Mapping for Greeley Creek Watershed Source Protection Plan

A key positive result of the study is the creation of more accurate maps of the watershed area. The new maps provide much more detailed information about exactly what’s located in the watershed, including the creeks that feed into Greeley Creek, and the past and present human activity in the area. The report also looks forward at climate change scenarios. Map 1 shows the study area and map 8 shows the modelled impacts of climate change - I am very proud do have developed this innovative visualization technique to show temperature and precipitation changes and look forward to evaluating climate change impacts for other projects in the near future.

Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/172893346/City-of-Revelstoke-Greeley-Creek-Watershed-Source-Protection-Plan-2013

Thanks for looking! Please post a comment below if you have any questions or thoughts and subscribe to my blog for future updates in 2014.

BC Commuter Challenge Results

Over the past few months I have volunteered some of my personal time to work with Stephanie, Masami and Beth from Better Environmentally Sound Transportation (BEST) to explore and evaluate the spatial dimensions of the data that were collected by registered participants in the 2013 BC Commuter Challenge.

I began this project by geocoding the postal code location for each trip origin and destination (home and work locations) and then displaying the straight-line connections thematically based on each participants' stated regular method of commuting. These results are shown below, both overall and broken down by regular commuting mode:

I then filtered the results to include only walking, cycling and transit trips for participants who indicated their regular method of commuting to be 'drive alone'. I selected this subset of users (541 out of over 3,500 within my study area) to focus my analysis on the trips that represent a significant behaviour change.

Drivers Who Switched to Walking

Drivers Who Switched to Cycling

Drivers Who Switched to Transit

One of the most interesting findings from this exercise is the average trip length for each commuting mode shown in the legend of each map. The average trip length for walking, cycling and transit trips were 4.1, 19.4 and 30.4 km respectively, which are somewhat longer than expected. Therefore, I believe this analysis provides an important evidence-base to guide policies and programs dedicated to reducing single-occupancy vehicle trips and increasing sustainable mode share for commuters.

I should also note that there are some unusually long walking trips included in the first map; however, the distance calculations above are based on the user's own distance input into the challenge website, not the straight-line distance visualized on the map. These erroneous trips are most likely due to people reporting a home postal code but travelling from a more local origin on one particular day.

Overall, this assessment also underscores the importance of the BEST Sustainable Commuter Challenge for two reasons:

In addition to recognizing and rewarding the behaviour of regular sustainable commuters, the challenge encourages a significant number of people to change their regular commuting behaviour.
Although this study evaluates only a small sample of data within Metro Vancouver area, the data collected by the challenge could provide a national framework for conducting spatial analysis on transportation patterns in virtually all major cities in Canada.

I am in the home stretch of creating a new open source walkability dataset I am calling "WalkMap" based on open data obtained from Open Street Map (OSM). The key benefit of using the OSM data is it includes all urban walking paths and trails in addition to main roads. I am currently refining the processing model for the Greater Vancouver area and hope to make this data available for all of Canada in the next few months. Currently Walkscore (TM) provides a great user interface but their data are fairly coarse-grained and very expensive to obtain. Therefore, my work is based on a unique 100m processing grid and I am planning to provide both the methodology and outputs via an open source licence. My goal is to create one primary WalkMap Index, as well as specific measures of the following WalkMap components:

Walkable Area - The total area you can access by walking 800m along a road or trail in every possible direction
Connectivity - The density of street street intersections
Destinations - The number of shops, cafes or other businesses within walking distance.
Infrastructure - The number of crosswalks, benches, water fountains, and other pedestrian infrastructure.
Nature - Proportion of the walkable area that is natural vegetation, recreation or park space.

I will also visualize my results on a simple mapping portal with cartography handled by MapBox, another exciting tool I am learning to use:

I have not designed a legend yet, but here is the basic story:

Green = More Walkable, Red =Less Walkable, No colour = Not Walkable

Please subscribe to this blog for future project updates or post a comment below.

Spatial Disparities and Travel to Abortion Clinics in Canada

A few years ago I created a package of very interesting maps under contract to the University of Ottawa. The research question was simple: how far do women travel to access abortion services in Canada? The data had been collected using a voluntary survey in partnership with several clinics across the country and each women had recorded home postal code or city name. My job was to match up the origins and destinations, aggregate the data to protect individuals privacy, and analyze the socioeconomic patterns in the data. These maps have now been published in the Women's Studies International Forum. Here is one map from the paper.

I also created several detailed regional views featuring proportional symbols to illustrate the number of women travelling from each origin census subdivision.

The full paper abstract is below:

Access to abortion services is uneven throughout Canada. As a result, women cross provincial and territorial borders to garner access to abortion services. In this first-time study, the travel women undertake to access abortion services at freestanding clinics across the country was systematically tracked, mapped, and analyzed using questionnaire-based data. A total of 1186 women from 17 freestanding abortion clinics provided information about their journeys. The mapped data reflect the acknowledged importance of the “spatial turn” in the health sciences and provide a graphic illustration of spatial disparities in abortion access in Canada, namely: 1) the paucity of services outside urban centers; 2) the existence of substantial access gaps, particularly for women living in Atlantic, Northern and coastal communities; 3) the burdensome costs of travel and, in some cases, the costs of the abortion procedure itself, especially for younger women who travel the farthest; 4) the unique challenges First Nations and Métis women face in accessing abortion services.

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