Healthy City Maps: Cycling

Showing posts with label Cycling. Show all posts

Safety: Why Toronto Must Install Bike Lanes on Bloor

Tomorrow at 9:30 AM Toronto City Council will decide if pilot bike lanes will be installed on Bloor Street between Avenue Road and Shaw Street. The plan before council is extremely well designed, supported by all local resident groups, will lead to increased local business profits, and generally provides greater transportation options that will reduce congestion in the city. However, the single most important reason why the pilot must move forward is simple: cyclists have a right to be safe on roads.

In this post, I share a simple analysis and mashup of two datasets: 1. the number of cyclists on Bloor and the surrounding areas (as recorded using the Toronto Cycling App that records GPS data), and 2. the location of safe cycling infrastructure that is currently in place. There are many drawbacks to the Cycling App data since it is not necessarily representative of all trips but given there are several thousand trips I would argue it does provide a valid proxy measure of general cycling behavior in downtown areas.

The Bike Land Pilot Area and the total number of cycling trips per road segment are illustrated in the map below - shades of pink show areas with a relatively high total number of cycling trips.

Next, the map below illustrates where there are safe cycling routes in place.

And finally, the map below combines these two datasets, to show the number of cycling trips on roads where there is currently no safe cycling route. This map makes a clear argument for why the City Council must not miss this opportunity to install bike lanes on Bloor Street and close a dangerous gap in the current cycling network.

Over the past four months, I have been fortunate to work with a small team to create a report on Transportation Options for Libert Liberty Village. This project was part of a Studio course in the Master of Planning program at Ryerson University. Our team worked in collaboration with staff from the City of Toronto, and our goal was to support the ongoing update to the Garrison Common North Secondary Plan - a long-term planning framework to guide development for the area that covers the Liberty Village employment area and surrounding residential areas.

You can download the full report by clicking on the cover page to the right or view our final presentation slides in the Slideshare below:

Presentation on Transportation Options for Liberty Village from Anthony Smith

For more background on the transportation challenges in the area, and a very detailed analysis of current travel behavior based on the Transportation Tomorrow Survey visit my earlier post here - this post also includes the slides from my group's Interim Studio Presentation on the Background Research for this project.

This project provided an inspiring opportunity to dream a little about what the future could look like if we connect the many ongoing plans for the area including the following:

UnderGardiner, West Toronto Railpath and Stanley Park extension / Garrison Creek Greenway linear parks;
Regional Express Rail, a new SmartTrack station, and the King Street Visioning Study;
The new Citywide Cycling Network Plan; and
Three new bridges and several other initiatives in the area that will make active and sustainable modes the most delightful way to travel.

The simple context is Liberty Village has and will continue to grow quickly, but there have been very few transportation improvements to this former industrial area. In addition to the recent population growth that is widely discussed, the employment area is projected to also experience significant growth - from about 10,000 employees today to potentially over 20,000 in 2035. This growth creates a great opportunity to leverage private development to invest in new transportation options for the area. Some of this potential growth is shown on the current and future development maps and 3D building massing visualizations below:

The following maps summarize the current and future transit, cycling and walking networks and parking supply in the Liberty Village area. Many of the future improvements are already proposed, planned or approved by the City, though several extra bike lanes and one new bus route have been added. The report also describes all the interventions in more detail and includes detailed phasing recommendations for each of these projects.

If you put these networks on a single map, you get a complete regional vision of the future sustainable transportation network and local connections within the study area that will enhance access and circulation:

Broadly speaking the regional elements of this plan rely on the City of Toronto's King Street Visioning Study to remove cars from King Street that will enable the 509 King Street Car to provide excellent service to Downtown. The plan also includes investments in the West Toronto Rail Path and the UnderGardiner linear parks. There are also several other cycling connections aligned with the draft City of Toronto Cycling Network Plan that is currently being developed to guide the next 10 years of cycling investment across the City. More locally this plan supports the addition of separated cycle tracks on Liberty Street, and construction of a new road and separated multi-use pathway on the southern edge of Liberty Village that has a completed Environmental Assessment.

The cycling network connects to three new bridges including the following:

The funded Fort York Pedestrian Bridge,
A smaller funded pedestrian bridge near the centre of Liberty Village, and
A new 'King High Line' bridge connection from the end of Atlantic Avenue.

The High Line bridge will connect to a new pedestrian mall and public park on Atlantic Avenue to the south, and the terminus of the Railpath Phase II extension that also has an approved Environmental Assessment to the northwest. Farther south, the pedestrian mall connects to an upgraded tunnel connection to Exhibition, that will soon have improved 15 minutes, all day regional express rail service. Transit will also dramatically change when a new SmartTrack station opens - this could be very soon if Metrolinx simply makes the UP express airport train stop at a pilot platform as soon as next year.

Finally, site visits and desktop research were used to select parcels that are likely to be redeveloped into new office space since the employment area does not allow condos. This will enable many upgrades to the local streetscape and public realm including new sidewalks, removal of boulevard parking, and creation of new public walkways between streets.

It is a lot to consider, so please do let me know what you think is most important to focus on first. I welcome your feedback in the comments below or on Twitter @HealthyCityMaps. Thanks!

Welcome to The Ribbon: The Lower Don Valley

This semester I had the privilege of working with a studio group in the Ryerson School of Urban and Regional Planning, to complete a visionary design project in partnership with the Evergreen Foundation. This project supported the Evergreen 'Ribbon' fundraising campaign, that will enhance access to the Evergreen Brickworks, via the Lower Don corridor that connects to Toronto's waterfront. This project had three primary objectives: analyze the history, ecology, neighbourhoods and uses within the study area; review and synthesize relevant planning policies and reports; and conceive a concise design vision and list of specific interventions. To support this project, I designed the following study area map to inform our analysis:

To illustrate the study area in a more interactive way, I created the following 'flyover' video to illustrate the journey from Corktown Common, up the Ribbon to the Brickworks:

I also designed the following series of maps to highlight the history, ecology, diverse uses, and neighbourhood context of the study area:

Please post any questions or comments you may have below, and be sure to visit the Ribbon Project website to learn more!

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.

BEST Commuter Challenge 2015

This is the third year I have mapped the travel patterns by mode from the BEST Commuter Challenge. This year I also decided to create custom maps showing results for the 104 offices located in the lower mainland, so if you want to see your custom results, send me a quick email to Anth42[at]gmail.com and I'll send you a map like the Golder Associates example at the bottom of this post. Thanks for visiting and keep up the sustainable commuting!

Personal Google Location History

Do you know where you have been? Google does. That is if you have your location history turned on. I personally love this feature, it means if you forget your phone somewhere you can log in to any computer and map the phone location, and even lock or erase the phone contents remotely.

I have been thinking about mapping my own personal history for some time, so I finally took a few minutes to download the past seven months of life, since I moved to Toronto. The files are extracted as monthly KML files from my personalized Location History portal. I then merged these into a single file in ArcMap. Because the track lines are fairly random at times, I transformed the vertices into points representing the exact locations where Google actually called home. This represented about 150,000 points (21,000 points per month or 700 points a day). I think this is a pretty awesome sample size, though it is not truly random since places I play with my phone are over represented, places my phone is turned off or underground are excluded, and places I run are excluded since I don't carry my phone. Here are all the raw data points and path lines for reference:

I also calculated a kernel density surface of the points to better represent the areas with many overlapping points. This map is below:

UPDATE: Here is another set of maps I created with one full year of location history data from Vancouver:

I would be happy to make a map of YOUR location history for a small fee if you are interested - all I need is a copy of your Google Takeout file in KML format that you can download from here. Please let me know if you have any questions in a comment below. I think it would be radical if I could automate this process and build an app so people could create their own custom history maps with the touch of a button - get in touch if you have any ideas about this!

20 Best Maps of 2014

Happy new year! In this post I have summarized my 20 favourite mapping projects from 2014. This has been an exciting year for me! I was promoted in my role at Golder Associates, working as a GIS Analyst and Cartographer on urban and environmental planning projects; however, I resigned in august and moved to Toronto to begin my Masters in Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University. I have continued to produce maps for this blog in my spare time using open data and I was recently hired to create maps for Dr. Richard Florida at the U of T Martin Prosperity Institute. I already have some exciting ideas for 2015, so consider subscribing to this blog to see more cool maps in the future!