Healthy City Maps: GIS

Showing posts with label GIS. 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.

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.

I have compiled a new Cartography Portfolio that contains nearly 500 maps and data visualizations I created over the past seven years. This is not every map I have made, rather a cross-section of representative types and content themes that I can publically share.

After the first nine overview images, the individual maps are sorted chronologically so you can see the progression of my career through the following phases:

Early academic assignments for UBC Geography courses
Population health research for the Human Early Learning Partnership
Urban design and environmental assessment projects for HB Lanarc/Golder Associates
Recent academic assignments for the Ryerson Master of Planning Program
Several other projects I worked on for this blog and as consulting contracts are also interspersed throughout the album.

I hope this overview of my work provides some insight into the diverse analysis and design topics I have enjoyed exploring. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments below or on twitter @HealthyCityMaps.

I also recently updated my main blog landing page so posts are shown as a preview with a small thumbnail - I hope this makes navigation into some of my older content a little easier since I now have 55 posts! Or you can look at the ten most popular posts listed on the banner to the right of this post. Finally, I also recently added a new Consulting tab to this site, so please explore that if you would like to learn more about the analysis and design services I can provide you or your organization.

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.

Seven Years of Cartography

This year will mark my 7th year as a professional cartographer. I am full of gratitude for every hour I have spent creating, and still love the meditative, balanced practice that forms the art and science of designing maps. The following two videos encapsulate a selection of my knowledge and practice to date and I hope these learnings may benefit my fellow spatial analysts, cartographers, designers, creators or anyone who wants to make the world a better place for future generations. If you only watch one, I suggest you watch the second video about walkability as I think it captures my current thinking very well while the longer lecture includes more specific design advice for aspiring mapmakers.

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!

Vancouver Property Values

Metro Vancouver Commuter Challenge Trips

Comparative Study of Bicycle Infrastructure

Population Density in Metro Vancouver and Toronto

Average Home Value in Metro Vancouver

Median Income in Toronto

Visible Minority Population in Metro Vancouver and Toronto

Social Determinants of Health Research for Cowichan Valley

City of Vancouver Integrated Stormwater Management Plan Analysis

Skate Park Planning Community Consultation

Assessment of Building Permits in Toronto

Assessment of Park Accessibility in Vancouver

Analysis of Dog Licences in Toronto and Most Popular Dog Names

Community Gardening in Vancouver and the Arbutus Corridor

Street Lamp Density in the City of Vancouver

Neighbourhood Design Evaluation of Cabbagetown

Environmental Assessment for Woodfibre LNG Proposal

Environmental Assessment for BURNCO Mine Proposal

Valentines Map

Walkability Map of Vancouver

Want More? Check out my "Thirteen Best Maps of 2013"

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

Population Density of Downtown Toronto

I am now pursuing a Masters of Planning degree focused on Urban Development at Ryerson's School of Community and Regional Planning in Toronto. To celebrate this new phase of my life, I have created the following map of Toronto. This will be the first of many new maps exploring socio-economic, environmental, and health data for the greater Toronto Area. Let me know if there are any data you would like me to map!

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.

Divvy Bike Trips in Chicago

Last fall I had the pleasure of visiting Chicago to run my first marathon. While there, I also enjoyed a ride along the waterfront on a Divvy bike-share bike. A few months ago I was excited to learn that a year of trip data had been released as open data for a data visualization contest. Although I did not enter the contest (results are here), I still could not resist the opportunity to transform the .CSV files in to origin-destination maps. With Vancouver poised to launch its own bike-share system in the next year, I hope to learn some transferable lessons that may assist the implementation of our own bike share system.

A friend told me most Divvy trips were quite short, so I explored the data and was surprised to learn the mean trip length is about 20 minutes. Therefore I wanted to look at the travel patterns by trip length, so I decided to produce the map below that includes over 750,000 trips - about 250,000 trips on each frame.

I also added a new graphic below that shows the total minutes of physical activity generated and the average trip length per neighbourhood. The basic story is that people who live on the outskirts of town ride longer trips, but there is a lower cummulative time spent travelling as there are fewer trips. I am very interested in looking at the cummulative health benefit of all these bike trips...I am working with a friend who works with the City of Chicago Public Health Department and she will be writing a guest blog post soon.

Let me know if you would like me to look at any specific questions using this goldmine of big data?

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.

Garden Deserts: Community Garden Plots per Person in Vancouver

Do you want to sign up for a community garden plot in Vancouver? If so, you are not alone - demand for garden space has surged in recent years as the local food movement has become mainstream. According to data published on the City's Open Data Site, there are approximately 3,965 garden plots of various types in the City and there are about 600,000 people in Vancouver. Therefore, there is approximately 1 garden plot per 150 people living in the city today.

After I created an interactive map showing all Community Gardens and Food Trees last year, I was asked by the Evergreen BC 'Seeding Healthy Communities' program coordinator if I could explore the distribution of garden plots within the city, with an eye towards understanding the spatial accessibility of existing gardens to citizens. I volunteered to conduct this analysis because I wanted to know if there were 'garden deserts' within the City where population-based demand for plots was much greater than supply?

I began by visualizing the number of plots per garden location as shown on the map below:

I also mapped the total population per census block based on the Statistics Canada's 2011 Census of Population.

To evaluate the relative supply and demand for garden plots within Vancouver, I transformed the point data from the two maps above into kernel density surfaces, based on the number of garden plots and people within 1 km from every point in the City. This process yeilded two surfaces, the number of plots per square kilometer and the number of people per square kilometer - I then divided these to derive a measure of 'Garden Plots per 1,000 People' as shown in on the map below. The dark green areas are relatively well served while lighter yellow and grey areas have very few or no plots per person:

I am a big fan of the City of Vancouver's Greenest City initiative that among other goals has supported creation of many new community gardens in the past few years, but I believe more gardens are still needed. What is the right number? That I cannot say. But I would suggest this map could be used to help plan where additional gardens may be needed from a spatial equity perspective. Although policy makers and advocates should also weigh other variables such as income level of communities. Additionally, there may be relatively less need for gardens in currently 'underserved' areas of the city where single family homes may have back yard gardens that may seem to negate the demand for community gardens.

That said, as a proud member of the Cypress Community Garden in Kitsilano, community gardens have a much greater impact beyond increasing local food security. In my experience gardens have an important role in increasing community social connectedness, which has in turn been linked in a recent Vancouver Coastal Health survey to improved sense of health and well-being. So with each new garden that is planted, we may in fact be growing a healthier community for generations to come.

CLICK HERE TO SEE MY THE INTERACTIVE MAP OF ALL COMMUNITY GARDENS

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