Healthy City Maps: Open Data

Showing posts with label Open Data. Show all posts

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"

Cycling Networks in Vancouver, Toronto and Chicago

The following three maps show the cycle tracks (protected bike lanes), painted bike lanes, shared lanes (sharrows) and other types of routes for cycling. Each map is shown at the same scale and colours, to provide a direct comparison of the network form and character. I hope this helps inspire toronto to learn from the other two leading cities in North America.

This map shows one dot for every person in Toronto. The data are from the 2011 National Household Survey, and shown by Dissemination Areas, the smallest unit socio-economic data are available from Statistics Canada. Also see my similar maps of Vancouver showing visible minorities and clusters based on immigrant origin.

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!

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.

What Vancouver Complains About: 12,1360 311 Phone Calls

Did you know that anyone in Vancouver can dial 311 and a friendly operator will provide you with virtually any kind of information or file a work-order and send it to the appropriate City department? This is a wonderful service, but I was curious why people have called and if there were any surprising spatial patterns in the data.

I began by downloading an open data file from for August 2013 that contains about 12,1360 calls. I then created a proper address based on the location fields provided (block ranges and intersection pairs that were a real pain to clean up) Also, there are no meaningful categories in the source data, so I created a custom set of 14 categories based on the city department involved and the information provided in the comment field for each record. My initial map with about 12,000 points is below, you may click on each point to see what the icons represent:

I also decided to focus on illegal street dumping to see if there were any interesting spatial patterns. there were a total of 1,038 reports in a single month, which alone is amazing! Also it turns out there were three distinct clusters as shown in the screenshot below:

Also, here is the full map of dumping locations - you can also click here to view the actual Google Fusion Tables dataset where you can filter the results and create density maps:

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.

I made this map to present at the Cypress Community 2014 Garden Annual General Meeting. My goal was to create a high quality base map that can be used for new member orientation, garden planning, and community outreach. If you are a member of another garden in Vancouver, contact me and I would be happy to create a similar map for your garden.

I also created the second map above more recently to address the controversy over the land area that CP Rail is claiming may need to be cleared. It was our members' understanding that the right of way was 20 feet from the centre of the tracks, shown in yellow. However, CPR is now claiming they will clear the full area up to the white property line. This would be a tragic loss as you can see the different between the yellow and white lines is approximately have of the community garden area, and all of the beautiful flower gardens along the north walking area.

Assessed Property Value Changes in Vancouver from 2013 to 2014

In my last blog post I mapped out the property values for every parcel in Vancouver and I received many questions about how values have changed over time. So voila - below is a new map that shows the percentage change of property values between 2013 and 2014, based on BC Assessment data distributed by the City of Vancouver Open Data Catalog. Note this is a zoomable map so simply double click or scroll to zoom into any area of interest.

According to a report in the January 27th issue of the Vancouver planning magazine Novae Res Urbis, Vancouver city council had a presentation last week from Dharmesh Sisodraker, the deputy assessor for BC Assessment, who said overall "the total growth in the roll was 2.36 per cent, including non-market change and market components." He added "this growth can be compared to the 2.87 per cent increase for the 2013 roll." He also recalled the growth was approximately "17 per cent the year before that, so this trend shows a leveling off of values in the city over the last couple of years."

He went on to say that "four neighbourhoods have seen the greatest amount of growth in value percentage-wise since 2010 - Dunbar, Southlands, Shaughnessy and South Granville, primarily all primarily single-family neighborhoods." However, this year "values in the industrial-zoned sites in the [False Creek] flats have risen 20 to 25 per cent generally and up to 35 per cent for investment properties." Additionally, "Mount Pleasant, has had land-value increases of 30 to 40 per cent."

To learn more about this experimental mapping project please click here to visit my previous post. You will find maps showing 2014 property values overall and per sq. m. and information about how property values are related to population density and zoning.

As always, please contact me by email or on twitter (@AnthonyNSmtih) if you have any questions!

As a follow-up to my earlier post about commute times in Vancouver, I opted to try out a new interactive map to show the same data for the Greater Toronto Area:

View Larger Map

The range of data is between 25-40 mins, and displayed using seven colour bands with an equal number of census tracts per colour - green areas have the shortest commutes while the red commutes are longer, on average. As always, remember these data are for the median of all commuters per area, so individual commutes may be much shorter or longer.

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.

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