Healthy City Maps: Physical Activity

Showing posts with label Physical Activity. Show all posts

Design Review of Hinge Park Based on The Seven Cs Framework for Evaluating Natural Play Environments

This presentation provides an introduction to a new community park that is generally referred to as Hinge Park, although has not been formally named by the Vancouver Parks Board. This park is located next to the 2010 Olympic Athletes Village, or what is now known as the Southeast False Creek Neighbourhood. Overall this park is a wonderful example of a master planned site that provides unique elements for play and relaxation.

The presentation includes a unique site tour created using Google Earth Pro, and it describes the park design elements and how they support the broader design goals of the community. There is also discussion of the artificial habitat island (or beer island as it is often called), the planning policies of the city that are supported by this project. The presentation also describes the Seven Cs, an evidence-based framework for evaluating the quality of natural outdoor play spaces for children. Several lessons for the City of Toronto are also suggested.

This presentation was delivered in an urban park planning class in the Master of Urban Planning program at Ryerson University in Toronto.

The following slide summarizes my own personal evaluation of this space:

2014 BC Commuter Challenge Participation Maps

Last year, I helped BEST prepare some maps showing participation in their BC Commuter Challenge, and this year I was asked to help out again. Below are some maps I volunteered to create using the trip data for over 3,000 participants from over 250 companies in Metro Vancouver. Enjoy!

Arbutus Corridor: Greenway or Railway?

Given the recent CBC news story about CP Rail considering running freight trains along the Arbutus Corridor through the center of Vancouver, I decided we needed a map or two. My personal interest is focused on the northern portion of the corridor, along 6th ave where I have a garden plot in Cypress Garden. This garden is one of six community gardens located on City of Vancouver owned land next to the CP Rail right-of-way, that would be significantly disrupted if industrial activities were to resume along the Arbutus Corridor.

Another thing to consider, there are approximately 22,000 residents living within 250 metres of the tracks. I think they may be concerned about new cargo trains moving through their front yard.

In my opinion, there is absolutely no feasible way there will ever be another train on the current tracks. I think CP rail is trying to force the City to buy their land for several hundred million dollars.

Please also visit my recent post about Cypress Community Garden that shows detailed view of 64 garden plots on the City of Vancouver right-of-way next to the CP railway land.

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.

Percent that Commute by Bicycle

Percent that Commute by Public Transportation

Mean Commute Time (new survey question added to 2011 NHS!)

Pecha Kucha Presentation: Mapping Healthy Built Environments

I am very grateful for having had the opportunity deliver a Pecha Kucha presentation at the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects Annual Conference called 'Depth of Field’. My goal for this presentation was to convey my love for maps and my belief that GIS should be utilized more widely in the practice of landscape architecture to analyze multiple scales and layers of context surrounding site-specific work. I illustrated my talk with many maps I created at the Human Early Learning Partnership and other exploratory projects I created out of personal interest. Please post below the video if you have any questions or comments!

Running Routes and Yoga Studios

This post explores two new experimental maps I created after browsing the City of Vancouver (CoV) Open Data site and reviewing my archive of GPS data from workouts over the past year. What do these two topics have in common you may ask? Both contain spatial data about WHERE people become healthier, indoors and out. I recently discovered the CoV publishes all current business licence information and for some reason my first thought was "I wonder where all the yoga studios are!" After further inspection, I realized it was very difficult to tease apart yoga only studios from all other types of fitness facilities. So I opted to include all 'Fitness Center' records based on the business category, and all records containing the word 'yoga' in the Studio, and Instruction Business categories. The resulting selection contained 399 unique locations, that I was able to map with the X/Y coordinates provided in WGS1984 format. After re-projecting to UTM Zone 11, I used a kernel density function to calculate the point density within a 500m bandwidth. After some careful cartography, I am happy to share my first new map:

My second new map was over one year in the making, that is because I have been collecting about 80% of my running and cycling activities using a Garmin Forerunner 405. I usually do this to track my total workout distance, pace, elevation gain, and interval times, but this was a nice way to get some value added out of the data. First of all, I downloaded the 77 workouts from the Garmin Connect website as individual .KML files. I then used Google Earth to bundle these all into a single .KMZ. This trick saved me a lot of work over importing each .GPX file directly from my watch and converting them one by one to shapefiles. After importing the .KMZ file to ArcMap, I simply converted the KMZ. to a new projected the line file in a geodatabase. Finally, I proceeded to run a kernel density function with a 100m bandwidth as shown below:

As you can see I tend to run around the False Creek and Stanley Park seawalls while my cycling adventures are more diverse. I may be the first to have done this type of route mapping in Vancouver; however, there is also a great example using Nike+ data in New York City that I discovered after designing my map. I would love to get access to a large data-set like MapMyRun.com and create a running density map for the whole city. Please let me know if you have done any thing like this or have seen other great examples online?

Physical Activity Mapping with Strava

Last week while riding my road bike with a new friend, I was enlightened by a tale of a new website/app that allows you to upload GPS tracks of your running/cycling efforts and compare your results across specific segments with thousands of other users from your own neighbourhood and around the world. Here is an example of a especially challenging hill I climb on my daily commute from home to UBC - it is particularly rewarding to race 200 other people as I ride:

I am also very impressed by the other features for viewing your route, speed, elevation and heart rate all simultaneously. I have used other products before like Polar Protrainer, Garmin Training Centre, and MapMyRun/Ride but none come close to being this slick:

If you would like to learn more you can visit www.strava.com or visit my personal page here: http://app.strava.com/athletes/367619 and feel free to follow me or give me kudos!

Healthy City Maps

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