Healthy City Maps: Walkability

Showing posts with label Walkability. Show all posts

My Three Minute Thesis (3MT)

Today I entered a speech competition at Ryerson University called Three Minute Thesis or 3MT. I was challenged to present my Masters Research Project (MRP) in 180-seconds, showing only one static slide, and without any notes or cue cards of any kind. Although I did not win, I received great feedback and I was happy to embrace the opportunity distil the key messages of my research, and try to communicate my work to an audience with no urban planning background. Here is what I can up with, as performed live today:

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.

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!

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.

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.

Dogs of Vancouver

I love dogs. People who own dogs are also statistically healthier - many owners meet their daily physical activity guidelines through dog walking alone! My own experience has also demonstrated that dog owners have more social interaction as dogs love to introduce their owners to each other.

I have always wondered how many dogs there are in Vancouver, so I finally decided to check if the Vancouver Open Data Site has any information about pet ownership. Indeed, there is a complete list of all registered animals. This is definitely not representative of ALL dogs in the city, as many are not registered, but I figured it is a fairly good sample. The list includes some other animals too, but over 95% are dogs. In total there are about 16,000 records, and I was surprised to discover there was nearly 50% more boy dogs than girl dogs - if you can explain this I would love to hear your ideas?

I was really hoping each dog would have a home address, but sadly there were no spatial attributes. However, there were other data to play, including dog species and name. I could not resist having a little fun with these text attributes on the following two figures:

1,000 Most Popular Dog Names in Vancouver

Click here to view this image in full size so you can zoom in.

100 Most Popular Pet Species in Vancouver

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.

This was a simple map I just had to create after seeing the open data on the City of Vancouver website. Be safe and have fun!

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.

Is Mode Share Related to Walkability?

Based on a suggestions from a friend, in this post I will connect my two previous posts and evaluate if people who live in more walkable areas actually do in fact walk more? I should begin by saying there have been many comprehensive studies published that clearly establish this relationship, see for example Active Transportation Benefits of Walkable Approaches to Community Design in BC produced by Dr. Larry Frank and his team at the UBC Health and Community Design Lab or the work of Walkonomics and Walkscore. However, my goal in this project is to test this relationship using two new spatial data sets that have not been previously linked. I conducted this analysis by spatially joining the home postal code locations for 3,657 BC Commuter Challenge participants to my WalkMap data set for the Metro Vancouver area. These data are shown on the map below:

To provide I grouped the WalkMap scores for each home location into five quintiles with about 720 participants in each category. Finally, I summarized the number of trips by mode within each category as shown below - it is important to emphasize that this breakdown is not representative sample of the overall mode share for Metro Vancouver because these data are based on trips during the week-long BC Commuter Challenge.

Mode Share by Walkability Quintile

I was happy to confirm that people who live in more walkable areas did in fact walk more. However, I was somewhat surprised to see that cycling and transit mode share was nearly constant between scenarios. This brings up the issue of whether I should add a transit component score to improve the practicality of my WalkMap model. What do you think: should a measure of access to transit be included in my WalkMap model or should this be a separate TransitMap-type score?

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