Almost three years ago I ran the numbers to identify “Vancouver’s most lucrative fire hydrant”.
Behold, Vancouver's most lucrative fire hydrant. 815 tickets issued in 7 years. Red curb markings might be advisable. Data via @VanOpenData pic.twitter.com/j4Po9UpiCc
— Jens von Bergmann (@vb_jens) February 1, 2017 Being a card-carrying Shoupista it’s high time for me to do an update. And looking back I can’t help but realize how my approach to data analysis, even about such trivial things as parking tickets, has changed since then.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
Property Tax Snacks Residential Property Taxes have been rising in Vancouver. As always, we’re seeing a lot of sturm and drang about the rise. But we think it’s ultimately a good thing. Why? Here’s three perspectives. From a fiscal perspective, property taxes pool our resources to enable our government to pursue projects and provide for the common good. They’re a big component of how we take care of each other and set priorities.
The long awaited first batch of data from the Canadian Housing Survey came out yesterday. The Canadian Housing Survey (CHS) is a new survey that aims give a better idea of well housing needs of Canadians are met.
Right now there are four tables publicly available, and we will give a quick tour of what’s out there, with a focus on Metro Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal and Calgary.
This post is meant as a quick overview of what’s available right now, the code is available on GitHub for anyone that wants to explore this further.
Metro Vancouver is growing, both in terms of population and jobs. That means the number of people commuting to work is growing and putting a strain on our transportation system. The nature of that strain depends to a large extent on how people are getting to and from work. The Canadian census started collecting data on how people get to work in 1996, which allows us to see how commuters and commute choice have changed over time.
Canada is a large country, with some reasonably densely populated regions, and large areas that are sparsely populated. That makes it hard to map things. CensusMapper, our project to flexibly map Canadian census data, struggles with that. The choropleth maps can be quite misleading. The same problem comes up when mapping Canadian election data.
This map makes it virtually impossible to get a good reading of the distribution of votes.
