We started CensusMapper in 2015, and it’s hard to believe that it’s already six years old. And with the first release of the 2021 census just a few months away it’s a good time for a review. And a preview of what could possibly come in the future.
TL;DR CensusMapper has outgrown it’s status as a personal side project and is now widely used by researchers, government officials and staff, non-profit organizations, and the general public.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
New parking proposal just dropped! As Vancouver City Council once again discusses parking it seems like a good time to give a brief overview of the trade-offs involved, with special focus on the progressivity of parking permit fees. Vancouver proposed to introduce a city-wide parking permit program, requiring residents to buy a $45/year parking permit to park their vehicles on city streets (reduced to $5 for people with low incomes), or pay a $3 overnight visitor parking fee.
We noticed a lot of recent traffic to our blog post on the 2019 elections, so maybe that means that, now that all districts have been called, we should update the post with 2021 data. We will just lazily run the code from the old post with the new data. And given that the outcome was overall quite similar, we can also leave the text/commentary largely unchanged. Which makes life nice and easy for us.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology) We know transnational ownership of properties is real. But how should we define it? And how many properties are owned by who where?
First to definitions. We’re primarily interested in ownership of dwellings, where we can define ownership of properties in terms of titles and – in the relatively rare case of corporate ownership – in terms of beneficial ownership. Given this start, we can define transnational ownership of properties in at least two ways, the key distinction being how we locate property owners.
BC now shares data on the vaccination status of cases and hospitalizations in their weekly Data Reports. This is progress, although calling it “data” is reaching. What is shared is graphs that need manual scraping to be turned into (approximate) data.
The numbers themselves aren’t particularly meaningful. Vaccines aren’t 100% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID (approximated by “cases” in BC) or hospitalizations. This means that as more people get vaccinated, there will be more cases and hospitalizations among the vaccinated population.
