CensusMapper
Just came across this excellent flow map tool that takes a google sheet and turns it into an interactive flow map. It’s super-easy to use, here is a quick demo.
We are using the commuting flow data between census subdivisions from the 2016 census. First we load the required libraries
library(tidyverse) library(cancensus) #remotes::install_github("mountainmath/statcanXtabs") library(statcanXtabs) library(sf) library(googlesheets4) Next we create the google sheet for our flow map. It comes with three sheets, one defining overall properties, one defining the locations and one for the flows.
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.
After our recent posts on multi-census comparisons I was pointed to a semi-custom tabulation for census timelines back to 1971 for Vancouver and Toronto. That’s data for the 1971, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011 censuses on a common 2016 DA geography for the two CMAs. This is really cool, not just that it eliminates the need to tongfen the geographies, but in particular because Statistics Canada does not even haven publicly available geographic boundary files for censuses before 2001.
Canadian census data is freely available, alas not in a very convenient format for older data. Census data back to 1991 are available from Statistics Canada with an open data licence, digital geographic data is only available back to 2001. Older census data is available in digital format via paid subscription services from private entities with restrictive licences. But all data is available for free as open data in paper format.
Two days ago I gave an example using the new (to CensusMapper) 2001 census data to mix with 2006 data on a common geography based on dissemination areas. A question came up if this works for several censuses, not just for two. Yes, the TongFen package was built with exactly that in mind. Time for a quick demo.
For this we will look at the households spending between 30% and 100% of income on housing in the City of Toronto.
