Transportation
I have played with Mapzen’s Isochrone serivce in the past with a simple visualization of walksheds.
Recently Mazen updated the isochrone API to allow for a more fine-grained selection of exactly what transit services to include or exclude in transit routing, and they created an amazing mobility explorer based on that.
Partially motivated by chatting with two TransLink planners I decided to riff off of that and take a look at how well TransLink serves different parts of Vancouver.
Just saw a comment on the Pricetags blog pointing to a nice master’s thesis investigating various TOD metrics around skytrain stations. I got curious how the 2011 transit mode share compares to the earlier census years listed in the thesis. And how the mode share varies spatially.
With CensusMapper at my finger tips and building on the visuals from the previous post this is an easy exercise.
We again simply map our concentric circles around the stations, but this time we turn them into pie charts to show the commute to work mode share.
Just saw this excellent post looking at density around transit stations today and though I should pull out some numbers to go with the pretty visuals. And with CensusMapper’s new capabilities of populating custom geometries with census data estimates it’s super-easy to do.
Population density is only one measure of interest here, job density or amenities density would be others. But for now let’s focus on population, so how many people live near the rapid transit stations.
Surrey published a beta version of their traffic loop counts, which is pretty awesome. Real life traffic data is very exciting, and there are lots of fun things one could do with that. So last night I decided to take a look and make a quick map. Nothing exciting yet, just to feel may way around what’s there. To keep things simple I again took advantage of the awesome Tangram mapping enginge and turned it onto the traffic loop data.
The other day at the SFU’s City Conversations someone asked a question about space dedicated to roads, and how that could be unlocked to aid housing. He mentioned what percentage of space is currently dedicated to roads. I forgot the number, but I thought to myself that I should look that up for all Metro Vancouver communities. So here we go. Actually, it would be interesting to compare how land is allocated to all kinds of land uses across Metro Vancouver, not just roads.
