How much is it to rent a 1 or 2 bedroom near a skytrain station?
A friend of mine is looking for a new rental, which reminded me that I always wanted to do a quick map of rents near skytrain stations. Should not be too hard.
First we need the skytrain stations, which we grab from TransitLand using our transitland R package that we used before to look at transit frequency in Vancouver.
How much space is taken up by roads right-of-ways?
Mitchell Reardon asked me a question about lanes in the City of Vancouver: “Do you happen to have a figure (or quick way to calculate) the number of laneways in Vancouver, and the amount of space they take up?” I have looked at the overall space taken up by roads before using the Metro Vancouver land use dataset, but never looked just at lanes. But that’s easy enough to do thanks to the streets package in Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue.
Playing with our new R API wrapper for transit data from Transitland
The other day I was catching a bus home later at night, which made me acutely aware that I should not take the frequent daytime transit in Vancouver for granted. On the ride home I decided to dig into this and grab some transit data. We have played with transit data before, but since this was going to be the second time it was high time for a quick R package to standardize our efforts and simplify things for the next time around.
Two days ago we took a first look at motor vehicle traffic counts, now it is time to turn to pedestrian lights. Everyone knows the “beg buttons” that pedestrians need to push for the pedestrian signal to turn green. If you forget to push the pedestrian light might stay red even if parallel motor vehicle traffic has a green light, all in the name of efficiency of motor vehicle traffic.
Measuring dropoff and pickup traffic.
School has started, and with it debate about people driving their kids to and from school is flaring up. And again people are questioning how much traffic is caused by this. As someone who bikes to school with his son every day I am keenly aware of the traffic mess around schools. But since I choose not to drive regularly, I don’t have a feeling for broader traffic patterns on non-school days to compare this too.
Too much data, too little time.
Mountain Doodles is an insomnia driven MountainMath side project, born out of random questions, trying to give partial answers through data.