Recently the City of Vancouver pivoted their planning for RS (“single family”) and RT (“duplex”) neighbourhoods from downzoning, to slow the pace of teardowns to adding infill as an incentive to to keep older buildings through extensive renovations, to now proposing the Making Room program to allow stratification and higher unit density, and Mayor Robertson adding an amendment to direct staff to look into also allowing multiplexes.
This change in policy grew out of a series of consultation processes, and it is quite interesting to browse through them chronologically and observe the shift in how participants talk about low density zoning.
In the past weeks I got interested in several news stories on aboriginal youth admissions to correctional services, adult incarceration rates and frequency of getting carded. I have this habit that when something interests me I go grab the original data and take a look myself. Having done this three times on related issues within a fairly short timeframe I decided to throw my code snippets together into a blog post.
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.
Skytrain station data
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.
CANSIM switched over to the New Dissemination Model (NDM) this past weekend. What this means is that we now have better organized CANSIM data. Yay. But it also broke my R package to easily access and process cansim data. Not so yay. Luckily it was an easy fix to switch things over to the NDM, and the cleaning of data gets even easier. And I also build in functionality to access tables through the old trusty cansim numbers.
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.
