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.
One thing the extra school tax debate has brought to light is how challenging 8th grade math is for people, especially those living in homes valued over $3M. Journalists also seem to have trouble putting outrageously wrong statements into perspective, so here is a simple calculator on how much extra school tax people will owe depending on their home value, years until home is sold, expected changes in the real estate market, interest rates on deferred (through government program or second mortgage) taxes.
In the City of Vancouver operators of short term rentals now need to obtain a license from the city to legally operate. There are restrictions on what units can be rented out short term. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but here is the main point. Licenses are only available for people that want to rent out their primary residence, that is the place where they reside at least half a year.
Last year we took a detailed look at Single Family teardowns in Vancouver, that is houses in RS or “Single Family” zoning that got torn down. We focused exclusively on those homes in RS zoning because these have to be replaced by another, often bigger, Single Family home. Using historical data we build a probabilistic model to predict future teardowns in Vancouver. If you haven’t taken the time yet to read through the data story, you probably should do that right now.
Jim has been using the Copernicus building height data for select European cities to understand the height profiles of cities. Building heights by distance from city centre in London and Paris, from 2012 EU Copernicus data. On average, buildings in Paris are taller throughout. pic.twitter.com/rtGiiBC7pd
— Jim Gleeson (@geographyjim) May 11, 2018 We thought these were pretty cool. Sadly we don’t have a dataset like this for Canadian metro areas, but we can hack together something similar using LIDAR survey data.
