suburban

Join a group of cyclists for a fun, friendly, and casual ride from traditional car-centric suburbia (Don Mills Centre) to Downtown City Hall.

Date: Monday May 31st 2010
Departure Time: 7am (be there before 7am for a brief intro and speeches)
Meeting Location: Don Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue East Southwest Corner

City of Toronto Councillor and Budget Chief Shelley Carroll has confirmed her attendance, and has been warming up for the ride recently. So get ready for a beautiful cycling week in the sun!

Toronto Annual Group Commute from Don Mills

Live on the east side of the Don Valley near Lawrence Avenue? Riding across the Lawrence Avenue bridge can be challenging for some. There will be a pre-ride westbound across the Lawrence Avenue bridge departing from Lawrence Avenue East and Underhill (Northeast corner) at 6:30am.

Toronto's centre trumps the suburbs in the numbers of commuter and utilitarian cyclists, but that doesn't mean there aren't still a lot of cyclists all over the city. The difference, however, between centre and suburbs is that cyclists in the suburbs are spread thinly over an area five times as big as the central urban area.

In this map I've divided Toronto into two regions: urban centre and suburban. This division is mostly based on population density with the dense urban centre bounded by Keele to Woodbine and St. Clair, and the less dense suburbs everything outside of that.

Working with two sources I was able to get some reasonable - though rough - numbers on the centre/suburb split of utilitarian cyclists (those who use the bike for work, school, errands, shopping or visiting) and commuter cyclists (those who use bikes as their primary commuter mode). Commuter cyclists are really also utilitarian cyclists so my map assumes the Census commuter cyclists to be a sub-set of the Decima utilitarian cyclists (though this is a bit of cheating since the data was collected quite differently).