statistics

Toronto cyclists face a dangerous combination of streetcar tracks and motorists, the Bicyclists' Injuries and the Cycling Environment Study (BICE study) has found in its preliminary results. The BICE study is coordinated by the Cycling in Cities program at the University of British Columbia, which interviewed 690 cyclists injured and admitted to hospital in Toronto and Vancouver in 2008 and 2009.

Injury by circumstance: preliminary results from BICE study at UBC

The initial analysis chose 150 interviews from each city and created a picture of the different environments each city's cyclists encounter. For downtown Toronto the researchers found that one-third of injuries involved streetcar tracks and a sizable portion of that involved cyclists falling because they are avoiding double-parked cars, cars moving out of parking spaces or drivers opening doors. The cyclists then slip or get their wheel stuck in the streetcar track.

The other big portion of downtown Toronto injuries involved "dooring" where the cyclists hit the car door because the motorist or passenger opened the door as the cyclists passed. This contrasts with Vancouver where most injuries involved car collisions.

Us cyclists have been saying for awhile: "Doesn't it look like there are more cyclists out there?" Well it's true. Cycling in Toronto is up 13% over the last decade - from 48% to 54%. The number of utilitarian cyclists - those who use their bikes to get to work, school, visit, or run errands - rose an astounding 45%: from 20% in 1999 to 29% in 2009. How do we know this? The City of Toronto has released their 2009 Cycling survey and all the numbers are up.

Will we have to wait another 10 years for an update? The plan now, says Dan Egan of Transportation Services, is to do the survey every 3 years, timed to coincide with municipal elections. Get the numbers out just before an election and you've got some good fodder for pushing politicians.

Some other interesting finds: motorists and cyclists feel that there is more respect for each other, despite the proverbial "War on Cars"; the largest increases in utilitarian cyclists is in the burbs: up about an average of 83%!

The map geeks at the Toronto star have outdone themselves with this google map of Commuter cyclists by census tract (a small area as defined by Statistics Canada's census). It shows the breakdown of how people commute who live in that area. The census tracts with red boundaries are over 10%.

Politicians need to stop treating cyclists as if they are marginal. If you lived in an area with cycling at 13% and showed this data to your councillor maybe a lightbulb would go off in their head. It's still a minority but not one they can always safely ignore.

It doesn't address who commutes through the area. For instance, the area southwest of Dundas West and Dufferin has 11.5% of commutes by bicycle, yet there may be many people driving through from the suburbs which will water down that percentage on the road.

The highest percentage is on the Toronto Islands at 29%. This is unsurprising, since no cars are allowed. It's odd to think that 18% of them still drive to work - they must be parking cars downtown.

The second highest is in Parkdale at 14%! This area bounded by Dundas, Queen, Sorauren and Lansdowne has an above the Toronto average household income and is mostly detached houses with a few condos.

The core of the highest rates of bike commuting is in the Annex - bounded by Bloor, Dovercourt, Spadina and Dundas. Leslieville and East York aren't too far behind.

Blogger Daniel Harren provides us with a nice overview of Bixi use over a typical work day.

Have you ever been unable to find a bixi? Or unable to find a parking spot?

I’ve downloaded a map of the Bixi system every 5 minutes for the last couple weeks, and got to working on an animation.

As the morning progresses the residential stations empty and the downtown stations fill up.

Note: "red indicate a station is full; transparent ones are empty. Sizes are roughly proportional."

I expect someone to step forward once Toronto gets its "Bixi".

Peter Milczyn, City Councillor for Etobicoke - Lakeshore has results for an unscientific survey of ward citizens and their cycling habits and views. We don't know how many people responded to the survey, and those who did respond are pre-selected to want to respond and perhaps liked Milczyn. Still there are some interesting trends for a Toronto suburb.

Some highlights:

• 90% own a bike
• 27% commute by bike
• 61% use existing bike lanes
• 41% would ride on a road with no bike lane, 39% only at certain times of day
• 55% fully support bike lanes, 26% in some locations
• most suitable locations for bike lanes: local roads 14%, collector roads 14%, minor arterial roads 19%, major arterial roads 12%, pathways and parks 22%, mixture of above 16%, nowhere 3%
• 38% see cyclist safety as the biggest concern with bike lanes, 16% see increased traffic congestion, 32% see disjointed bike lanes as biggest concern
• 58% would bike more often if more bike lanes were introduced
• 65% of drivers willng to share roads with cyclists
• 46% willing to give up a lane of traffic for dedicated bike lane, 23% only on certain roads

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).

This is my third map mashup. It compares the share of commuters who are cyclists with the location of Toronto Cyclists Union membership. The map shows that the richest deposits of potential bike union members are where there are already a high number of cycling commuters.

Like bike shops and bike accidents these areas are located in downtown and west of downtown. These could be considered the easy picking areas for increasing bike union membership. It's possible that the bike union's current attempts to create ward captains in every ward of Toronto is actually slowing the growth of the bike union membership. A concerted effort to recruit members in the core might have a bigger impact on the bike union and provide more resources to recruit members in the suburbs later on. I'd be interested to see if there are alternative conclusions.

Bicycle Mode Share and Accidents in Toronto

This is a third look at the Bike Modal Share of Toronto. In this map I layered the Bike Accident map from Patrick Cain's Toronto Star blog on top of the Census 2006 bicycle modal share in Toronto. By graphically I mean that I just took the two images rotated them until they lined up and prettied them up. Not very sophisticated but the results speak for themselves.