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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.

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.

Bicycle Mode Share and Bike Shops in Toronto

It may come as no surprise that bike shops are located where people bike.

I had previously posted the Census map of bicycle commuters in Toronto. I thought it would be interesting to overlay other information on top. So I created an old fashioned "mashup of the bike shop locations (source: Bike Union website) and the map of the Bicycle Modal Share in Toronto. Not having access to the original census data, I had to just take the image and rotate the bike shop map so it roughly fit the census map. You see the result above.

There seems to be a pretty high correlation between bike shops and commuter cyclists. In a previous post I had wondered why bike shops couldn't survive in the east end. The really low modal split for cyclists in Scarborough gives a pretty good indication, though it appears that there might not be such a big problem in East York and Leslieville.

If were going to open a bike shop I'd look at this map carefully. There are some darker blue spots with few to no bike shops, such as Etobicoke, Toronto Islands, the Portlands and Leaside (I think).

The City staff in planning has analyzed Census of Canada 2006 commuter information to give an update on the number of people cycling in Toronto.

Cycling is also more common among people who live closer to downtown. For example, the bicycle mode share for the census tract located at College St. and Bathurst St. is 17%, while most suburban areas of the city have a bicycle mode share of less than 1%.

In 2006 1.7% of Torontonians rode their bicycle to work. The average in Canada of 1.3% is higher than Toronto suburbs' and the Golden Horseshoe region's modal share of 0.5%. Why is that? There is the obvious answer that outside of urban centres cycling requires riding long-distances with high-speed traffic. But Hamilton is fairly urban. The other likely factors are that cycling infrastructure in these regions is not adequate and there is a weak cycling culture.

But we still need to have a sense of perspective that 1.7% is not that much higher than 0.5%, especially compared to locations with about 30% of all trips made by bike such as Denmark or The Netherlands. In Toronto the West-end and Toronto Islands are approaching those numbers. The Toronto Islands allow no personal cars so that makes sense. As for Toronto's west-end there's still a lot of work to make cyclists feel as if the City cares.

Just in time for the Spring cycling rush, the Toronto Star posted a new Map of the Week: Bike accidents. This map of "accidents" on the streets of Toronto gives a quick and handy guide to the cyclist-related carnage on Toronto's streets.

I haven't studied this map in great detail yet, but it doesn't look like things have changed that much from other similar maps I've seen in the past. Some typical observations on these maps:

• The core east-west streets (Bloor, College, Queen, etc.) seem to have solid patterns and high concentrations of "accidents".
• Some of the north-south streets like Bay and University look bad too.
• The number of cycling "accidents" drops quickly once you get out of the core. Most likely because the number of cyclists drops too.
• There are lots of "accidents" even when a bike lane is in place (e.g. Davenport).
• This map also confirms that there are cyclists in Scarborough (unfortunately, they have "accidents" too).

According to The Star, who saved you plenty of time by not having to click on ALL of the dots, here are the worst intersections in Toronto:

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