commuters

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%!

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 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).