Friday, January 1, 2010

A Labour of Love

I've been trying to convince Statistics Canada to give me a free copy of a map they sell for a thousand dollars, which contains the census tracts of all the metropolitan areas in Canada. So far, no luck, but we'll see...

In the meantime, I spent a few hours tracing over the census tracts of downtown Montréal in the Epi Info shapefile editor, and managed to create a map covering an area from Pie-IX to NDG, and from the river to the A-40.

I also wrote a small program to repeatedly query Census Tract Profile data, which you don't seem to be able to download for more than one census tract at a time, and compile it into one big data file.

So now I can make maps covering a variety of themes, from language to education to employment and mode of transportation used to get to work.

My first map shows what percentage of residents of each neighbourhood either walk or cycle to work.

(Click to enlarge)

Not surprisingly a lot of people who live right downtown walk or cycle to work, but there are some zones further out where people do as well. The two areas that stick out, Lower Westmount / Saint-Henri and the Plateau / Rosemont, are also pretty mixed residential/commerce neighbourhoods, so perhaps it's people who live near where they work...?

2 comments:

  1. I grew up in lower Westmount and my dad used to walk to work, which was downtown. It was probably about a 30-40 minute walk, but he liked to do it. Three of my neighbours did the same thing. I know, of course, that's not representative. It is an easy walk though.

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  2. I walked from downtown to Westmount the other day (well, as far as the AMC Forum) and it was NOT easy. Sara and I got caught out by the dreaded windchill factor near Guy-Concordia. ;)

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