PtboContext

When thinking about where to build streetcars you have to think about various contexts.

The travel destinations are one context. This map is based on City of Ptbo data showing buildings in selected categories. It also shows some downtown boundaries and identifies the what they call the linear city structure (main roads and rail). Let us know what is missing!



There is a view of just the linear structure of the city. This dataset was obtained in December 2017 and was part of the official planning process. In this view colour has been used to distinguish transportation corridors from intensification & transportation corridors. The heavy rail line is also shown. Given recent (pre-election) announcements the rail line will be getting upgrades and more frequent service. There is a research topic to understand heavy and light rail interactions.



This map is based on the 2016 census using dissemination blocks, which is the smallest mapping area used to report data (privacy, etc). Each block reports how many people live it in but there are know glitches with the data caused by either non-compliant reporting or processing errors but it's still reasonably useful. One of the challenges however is that the blocks are defined rather flexibly, evolve over time and are designed to have roughly the same population. So sparsely populated areas have big blocks and typically in a downtown environment each street block is a dissemination block. This caused problems for making a useful map because a large area, say a golf course or park, sometimes gets grouped with an adjacent apartment building. The apartment building has lots of people and the park none (assuming rough sleepers don't fill in the census) but resulting polygon reports the large number of people. This can be addressed partially using the area of the block to give more of a density value. But I'm trying to report where people live more than where they are tightly clustered so I've computed this strange value: Pop^2/Area for this map. It deemphasises the parks and golf courses issue and still lets you see where apartments are clustered. The transit planning task should provide service near where people live.