PtboContext

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

Destinations
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!

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Corridors
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.

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Population
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.

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A population slide was including in the August 2021 Transportation Master Plan presentation. There were maps of population and employment density for 2018 and 2051. Comparing a population by acre 2016 map to the 2018 data, accounting for differences in regions and employment and using knowledge of the city you can quality check... uh oh.

I will point out a few anomalies in the 2018 map that appeared in the presentation: That's enough... obviously studying some edge cases is enough for a quality check. Their 2018 map is wrong. Do I trust their projections?
 * There is a high density blob just under the word Selwyn along the north edge of the city. 2020 satellite photos show it as undeveloped land.
 * There are a couple of blobs of higher density in the west end (east side of Fair Ave, along Ireland Dr) that get less dense in 2051 and they show as pretty evenly dense in the census data - maybe it's a neighbourhood of work at home folks who are going to retire.
 * There is a small triangle in the industrial park (above the 7/115 label) that is about 2.5 acres and shows density of 50+/acre... so um 125 staff at Nurse Scrap Metal?? In 2051 it's in the 0.1-9.9 bucket. Census connects it to the streets to the east - do you think anyone lives in there?
 * Finally along the south side of Lansdowne north of Harper Park there's a zero population and employment area. Except for the two hotels, car dealership, restaurants, Best Buy, etc.

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