cartography

Mapping the City is an ongoing series on the stories we can tell about people and places in Toronto through maps created by University of Toronto students and faculty.

In the third instalment, U of T News writer Romi Levine profiles the work of Alberto Leon-Garcia.

Read part one: how transit can fix access to jobs

Read part two: what Toronto's waterways can tell us

“It’s a map but it’s more of a platform to do smart things.”

That’s how Alberto Leon-Garcia, professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, describes the Connected Vehicles and Smart Transportation (CVST) project – an ambitious, interactive map of Toronto that gives you a real-time picture of how people get around the city.

“We took it upon ourselves to build a platform that would be able to, in a snapshot, tell us everything we needed to know about the transportation network,” says Leon-Garcia, who is the scientific director of CVST.

“There’s something like 4000 streams of data here,” says Leon-Garcia.

Everything from speeds in certain segments of the highway, bus locations, and bicycle rental occupancies, to different types of cameras is represented on the map.

The platform has many practical uses, says Leon-Garcia, like improving traffic flow, reducing travel times and providing traveller advisories.

The red, yellow and blue circles represent the number of data points in a specific location. Zoom in and you can see the specific points, like a fixed camera or even the view from a drone.

Leon-Garcia says the drones are used to show how a city could utilize the gadgets for effective traffic surveillance.

“You can see a lot further and you can pan – you can choose a direction – a lot better than fixed cameras,” he says.

“One of the things we’re exploring is the use of drones to gather real-time information about events in certain locations in the city,” says Leon-Garcia.

The drones could be used to share information with the city and services like police and paramedics, he says.

The most interesting application for the CVST map is its potential in a driverless-car future.

“As vehicles become autonomous, you’re going to need a control system that directs the flow of these autonomous vehicles across this map,” says Leon-Garcia.

There are also implications when those vehicles become powered by electricity.

“There’s the management of the movement of the vehicles themselves,” says Leon-Garcia, “but then there’s also the coordination with the power grid so there’s sufficient power where the vehicles go to be recharged.”

Maps like the CVST could also become a big environmental player.

“If you start looking at air quality, at putting sensors on energy consumption, if you start keeping track of the energy that’s used, this same map becomes a map of the carbon footprint in a region,” says Leon-Garcia.

He says tracking emissions is a step toward reducing them.

With support from Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation and the City of Toronto, Leon-Garcia sees CVST growing with the city.

“In terms of meeting the challenges of cities, the interplay between public transit, subway, buses, bicycles and vehicles, especially as the nature of vehicles changes, there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of how things can evolve for the better – it’s exciting,” he says.

Mapping the city: How transit can fix access to jobs in Toronto

lavende4 — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 19:32:05 +0000

Mapping the city: How transit can fix access to jobs in Toronto lavende4 Tue, 07/12/2016 - 15:32

Cutline

A map created by Steven Farber, Jeff Allen and Maria Grandez shows the number of jobs reachable by public transit within a 45 minute trip from each neighbourhood in the GTA

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

Geography and Planning

Mapping the City is an ongoing series on the stories we can tell about people and places in Toronto through maps created by University of Toronto students and faculty.

In the second instalment, U of T News writer Romi Levine profiles the work of Steven Farber.

Read the first part of the series here

Toronto is a sprawling city – one that keeps growing in all directions to accommodate the growing number of people who come to live here. But its vastness has made it hard to connect every part of the city with public transportation. That, in turn, has created inequalities in opportunity, especially between high and low income households.

Steven Farber, assistant professor of Geography and Planning at University of Toronto, set out to find the link between transportation and opportunity by creating a series of maps with the help of U of T students Jeff Allen and Maria Grandez.

“I showed the levels of opportunities in terms of how easily people can access jobs in the city by the different modes of transportation,” he says.

People who have cars have greater access to a larger selection of jobs, Farber says. Those who do not have cars have a much smaller geographical area to find employment.

Those without cars who live in downtown Toronto or along the subway line, he says, can access 30 per cent of the jobs car owners can. The number gets even smaller when you move away from the city centre.

“As you get further and further out from there, the accessibility ratios really drop off really really quickly – down to 5 to10 per cent for much of the city and less than 5 per cent outside the city of Toronto,” Farber says.

“For now, car drivers have it made,” he says. “Even if you complain about traffic and congestion and slower trips – if you take the situation of drivers and compare it to transit users, they’re still way ahead of the game.”

The key to closing the gap in accessibility is in beefing up Toronto’s public transportation, says Farber.

“When we’re trying to use transit to address these accessibility differences, you have to think about which low income neighbourhoods need transit investment more,” he says.

“The map clearly shows there’s huge swathes of suburban Toronto – Scarborough, North Etobicoke, North York, that are really lacking in transit connectivity to jobs in the region.”

One of the maps Farber and his students created evaluates the effectiveness of some of the proposed transit expansions – including the Scarborough LRT and subway extension as well as the Eglinton Crosstown – to increase accessibility to opportunity for transit users. In the map (below), the dark outlines show the areas where a new transit line would heighten accessibility for transit users from below 30 per cent to above 30 percent of what car owners can access.

It holds particular significance as Toronto City Council votes on a long-term transit plan.

“What we found is that the Eglinton Crosstown has the largest impact on increasing accessibility – which really makes sense,” says Farber. “Any line that cuts through the middle of the city from end to end is going to have very very large impact on increasing accessibility.”

He says the Scarborough transit expansion will greatly benefit those who live along the proposed lines, but “will do almost nothing for people who are just offsite.”

“Really what we should be thinking about is how we’re going to fund more widespread transit expansion throughout the suburbs and especially try to hit neighbourhoods where bringing transit will improve the quality of life and participation levels of people living there,” says Farber.

He says the best way to do so is by improving on existing bus routes.

“We need to figure out how to make those routes more efficient and faster because we have the reach,” Farber says. “There are very few places in the city where there’s not a bus within 400 metres of someone’s house.”

Farber hopes to get this message across through his maps. He says displaying data in a visual way makes the information seem more personal to those who view it.

“I think it’s a hugely powerful medium for transmitting information and getting people to think about their surroundings and think about their city in a new way,” Farber says. “It really gets the neurons firing.”