I just got home from a weekend up at a friend’s cottage. It’s an annual birthday tradition and it’s always a great time. A good cottage weekend can do wonders to reinvigorate yourself. I am ready for the week.

But since the Pan Am Games closing ceremony fireworks are about to kick-off and I want to go watch them from my sun deck, I don’t have a lot of time to write a post. So instead, I thought I would share a few of my photos from the weekend.

The first photo is near Shelburne, Ontario. The wind turbines are from the Amaranth Wind Farm, which is the largest wind energy installation in Canada.

This is the Georgian Bay. I love swimming in this water.

Cottage reading: Monocle.

The wood shop. There’s a lot of creative talent at this particular cottage.

Creemore = cottage.

All of these photos were also posted to my Instagram if you’d like to follow me there. The last photo was from Snapchat (donnelly_b).

Regular scheduled programming will resume tomorrow. I have a great guest post queued up on road pricing. I can’t wait to share it.

At the beginning of this year I wrote a post about a mobile tracking app called Moves that I had heard about through my friend Sachin Monga. He had just published a beautiful set maps showing where he physically spent his time in both Toronto and San Francisco.

His post spurred me to download the app and at the end of my post I promised to share my own set of maps once I had collected enough data points. It’s only been about 3 weeks, but already my maps are starting to fill out, so I thought I would do a release.

The orange lines represent transport of some sort (car, subway, streetcar, and so on) and the green lines represent walking. I don’t cycle very often in the winter (I know, I’m a fair-weather cyclist), so you won’t see any of those lines just yet. However if I posted a map from the summer, I know it would look completely different.

Here’s a first one showing a regional scale:

Here’s a second one showing the city of Toronto:

And here’s a third one showing mostly downtown:

What’s interesting about these maps is how much you can tell about me and the way I move around the city.

For one, there’s a good chance I ski or snowboard given that I’m driving up to Collingwood, Ontario in the winter. You can also see how heavily dependent I am on the Yonge subway line, which is the thickest orange line in the middle of downtown. It’s also interesting to see how localized I am within my neighborhood (St. Lawrence Market). I walk to get groceries. I walk to the gym. I walk to coffee. And the list goes on.

This is fairly typical for people living in urban neighborhoods, but it would be interesting to see where it applies in the city and where it begins to fall apart. I would also imagine that there’s a correlation to the area’s Walk Score, although this (Moves) might actually be a better measure since it’s usage data.

Either way, imagine what cities could do if they had this sort of data for every resident. They would be able to see precise resident flows and then determine exactly where transit and infrastructure investments should be made instead of politicking to determine where they should be made.

That time is coming.

I’m late in writing this blog post because I was up in Collingwood for the day snowboarding. I’m exhausted, but I do have something to say.

One of the things I always find interesting when I’m driving north of the city is how far Toronto’s major north-south streets extend. Go out to Aurora or Newmarket and you’ll still come across many familiar faces such as Jane, Keele, Dufferin, Bathurst and Yonge Street. And the distance between each of them is exactly the same as it is in the city: 2 kilometres.

This may not seem like much of a big deal, but have you ever wondered how this street grid was established?

These streets are actually concession roads. And they were used to subdivide undeveloped land in Upper and Lower Canada into a grid that could then be further subdivided into farming lots. Each square of the grid is 2 km x 2 km, or 1,000 acres.

Look at a map of the Greater Toronto Area and you’ll see it:

But what I find most intriguing about this grid system is that it was designed around farming—not our current use case. The intent was to further subdivide each 1,000 acre lot into smaller 100 acre farming lots. And these concession roads were for access—they weren’t city blocks.

By comparison, there’s another city that’s famously run off a regular street grid. You may have heard of it. It’s called New York. And its street grid was established in the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811. Some even go so far as to say that it’s “the single most important document in New York’s development." 

But New York’s grid is much different than the one I’m talking about. Because of its smaller scale (20 blocks a mile going north-south), New York’s was decidedly urban. It was meant for city building.

Now, in the case of Toronto, concession roads obviously never stopped us from developing a thriving city. We filled in each square to make them as urban as we needed them to be. But as planning ideals changed, so did the infilling of those squares. Our grid was flexible enough to accommodate everything from farm land to suburban subdivisions.

But I can’t help but wonder how the Greater Toronto Area would have turned out had we, quite simply, chosen a different size of square. What if instead of 2 km x 2 km, we had made them 1 km x 1 km? Or what if we made them even smaller? What would the Toronto region look like today?

Sometimes it may seem like a simple decision, but in reality the implications are huge.