This is a language map of Toronto showing the most commonly spoken non-official languages at home. (It only counts individuals who reported speaking a single non-official language most commonly at home, as opposed to multiple ones.) The map you see below is based on 2016 census data, but if you’d like to check out the previous census years, as well as an interactive version, you can do that here at Social Planning Toronto.
The top languages are also listed on the right of the map, with the exception of the gray areas. These areas indicate census tracts where English > 90%. I don’t know why French shows up as #13, since this map is supposed to be non-official languages.
In any event, green represents Chinese (includes Cantonese, Mandarin, and so on). Sky blue is Tagalog. And yellow is Tamil. I’ll let you play around with the map to explore the others. There shouldn’t be many surprises if you know Toronto well, but it’s still interesting to explore the clustering and the percentages. Some of the census tracts have a single non-official language representing 90%+ of the responses.
The biggest gains over the last decade – following the same methodology as the above mapping – were Tagalog, Farsi, Bengali, Arabic, and Pashto. And the biggest declines over this same time period were Italian, Tamil, Urdu, Punjabi, and Polish. But this data is only for the City of Toronto and so I suppose that a decline could also be because of people relocating to other parts of the region.
A big part of Toronto’s strength comes from exactly what you see in this map: the world in a city.
I’m taking next week off so that I can respond to emails from various places in Ontario and Quebec instead of from my desk. The out of office messages really fly at this time of year, so it’s usually a pretty good time to try for a recharge.
Because of that, this post feels appropriate.
Sahil Chinoy of the Washington Post recently looked at anonymous cell phone and vehicle data (from Here Technologies) to see how far you could drive in one hour if you were trying to escape the downtown of various U.S. cities on a Friday afternoon in the summer.
This exercise was done for 3 departure times on July 28, 2017: 4pm, 7pm and 10pm. The mappings all leverage 3 years of historical speed data.
Here is a first set of maps showing a few cities in the northeast and in the mid-atlantic. Every city is shown at the same scale so that they can be easily compared.
Today I came across this Reddit talking about how few census tracts there are in the United States with a population density greater than 150,000 people per square mile.
Basically, there’s a bunch in New York, one in San Francisco (Tenderloin), and one in Chicago that doesn’t really count because it’s an unusually small tract. Most other American cities don’t even come close.
Looking at this New York Times mapping of the 2010 US census data, it turns out there are neighborhoods in NYC that go well beyond 150,000 people per square mile. Here’s one census tract (#154) at just over 200,000 ppsm:
This is a language map of Toronto showing the most commonly spoken non-official languages at home. (It only counts individuals who reported speaking a single non-official language most commonly at home, as opposed to multiple ones.) The map you see below is based on 2016 census data, but if you’d like to check out the previous census years, as well as an interactive version, you can do that here at Social Planning Toronto.
The top languages are also listed on the right of the map, with the exception of the gray areas. These areas indicate census tracts where English > 90%. I don’t know why French shows up as #13, since this map is supposed to be non-official languages.
In any event, green represents Chinese (includes Cantonese, Mandarin, and so on). Sky blue is Tagalog. And yellow is Tamil. I’ll let you play around with the map to explore the others. There shouldn’t be many surprises if you know Toronto well, but it’s still interesting to explore the clustering and the percentages. Some of the census tracts have a single non-official language representing 90%+ of the responses.
The biggest gains over the last decade – following the same methodology as the above mapping – were Tagalog, Farsi, Bengali, Arabic, and Pashto. And the biggest declines over this same time period were Italian, Tamil, Urdu, Punjabi, and Polish. But this data is only for the City of Toronto and so I suppose that a decline could also be because of people relocating to other parts of the region.
A big part of Toronto’s strength comes from exactly what you see in this map: the world in a city.
I’m taking next week off so that I can respond to emails from various places in Ontario and Quebec instead of from my desk. The out of office messages really fly at this time of year, so it’s usually a pretty good time to try for a recharge.
Because of that, this post feels appropriate.
Sahil Chinoy of the Washington Post recently looked at anonymous cell phone and vehicle data (from Here Technologies) to see how far you could drive in one hour if you were trying to escape the downtown of various U.S. cities on a Friday afternoon in the summer.
This exercise was done for 3 departure times on July 28, 2017: 4pm, 7pm and 10pm. The mappings all leverage 3 years of historical speed data.
Here is a first set of maps showing a few cities in the northeast and in the mid-atlantic. Every city is shown at the same scale so that they can be easily compared.
Today I came across this Reddit talking about how few census tracts there are in the United States with a population density greater than 150,000 people per square mile.
Basically, there’s a bunch in New York, one in San Francisco (Tenderloin), and one in Chicago that doesn’t really count because it’s an unusually small tract. Most other American cities don’t even come close.
Looking at this New York Times mapping of the 2010 US census data, it turns out there are neighborhoods in NYC that go well beyond 150,000 people per square mile. Here’s one census tract (#154) at just over 200,000 ppsm:
And here is a second set of maps showing a few, more car-oriented, cities.
Not surprisingly, older transit-oriented cities like New York don’t do well in this contest. No matter what time you leave, it’s hard to make it past 30 miles. Whereas in the case of Vegas, it doesn’t really matter what time you leave. You should be able to clear 50 miles.
That’s the other interesting thing to note about these maps – the spread between distances at the various times.
I’m sharing these because I’m a sucker for diagrams, but I don’t think they tell the whole story. The modal splits and the population and employment densities are all very different across these cities. New York’s core competency is in moving lots of people in trains, not in cars.
Although, perhaps the ironic thing about these diagrams is that a tighter drive radius might actually say something about how efficiently land is being used.
If you convert 200,764 into the globally accepted standard for measuring distances and areas, you get approximately 77,515 people per square kilometer. Pretty dense.
As a comparison, I thought I would see how this number stacks up against what is commonly referred to as the densest neighborhood in Canada: St. James Town.
If you pull up that geographic code in the 2011 Canadian census data (#5350065.00 in case you’re that nerdy), you’ll see a map boundary that looks like this:
And you’ll also find a 2011 population density of approximately 60,915 people per square kilometer. Also pretty dense – though the population did decline from 2006.
Now obviously St. Jamestown is only one example. The rest of the city is, by and large, far less dense. But maybe when our 2016 census data gets released next year, we’ll find that we’ve become even denser. I suspect we will.
And here is a second set of maps showing a few, more car-oriented, cities.
Not surprisingly, older transit-oriented cities like New York don’t do well in this contest. No matter what time you leave, it’s hard to make it past 30 miles. Whereas in the case of Vegas, it doesn’t really matter what time you leave. You should be able to clear 50 miles.
That’s the other interesting thing to note about these maps – the spread between distances at the various times.
I’m sharing these because I’m a sucker for diagrams, but I don’t think they tell the whole story. The modal splits and the population and employment densities are all very different across these cities. New York’s core competency is in moving lots of people in trains, not in cars.
Although, perhaps the ironic thing about these diagrams is that a tighter drive radius might actually say something about how efficiently land is being used.
If you convert 200,764 into the globally accepted standard for measuring distances and areas, you get approximately 77,515 people per square kilometer. Pretty dense.
As a comparison, I thought I would see how this number stacks up against what is commonly referred to as the densest neighborhood in Canada: St. James Town.
If you pull up that geographic code in the 2011 Canadian census data (#5350065.00 in case you’re that nerdy), you’ll see a map boundary that looks like this:
And you’ll also find a 2011 population density of approximately 60,915 people per square kilometer. Also pretty dense – though the population did decline from 2006.
Now obviously St. Jamestown is only one example. The rest of the city is, by and large, far less dense. But maybe when our 2016 census data gets released next year, we’ll find that we’ve become even denser. I suspect we will.
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