Every five years, the Greater Golden Horseshoe Area (of southern Ontario) conducts something called a Transportation Tomorrow Survey. And I am told that it is the most comprehensive travel survey conducted anywhere in the world. So let's look at some of the data. The last survey was completed in 2022 and a mapping of the data was prepared by the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

Population density:

Percentage of trips by walking:

Percentage of trips by bicycle:

Percentage of trips by public transit:

Percentage of trips by car:

Percentage of residents with a driver's license:

Percentage of households without a car:

Average trips by distance:

Once again, these maps remind us that the starkest contrast is between active and non-active forms of mobility. In other words, we have a central core where many, and sometimes most people (>50%) walk to where they need to go, and then there's absolutely everywhere else in the region where most people drive (>50%) and, in some cases, where people drive almost exclusively (>90%). Public transit ridership is more dispersed, but it's really only dominant in Toronto, and not in any of the suburbs.

Perhaps the only reasonably uniform finding is that average trip distances tend to be relatively short (<10 km) no matter where you live.

Maps from the School of Cities at the University of Toronto; cover photo by Juan Rojas on Unsplash

It is surprisingly difficult to find good real estate and development information about a market that you're not familiar with. So I was pretty excited when I came across this map of every development project in Grand Paris (Greater Paris) created by Arthur Weidmann.

It's in Google My Maps and what he has done is pin every project according to status: under construction, under renovation, approved, proposed, and recently delivered. For each pin, you'll also find information like the expected completion date, the use(s), the area, the architect(s), and photos. It is unbelievably detailed and, according to Google, it was last updated 8 hours ago.

Here's the full map with all statuses shown:

And here's what it looks like if you filter by only projects under construction:

It's interesting, but not surprising, to note that the majority of construction projects seem to be taking place outside the boundaries of Paris proper. However, if you alternate to projects under renovation, it more or less flips, with most of the projects being within Paris:

This tells you something about the city.

Sometimes when I'm looking at or for information like this, I think to myself that I must be in the minority of people who are interested in tracking development projects with this level of detail. So I find it interesting that this map has been viewed nearly 300,000 times. Clearly, I'm not actually alone.

The Washington Post just published this interactive feature showing new developed land (i.e. urban sprawl) across the US between 2001 and 2019.

It is based on these land cover maps which were published by the US Geological Survey earlier in the summer. Their findings show that between 2001 and 2019, more than 10% of the land cover in the lower 48 states changed during this time period. Mostly in forested areas.

The WP feature allows you to search by city/address and I would encourage all of you to try it out. As an example, here is Salt Lake City. The gray areas represent land that was already developed in 2001. The purple areas represent land that was developed sometime between 2001 and 2019.

Images: Washington Post