I first met Monika Jaroszonek in 2017, right before she started RATIO.CITY. Since then she has developed some pretty incredible tools for the city building space.
Yesterday the company published this interactive visualization looking at development potential across the City of Toronto. The mapping looks for the following:
Land that has a Mixed Use, Apartment or Regeneration designation in the City of Toronto’s Official Plan
Land that is located within a Provincially designated Urban Growth Centre
Land that is located within 500m of a Major Transit Station
The tool then ranks each development site – AAA, AA, A – according to how many of the above criteria it meets.
It also flags land that it refers to as “Missed Opportunity.” These are lands located within 500m of a Major Transit Station, but that are designated as Neighbourhoods (considered stable) or Employment (whole other discussion).
Based on this filter, about 5.6% of the City’s land is a “Missed Opportunity” and about 1.2% is AAA.
When you look at the visualization, that is one of the first things you will probably notice; a lot of our transit infrastructure is currently underutilized as a result of land use policies.
Image: RATIO.CITY
This is a map of the Bay Area Rapid Transit network:
And this is an elegant visualization by Ray Luong of ridership levels over the course of one day: February 4, 2016. If you can’t see the embedded video below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGgbAS7Wq8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Note how the lines speed up as they go through the Transbay Tube connecting San Francisco and Oakland. That’s actually what happens. Within the 10 km-long tube, the trains reach ~130 km/h, which is more than twice as fast as the average speed throughout the rest of the network.
Max Galka has created an incredible visualization of country-to-country net migration (from 2010 to 2015) on his blog, Metrocosm.
Here’s a screenshot:
But you really need to view the full screen interactive version.
In that version, you can hover over a country to see the total net migration number (+/-) and you can click on a country to see where people are moving to and from. A blue circle indicates positive net migration (greater inflows) and a red circle indicates negative net migration (greater outflows).
All of the data is from the United Nations Population Division. And though the numbers are estimates, it’s a fascinating look at global migration. For instance, look at the outflow from Syria.
It would also be interesting to see these numbers on a per capita basis because some countries certainly punch above or below their weight in terms of migration. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Canada and Australia vis-à-vis the US.