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rfmcdonaldPatrick Cain's Map of the Week blog, maintained by the web editor of the Toronto Star, is easily the best Toronto map blog out there. Some of you who've taken a look at my blogroll know that I'm quite a fan of maps. You should be a fan of maps, too: they help show, in easily comprehensible form, the various divisions and quantities and qualities of the territories that define any society. One of these maps--5 January 2010's "Map of the Week: Commuter cycling by census tract"--shows which neighbourhoods of Toronto are home to people who commute regularly via bicycle and which are not, and, in so doing, shows why biking isn't big across Toronto and why there are so many disputes within Toronto as to the use of biking. The areas coloured dark blue in the area of the Cain's map of Toronto bike commuting are all but one of the areas where 10-12% of the resident population commutes via bicycle, and are themselves surrounded by most of the other bicycle-happy districts of the city.
Below is a map, originally from here, created by Wikipedia's Lencer and edited by Simon P, showing the municipal boundaries of the various communities federated in Metropolitan Toronto (1954-1998) before these communities' amalgamation into a single megacity.
See a correlation?
At some small risk of generalizing, the former city of Toronto, comprising the south-central area of the megacity, along Lake Ontario, is the densely built core of the city, with the narrow streets defined by a high destination of commuters' homes and destinations and relatively slow speeds conducive to biking. Away from the old city, into the areas which saw their big development in the post-Second World War boom, the broader and quicker roads covering greater distances less conducive to biking predominate.
I'm a very big fan of the bicycle. I don't commute via bike since an hour's bike ride is too much for me, but I enjoy exploring the city on bike, with or without Jerry, enjoying the speed I reach and the careful attention that I have to pay to my surroundings for safety and scenic reasons. I, however, have always lived in neighbourhoods where commuting via bike is at least a possibility, where my surroundings are bike-friendly enough for it to be an option. If I lived outside of these densely populated city neighbourhoods, I wouldn't have the option. Who knows? If I hadn't had a chance to start biking on a Prince Edward Island with relatively slow traffic flows, but had instead lived in geographically peripheral neighbourhoods where cycling wasn't even a good option for sports, I might not have biked at all. It's no wonder that biking's irrelevant, or even a nuisance, to most Torontonians; for the large majority of Torontonians (the roughly two out of two and a half million who live outside of the old city) biking's literally not even on the map. Hectoring these people for not following the Pure Way is, besides being counterproductive, useless: for biking to be an option, a whole series of slow and expensive investments in cycling infrastructure that don't detract from the existing lifestyle will be necessary. Will the City do this in the future? I hope, but I don't expect.
Below is a map, originally from here, created by Wikipedia's Lencer and edited by Simon P, showing the municipal boundaries of the various communities federated in Metropolitan Toronto (1954-1998) before these communities' amalgamation into a single megacity.
See a correlation?
At some small risk of generalizing, the former city of Toronto, comprising the south-central area of the megacity, along Lake Ontario, is the densely built core of the city, with the narrow streets defined by a high destination of commuters' homes and destinations and relatively slow speeds conducive to biking. Away from the old city, into the areas which saw their big development in the post-Second World War boom, the broader and quicker roads covering greater distances less conducive to biking predominate.
I'm a very big fan of the bicycle. I don't commute via bike since an hour's bike ride is too much for me, but I enjoy exploring the city on bike, with or without Jerry, enjoying the speed I reach and the careful attention that I have to pay to my surroundings for safety and scenic reasons. I, however, have always lived in neighbourhoods where commuting via bike is at least a possibility, where my surroundings are bike-friendly enough for it to be an option. If I lived outside of these densely populated city neighbourhoods, I wouldn't have the option. Who knows? If I hadn't had a chance to start biking on a Prince Edward Island with relatively slow traffic flows, but had instead lived in geographically peripheral neighbourhoods where cycling wasn't even a good option for sports, I might not have biked at all. It's no wonder that biking's irrelevant, or even a nuisance, to most Torontonians; for the large majority of Torontonians (the roughly two out of two and a half million who live outside of the old city) biking's literally not even on the map. Hectoring these people for not following the Pure Way is, besides being counterproductive, useless: for biking to be an option, a whole series of slow and expensive investments in cycling infrastructure that don't detract from the existing lifestyle will be necessary. Will the City do this in the future? I hope, but I don't expect.
