Accessing Calgary’s downtown

One of the concerns with the Green Line currently being debated in Calgary city council is that Centre Street is a busy street that can’t afford to lose lanes for LRT. Here’s the daily number of users on the major entrance routes into the downtown; the Centre Street upper deck isn’t busier than other routes; […]

Airport Transit Use

I’ve been thinking about a number of things lately; one of them is transit to the airport. It’s a broadly popular concept, and the City of Calgary is studying some options. I was wondering what kind of ridership we would see in Calgary if we connected LRT to the airport, and what that would look […]

Bank Stock Photo Regionalization

Okay, so this started with someone’s tweet: To summarize the thread, it turns out that Chase uses a different background photo depending on where you are; the photo above is what New York City area customers see, but this varies by place in the US. There are actually two different photos used in each location, […]

How weather affects cycling

I presented this at the 2019 World Winter Cycling Congress here in Calgary; it’s a data-driven look at what weather factors have an impact on cycling volumes. Winter has enough of an effect on cycling that it makes sense to have a winter cycling event — I don’t think there’s a Spring Cycling Congress, for […]

How weather affects cycling – methodology

As part of the World Winter Cycling Congress in Calgary, I’m presenting a paper entitled “Wondering What’s Winter Weather”, which is a data-driven look at what weather factors impact cycling. This is the data dump / methodology version of the post; I’ll produce another in a few days that is words and brightly-coloured charts, so […]

Transit walking distance: Calgary

How far do people walk to take transit? This is a classic question in transit planning, and the most common answer is “400m”, represented as a 400m circle around the stop. A longer distance, 800m is also often cited, particularly around rail stations. (In the US, these round very neatly to 1/4 mile and 1/2 […]

Methodology: Transit walk distance

I’m going to try to do a two post thing, for anything with some complexity. The main post will show the most interesting stuff, the key takeaways and so on, and then a methodology post will cover some of the gory details that might not be useful or interesting for everybody.

Visualizing LRT frequency

There’s a lot of ways to visualize frequency; I’m hoping this is relatively intuitive. Here is the service offered by the light rail networks in Canada and the US. The grid represents a station at the edge of the downtown during the 7 to 8 AM weekday time period; each cell is a minute, and […]

The start of a journey

This is the first entry in what I hope will become a blog looking at all the things I’m interested in — transportation (especially transit and walking), cities, demographics, maybe even a little economics and sport — through my favourite lenses; namely wordy texts and brightly coloured maps and charts. The title is hopefully a […]