Toronto Density Map, 2006

[scarberiankhatru]

My guess it that although that area has a number of large office buildings, those buildings are usually surrounded by large parking lots and/or parkland. Contrast that with the Toronto CBD where office towers butt up against office towers. I'm sure that leads to a lower overall density.

A bigger factor is greenfield sites and the enormous footprint of the highways - the 404/407 interchange alone takes up an entire square kilometre.

 

[taal]

What sunrises me is comparing it to the 401 - Vic park area / 404, which seems denser on the map, but in reality - I don't think it is, I think there are less jobs in the district then 404/407. The 401 - Vic Park area, also is surrounded by parking lots and the like ... probably worse so actually.

 

[Second_in_pie]

Yeah, somehow I get the feeling the numbers for that are wrong.

Perhaps when they do some more development in that area, the numbers'll look up. If I'm not mistaken, they're building some condos or something in that area, and there's plenty of opportunity for infill development.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

What sunrises me is comparing it to the 401 - Vic park area / 404, which seems denser on the map, but in reality - I don't think it is, I think there are less jobs in the district then 404/407. The 401 - Vic Park area, also is surrounded by parking lots and the like ... probably worse so actually.

Yeah, somehow I get the feeling the numbers for that are wrong.

Perhaps when they do some more development in that area, the numbers'll look up. If I'm not mistaken, they're building some condos or something in that area, and there's plenty of opportunity for infill development.

The numbers are not wrong. I've already explained them. Between the highway footprints, greenfields, and stuff like Buttonville, the 404/407 area cannot possibly be denser than somewhere like Consumers (which has huge complexes like Atria), particularly when some suburban office parks are filled with warehouses, printing presses, etc., that look impressive in the amount of land being consumed by employment, but don't actually employ anywhere near as many people as a tiny building filled with cubicles.

 

[taal]

Ah, that makes sense actually! Thanks for the explanation.

 

[CDL.TO]

Whoops. I posted these maps then got sidetracked and forgot to come back and respond to comments.

Yes, the figures are accurate. There's some rounding at play but they are correct. There is a lot of undeveloped space in suburban office parks.

Thanks to everyone who liked the maps. It did take time to assemble them. I think they are very useful, but improvements could be made. I think there would be value to removing roadways from the density calculation, much like the parks, but I don't think I have access to that data.

Does the first map show DAs? Some of those zones seem really tiny.

The only problem with adding employment to residences is that the jobs are added to census tracts which are divided up based on where the residences are...a cluster of condos may receive its own census tract (or one of the smaller census zones) and be set apart from a sea of bungalows, but a cluster of office towers is invariably included with seas of parking lots and warehouses and strip malls because without a residential population there's no reason to sever the area for census purposes.

It's sort of like packing/cracking issues with gerrymandered ridings. This affects areas like the Kennedy/401/Markham/Ellesmere block (STC), as well as the 404 office parks in Markham, even the CBD itself (though that is about uniformly extremely dense with jobs). I don't know if there's any more realistic but still practical way to show where jobs are within employment areas.

One tweak that would be interesting is to show population and jobs on the same map using two colour scales, like red for homes and blue for jobs, where white zones are uninhabited day and night, red zones are dense during the night, blue zones dense during the day, and purple zones dense both day and night. 25-49+ total zones on such a map would help distinguish homes from jobs on a combined map, though this isn't especially useful if one is very familiar with the location of all of the residential and office tower clusters.

Both maps show DAs. Of course, you accurately describe the issues with showing employment based upon population-based CTs/DAs, but any other census geographies that aren't based upon population, like TAZs, are inevitably less fine-grained than DAs. So there's your trade-off. It would be nice to have the actual point data of every job in the GTA, but good luck getting your hands on that. However, DAs are pretty small that I don't think it causes too much of an issue (within the 416, at least).

I'd be interested in making a map as you suggest. Of course, any quantitative map needs to be based upon actual quantities. I assume such a map would be based upon two figures, one for blue-two-red and another for transparency. How would you construct such a map, mathematically-speaking?