Public Transit Service Density: The Case of the TTC

As the City of Toronto inches closer and closer towards the green light for new Metrolinx projects like the LRT lines for Shep­pard East and Eglin­ton Crosstown, GIS will play an ever cru­cial role in assist­ing deci­sion mak­ers by fram­ing City-wide issues into a per­spec­tive that can be quickly com­pre­hended. Map­ping ser­vice den­sity aims to iden­tify tran­sit deserts in the over­all tran­sit net­work. These maps empha­size the dif­fer­ence in the lev­els of ser­vice (num­ber of trips) by using darker/stronger colours and thicker lines for higher than aver­age trips, and vice-versa for routes that dis­play below the aver­age num­ber of trips.

Averaging Trips per Route

The map below dis­plays my inter­pre­ta­tion of ser­vice den­sity for the Toronto Tran­sit Comission’s sur­face net­work. The data was col­lected from toronto.ca/open (in GTFS for­mat), com­piled in openof­fice and linked to bus routes in QGIS. Using the sym­bol­iza­tion scheme defined above, the map dis­plays vary­ing lev­els of trip den­si­ties across the City. It’s worth not­ing that many of the high­est den­sity routes are in fact street car lines, includ­ing the recent right-of-way St Clair addi­tion to the City of Toronto. One issue with this map is that many routes lie on top of each other, shar­ing a sec­tion of the road net­work. Aver­ag­ing the amount of trips on a road seg­ment by seg­ment basis was a lit­tle beyond the scope of this project. How­ever, for a more accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion, one would want to iden­tify the amount of trips that occur on each line seg­ment, as opposed to the entire route, thereby elim­i­nat­ing the mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion caused by errors in the aggregation.

 
 
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