Bloor & Shaw: Traffic counts between 1992 and 2020

A snippet from graphicmatt.substack.com's March 15, 2021 issue of "City Hall Watcher" a subcription e-newsletter

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Intersection Inspection: Bloor & Shaw

Toronto Open Data added a nifty new dataset last week, with traffic counts for many intersections. The dataset is great for two reasons. First, it includes counts all the way back to the 1980s. Second, it’s super granular — if you wanted to find out how many trucks were counted turning right on a day in 1986, you could conceivably find that in this set.

To make use of it, I’m going to introduce a new recurring feature called Intersection Inspection, where I look at the data from select intersections over the decades.

To start, here’s Bloor & Shaw, chosen because I wanted to start with an intersection with some decent historical data and a good mix of traffic modes.

Some notes:

• Cycling traffic through Bloor & Shaw has increased from about 5% of mode share in August 2007 to a peak of 27% in September 2020.

• On Tuesday, September 29, Bloor & Shaw recorded the highest number of cyclists at any measured intersection for a 15-minute period in 2020. 252 cyclists were counted at the intersection between 4:45 p.m. and 5 p.m. That’s about one bike every four seconds.

• Also on September 29, bike and pedestrian traffic counts totalled 6,167 while cars and trucks totalled 7,052. I would not be surprised if future data shows this intersection past the tipping point, where motor vehicles are the minority.

• Nearly 30 years later, the intersection served about as many cars, trucks, bikes and pedestrians in a day in September 2020 as it did in April 1992 — 13,982 in ‘92 versus 13,245 in ‘20 — except in 1992 about 81% of users were in cars and trucks. In 2020, 53% were.

I plan to do this kind of analysis every now and again when I’ve got space in this newsletter. If there’s an intersection near you that you’d like to see charted with the available data, let me know — you can just reply to this message to send me a note.

Republished by MichaelHolloway.Substack.com