computers
Greater Toronto Area transit map
Many years ago, when Google first released Google Maps and revolutionized online mapping from the stagnant MapQuest era, I put together a few quick demos showing the Vancouver and Toronto transit maps. I’ve made a few updates over the years since then, but not much more. The Vancouver one is still quite popular – more [...]
Google Map updates
Several years ago, I put together some Google Maps for the Vancouver and Toronto transit systems. In light of the expected opening of the Canada Line in Vancouver on August 17th, I took a shot at updating the maps. In the interim, though, Google has made some big advances in its handling of transit. They [...]
Transportation Research Board template for LaTeX
Last summer, I submitted my first paper to the Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference (ultimately accepted, and presented in January 2009). They have recently started accepting papers in PDF form instead of requiring a Word file—and this meant that I could write my paper in LaTeX, my preferred document processing system. However, TRB doesn’t provide [...]
Thesis: Synthesizing Agents and Relationships for Land Use / Transportation Modelling
I finished my M.A.Sc. degree at the University of Toronto in August. In a past post, I discussed some of the coursework that made up the first year of the degree, but I haven’t really discussed the core research here before. I did win an award for some interim results presented at a local conference, [...]
The Science Commons
I’ve been writing a short report on open source transportation software, and I ran across an interesting website along the way. Apparently, the Creative Commons people are trying to kickstart a new Science Commons for factual information. Unlike creative content, facts are not covered by copyright protection, but collections of facts (i.e., databases) fall into [...]
Virtual City
The Globe and Mail had a story today about a very cool website for techie urbanists like me: Virtual City. They’ve digitized streetscapes for a ton of Toronto and Montreal cities, and you can use Google Maps to bring up photos of the street. Great idea, and reasonably well implemented. It clearly still needs a [...]
GO Transit
I’ve been reading Steve Munro‘s blog lately, as he discusses the nitty-gritty details of transit planning in Toronto. He brought up an interesting point regarding the extension of the Spadina subway line to York University: there’s already a GO transit line that goes direct from York University to downtown, and GO is a better way [...]
Toronto Transit Map
Last August, I put together a transit map for Vancouver using the new Google Maps API. I recently went through and updated all the code, switching it over to XML for the geographic data. Using that backend, I’ve now put together a Toronto transit map. So far, I’ve only got the TTC on there – [...]
Bike & compute
I’ve been looking around for a new set of panniers to replace my current beat-up pair. (For the uninitiated, panniers or “saddlebags” are bags that strap to the rack on the back of a bike.) Since I bike everywhere, having good bags is critical – I need to move around groceries, papers, and my computer [...]
Google Transit Map
I’ve put together a Google Map of Vancouver Transit as a test of the new Google Maps API. I’m a big fan of this technology, and I really hope they keep adding to it. I think it could do for map publishing what HTML did for text publishing: democratize and simplify it. Very cool.
