About
Observing the City was born out of my desire to make opaque data more accessible to the public. There is so much open data hidden in government portals and APIs. It only sees the light of day when a report is requested by the government, and then it gets buried as a PDF in a committee agenda. I set out to change that.
The cycling numbers come from the City of Toronto’s permanent bicycle counters, which also supplies the ward boundaries used on the maps. The mode-share figures are from the Transportation Tomorrow Survey, a regional travel survey run by the Data Management Group at the University of Toronto. Bike Share trip activity comes from the system’s public GBFS feed. Each tool notes its own sources and whatever processing was involved. Older survey wards get mapped onto the current 25-ward model, for instance. None of this is affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, or anyone else who publishes the data.
I run the site myself and pay for the hosting, with some help from readers. If you spot a mistake or know a dataset that should be on here, email me. The contact page has my email.