Patient Zero

10:07 PM

Bikes on Bloor good for business

Spacing Magazine reports thusly on a study released in February 2009 favoring bike lanes down Bloor St. as good for business. Bloor is a premier shopping corridor stretching from Gucci in the east to Little Korea in the west and destinations beyond. It is also one of the most clogged streets in Toronto, particularly during rush hour when the hipsters get out of bed and wander around on foot and the business types drive home to the burbs.

Bike Lanes, On-Street Parking and Business (PDF), has just been released. It’s a study of Bloor Street in the Annex (Huron to Palmerston), and it shows that removing parking for either bike lanes or a widened sidewalk would actually benefit local businesses in that area. The study surveyed both merchants and people walking along various parts of this stretch of Bloor during the month of July 2008.

The first part of the study shows that the majority of owners or managers of local businesses estimate that only a minority of their customers drive to their location, and also that they believe it would not harm, and might even benefit, their business if parking were removed to make space for either bikes or pedestrians.

The second part of the survey shows that the merchants are correct in their estimation of how their customers get to their store: 46% walk, 32% take transit, 12% cycle, and only 10% drive. Not surprisingly, walkers were also the most frequent visitors to the area, followed by cyclists, transit users, and finally drivers. Walkers also spent considerably more in the area than other types of customers. In other words, pedestrians were by far the best customers, followed by cyclists. Drivers, meanwhile, are the least frequent visitors and are low spenders.

Finally, the study shows that, if one lane of parking was removed, there would still be enough capacity in local “Green P” municipal parking lots within a 3-minute walk to accommodate the peak demand for parking.

The point of the study isn't to go mad and suggest that this is some kind of general transportation model. It recognizes that it is a highly contextual study particular to the patterns of people, buildings, culture and traffic that configure this corridor.

03:44 PM

Project Spectrum

This is a pretty amazing video. Autistic children were given copies of Google's free architectural drawing program Sketch-Up with incredible results. In one segment, the children are shown to be incredibly frustrated and inhibited by the the task of hand-drawing a floor-plan of their bedroom. But given Sketch-Up, they are able to express themselves in half the time and with a massive proliferation of ideas.



Learn more about the project and get the software at Google Sketch-Up.

05:58 PM

Nukes are dangerous

Such as when they hit your webserver database... and take out your entire blog. Ah well, nothing like a fresh start.

11:46 AM