The Map Room

I’ve seen a lot of maps in a lot of places in the eight years I’ve been writing this blog, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a map on a coin. The Royal Canadian Mint is producing a limited-edition $25 silver coin with a map of Toronto on the reverse. Via @jakubczaplicki.

Google’s Street View has launched in 11 Canadian cities: Calgary, Kitchener and Waterloo, Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, Québec, Toronto, Vancouver, and Squamish and Whistler (these last two almost certainly for the upcoming Olympics). Equally large cities like Edmonton, London (Ontario), Hamilton and Winnipeg are apparently not yet available. News coverage: CBC News, National Post. See also Google Maps Mania and Google Earth Blog.

Also today, Street View also came to Prague (Google Earth Blog, Google Maps Mania).

Boston’s MBTA is upgrading the maps in its stations; some of the neighbourhood maps haven’t been upgraded in 40 years. The system maps show services that will not be operational for another month, but that’s nothing compared to the trouble with Toronto’s station maps. The Toronto Transit Commission has gotten into trouble for the neighbourhood maps in its stations, thanks to several embarrassing typos and omissions; the TTC says that corrected maps will be in place by the end of October. Via All Points Blog.

Using a GPS, Toronto cyclist James Redekop has recorded his bike routes from 2004 to 2009 — more than 8,000 kilometres’ worth — and created a nifty time-lapse animated video. Torontoist has more. Via Richard.

As a child I drew on road maps, adding streets, freeways, even whole cities where none would ever exist. Dieter Janssen’s map of an imagined Toronto subway network in 2030 has a more serious purpose: he hopes his map, which dramatically extends the existing lines and adds another four, will stimulate discussion of about the future of Toronto’s transit system. Torontoist has a full-sized version of the map and an interview with Janssen, an architecture professor at the University of Toronto. Incidentally, this is not the first imagined future Toronto subway map; I think Torontonians want more TTC. Thanks to Richard Akerman for the link.

The Toronto Star’s Map of the Week blog discovers several errors in Google Maps’ coverage of Toronto. You may recall that I noticed a bunch of errors in my neck of the woods back in September. The blog entry is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Based on feedback the Toronto Star received after it published a version of its neighbourhood map last weekend, the neighbourhood map has been updated with 29 specific changes. This strikes me as the kind of project that will never truly…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Toronto Star is developing a map of Toronto’s neighbourhoods, based in part on reader feedback. (Boundaries are always the problem with neighbourhoods, because they’re not always strictly defined; growing up in a western suburb of Winnipeg, I wasn’t…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The greater Toronto area’s multicultural nature is vividly brought out by the Toronto Star’s extraordinary “language quilt” map (19.5 MB PDF), which shows the most dominant second language in a given census tract. (In 95 percent of the cases,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last Wednesday’s Toronto Star had a brief item about an 1818 map of Toronto harbour, with lots of detail about the map itself and how it came into the current owner’s possession. Via Map the Universe….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Torontoist calls this transit map of Toronto “the best map ever in the history of anything.” What it looks like to me is the TTC transit map superimposed on a Google Maps interface. Not that that isn’t impressive in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Plep points to the Greater Toronto Area Digital Mapping Project, done by the University of Toronto’s map library. It’s old-style and not very accessible (it requires a plugin), but it’s got a collection of old maps and more recent aerial…  •  Continue reading this entry.