Measuring Bicycling Infrastructure Across Canada:
Leveraging Open-Data

Active transportation, such as walking, bicycling, and skateboarding to get around, is an important method by which Canadians move through their environment. While its benefits are typically thought of as reducing road congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, active transportation is also a crucial way that many Canadians achieve daily physical activity. Physical activity has many physical and mental health benefits, including chronic disease prevention^{Footnote 1}. In 2018, Canadian adults reported using an active form of transportation for an average of 1.7 hours per week^{Footnote 1}.

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) developed the Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Sleep (PASS) Indicators, consisting of 55 indicators that together help build a picture of the PASS behaviours of Canadians^{Footnote 2}. The PASS Indicators include several indicators related to active transportation.

Evidence shows that the safer an individual feels on their cycling route, the more likely they are to cycle^{Footnote 3}. This can be particularly true for those who are less confident cycling, and could reduce a barrier for individuals to begin cycling^{Footnote 4}. Bicycling infrastructure is often built to keep riders safe, but not all types of infrastructure provide equal levels of safety^{Footnote 5}. PHAC is currently working to develop a surveillance indicator to better understand bicycling infrastructure across the country. Open data provides one possible information source for reporting on this indicator.

Open-Data

Open-data refers to data that is free to access, use, modify, and share^{Footnote 6}. A growing number of Canadian municipalities have created open-data portals as a way to publish their data on a range of topics and make it accessible for all. These open-data datasets can be rich sources of information that can be leveraged for many uses, including public health. Datasets that include the location and types of bicycling infrastructure within municipalities are relatively common. The purpose of this investigation is to test the potential of using open-data on bicycling infrastructure to create a new PASS Indicators measure for active transportation infrastructure.

Most municipalities have their own data portals, so gathering every active transportation dataset across Canada would require identifying each municipality with a portal and searching it for relevant data. As a first step in determining if such data could be used for a national indicator, this investigation explored open-data from the two largest municipalities within each Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) in Canada. Bicycling infrastructure data was not available for every municipality considered, indicating that there are gaps in the data. The municipalities for which data was obtained accounted for approximately 42% of the Canadian population. The nomenclature used in each dataset differed between municipalities but was kept in this tool in order to show the data as it is provided.

Dive into the data

• Select a municipality from the list at the top of the tool to view that municipality’s infrastructure.
• Select the toggle switch at the bottom of the tool to switch between the map view and graph view.
• While in the graph view hover over each bar to show the total length of each type of infrastructure and the average length infrastructure segments.

Takeaways

• Through this exploration of available open-data, bicycle infrastructure information was identified for 26 municipalities, accounting approximately 42% of the Canadian population.
• The availability and quality of this data suggests that open-data is a viable data source for the development of a measure of the amount of bicycling infrastructure across Canada.

Limitations

• The publication date of each dataset varied by municipality, the earliest being from June 2013 and the latest from August 2018, so newbuilt infrastructure may not be reflected.
• From the 26 municipalities included, there were a total of 106 unique labels for bikeway infrastructure. This variation in nomenclature likely does not reflect the variation in infrastructure, and is an obstacle for cities to compare and learn from each other.
• Definitions for different types of bikeways varied between municipalities, so direct comparisons between cities should be considered with caution.

Next steps

PHAC funded the development of a simplified naming convention for bicycling infrastructure, the Canadian Bikeway Comfort and Safety (Can-BICS) classification system^{Footnote 7}. Can-BICS was created to help bring consistency to the variation of names currently employed for cycling infrastructure, and streamline the process of developing a PASS Indicators measure of the amount of bicycling infrastructure by type across municipality.