For my latest article in The Herald – “Potent lessons on food access” – I give some figures on the share of Elmwood residents who do not drive. Specifically, I state the following:
Using the City’s Neighbourhood Profiles (which are based off of the 2011 National Household Survey), one finds 29.8 per cent of Elmwood residents bus, walk, bike or use other methods aside from personal car driving to get to work.
While I felt it was too much methodology to include in a 400 word article, I’d like to share with anyone interested how I derived that figure and some of the reasoning behind why I derived the figure the way I did.
As stated in the article, I used the City of Winnipeg’s Neighbourhood Profiles data. This information is based on the 2011 National Household Survey. I would have preferred to use the 2016 long form Census data, but journey to work data will not be released until November 29, 2017. I was also (unlike previous census years) unable to find data broken down by Forward Sortation Area (the first three digits of the postal code) – so perhaps Statistics Canada has yet to release data in that format or just won’t this year.
The 2011 National Household Survey was the voluntary survey that replaced the mandatory long form census during the 2011 census year. Because it is a voluntary survey there are concerns over its reliability. The 2016 census reverted back to having a mandatory long form.
To derive the 29.8 per cent figure for Elmwood residents who bus, walk, bike or use methods other than personal car driving I first summed up the figures for each neighbourhood of those who use public transit, walked, biked or used other methods.
Once I had derived these “non-car” figures for each constituent neighbourhood of Elmwood (Glenelm, Chalmers, Talbot-Grey and East Elmwood) I then calculated the total share for Elmwood. This was done by adding up all the “non-car” transportation commuters from each neighbourhood and adding up the total samples for the mode of transportation survey question from each neighbourhood to derive percentages.
I also derived a non-car percentage for Winnipeg overall by summing up the percentages for transit, walking, biking and other methods for the city in general provided in the Neighbourhood Profiles.
With this information, I was able to make the following comparison:
This [29.8 per cent] figure varies within the community, from a high of 38.8 per cent in the Talbot-Grey neighbourhood to a low of 21.2 per cent in East Elmwood and is over six percentage points higher in Elmwood than for Winnipeg overall.
If you are curious about anything else, feel free to download the data below.
Prairie Outpost 
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