Author: Michael McCrae

A year of transportation costs for a family of four living in Greater Vancouver

sankeymatic_1200x1200 (1)
Sankey chart made using the excellent SankeyMATIC.

Biking is not as cheap as I thought.

Here are total commuting costs for my family of four living in New Westminster, a suburb in Greater Vancouver.

We have two children aged nine and 11 who both need transport to local public schools. We have one car. My wife drops off our children at school and then carries on to work in South Vancouver, about 12KM total travel distance one-way.

My commute to downtown is about 22KM one way. I mix it up with a bike one day and public transit the next.

The cost of running our car was on the low side. We have an 18-year-old Subaru Forester, which didn’t require any major repairs this year. Most of the maintenance cost was putting on and taking off winter tires.

Yes, the maintenance and clothing costs for my bike was on the high side. You try riding to work year-round in Westcoast weather and see how you feel about skimping out on commuter clothes.

Data was compiled using Mint and Strava.

2018-01-31 6-59-59 PM

2018-01-31 7-00-22 PM

How to make a waffle chart in R

Chart is based on excellent tutorial by @jayjacobs. Just go to his blog entry at rud.is.

Chart is an attempt to pick a mining capital of the world. It counts all the publicly-listed and active mining companies that are headquartered in each city. Data is from Mining Intelligence.

Here is the code.

library(waffle)  ###Open Waffle package

addresses <- c(`Vancouver, Canada - 805`=805, `Toronto, Canada - 300`=300, `Perth, Australia - 263`=263, 'Sydney, Australia - 96'=96,`London, United Kingdom - 92`=92, `Calgary, Canada - 56`=56,`Melbourne, Australia - 37`=37, `Montreal, Canada - 30`=30,`Johannesburg, South Africa - 14`=14) ###Assign cities and values to variable addresses

waffle(addresses, rows=25, size=0.5, ###rows is rows. size is area around box.

colors=c('#a6cee3','#1f78b4','#b2df8a','#33a02c','#fb9a99','#e31a1c','#fdbf6f','#ff7f00','#cab2d6'), ### using colorbrewer for pretty shades

title="Listed miners and juniors per city", ###Label
       xlab=NULL)

My Github for this project is here.

The original posting is here.