Edmonton Transit Hotspots

Last week's post about optimized traveling around Edmonton was pretty fun, right? It actually got me thinking about some different ways of looking at Edmonton's transportation systems.

Last time was taxis between bars, so I thought this time a cool idea would be the ETS, with its fun combination of buses and LRTs. Of course, now that my blog is the number 1 Google result for "Mathematically Optimized Pub Crawl" I figured I'd expand my horizons a little bit. Without any further delay, why not take a look at this:

This is a heat map of our fair city, based on transit time required to get to our biggest tourist attraction (West Edmonton Mall). The colours range from green (less than 10 minutes) to red (more than two hours). Almost every single neighborhood is within a one hour bus/train/walk (or combination thereof) from WEM apart from the very north-east of Edmonton, but there's a little island around Clareview station of reduced travel time. Cool, eh?

Next up is Century Park station:

Century Park's map is pretty cool. The south side of the city can get there really quickly (particularly close to 23rd Ave in Mill Woods), and along the LRT line in the north is pretty well defined too. Personally I really like the Moat o' Excessive Transit Time that surrounds downtown St. Albert, and the long wait times west of the river on the south side (apparently the buses there don't like the Henday...).

For something completely different, how about Rexall Place?

Perhaps not surprisingly at all, Rexall Place is very easily accessible by public transit. I'd post maps for Commonwealth Stadium, but it would be virtually identical. The LRT line extending as far south as it does really helps, as there are enough relatively direct buses both from St. Albert and West Edmonton that drop people off close to an LRT line. When it comes to great coverage for the city, though, you really can't beat...

...the University of Alberta. Man it's almost like they really wanted it to be easy for people to get to class, eh? Pretty much the only way you'd have a tough time getting into campus (tough being more than about an hour) is if you live in the no-man's-land between Edmonton and St. Albert. Also, we can see the effectiveness of Clareview LRT again, in the top right hand corner.

Speaking of St. Albert...

What's cool about the St. Albert map is that the direct bus lines to downtown, WEM, and the U of A are clearly visible, but going any further than that is pretty much a bad idea.

I like movies. I also like being treated like a very important person. You know where Edmonton's only VIP movie theater is? Windermere.

...but maybe it's better just to drive there.