The Vancouver Cherry Blossom Marathon
A Data-Driven Guide to the City’s Most Spectacular Streets
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Using data from the Vancouver Open Data Portal, some vibes, and lots of checking We have the Vancouver Cherry Blossom (Ultra?) Marathon!
Every spring, Vancouver transforms into one of the most breathtaking cities on earth. Hundreds of cherry blossoms erupt in pink and white blossoms, turning ordinary streets into canopies of colour. The season lasts only a few weeks; The official Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival runs from March 27 to April 17.
But which streets are actually worth visiting? And if you only had one day, could you see the best of them all in a single route?
In this part of the blog series, I’ll just cover the main results. The more technical code breakdown will be in later posts. All of this was inspired by Kyle Walker’s {spopt} route optimization code from his LinkedIn post.
If you’re interested, the code for this analysis is all here: https://github.com/chendaniely/yvr-cherry-blossoms
Where are Vancouver’s cherry blossoms?
Not all neighborhoods are created equal when it comes to cherry blossoms.
The map below shows every individual Japanese flowering cherry tree in Vancouver’s public tree inventory, overlaid on neighbourhood boundaries. There are many different types of trees that are in the city, I hope I’ve properly captured the correct set of cherry blossoms, I didn’t know there were so many different kinds!