Out of the Sun
It is a hot afternoon and you want to be out of the sun. At one o'clock, four fifths of Toronto's ground stands in open sun. This maps where the other fifth is, hour by hour, across one modelled day.
The map you were already using
You already do this. Walking a long block in July, you cross to the far side without deciding to, then cross back when the buildings run out. Nobody taught you the rule. You read the pavement ahead, saw where the light stopped, and moved.
That habit is a map. You drew it from memory, it covers only the streets you walk, and it changes every time a tower goes up or a tree comes down. This guide draws the same map for the whole city, on one day of one year.
This guide maps shade, not temperature. Shade is a question of what stood between the ground and the sun at a given minute. That is all it measures. A shaded asphalt lot can be hotter than a sunny lawn, and nothing here measures heat.
Explore shade by clock hour
Look up a street you walk, or a stop you wait at.
The same ground twice. The map on the left is what the lidar measured. The map on the right raises bare canopy to a leaf-on equivalent. Both are published because the correction changes which neighbourhoods come out shadiest. Choose one clock hour and both maps update together.
Measured, leaf-off
How to read this map
Dark ground was shaded at the selected clock hour. Light ground had direct sun. Both panes always use the same hour.
This map shows where the sun was blocked. It says nothing about temperature.
Loading the map
The surface the lidar actually recorded. Every flight over Toronto is spring, so tree shade is understated and building shade is not.
Leaf-on corrected
How to read this map
Dark ground was shaded at the selected clock hour. Light ground had direct sun. Both panes always use the same hour.
This map shows where the sun was blocked. It says nothing about temperature.
Loading the map
Bare canopy raised to a leaf-on equivalent. The generous end of the range: ground under a crown counts as shaded for the whole modelled day.
Shade state at 13:00 EDT
- Shaded at the selected hour
- Direct sun at the selected hour
- Not sampled ground
Selected from fifteen frames, 21 July 2026, 06:00 to 20:00 EDT, on a 2 m grid. Lidar flown April to May 2023. The 06:00 frame sits at 0.38° above the horizon and is shaded everywhere by construction.
Inspect a point
Click or tap either map to inspect a point. With a keyboard, focus a map and press Enter to inspect its centre.
Select a point to see its shade profile from 06:00 to 20:00 EDT.
Selected hour, 13:00 EDT
Measured, leaf-off Unknown
Leaf-on corrected Unknown
Each hour has two bars: measured above, corrected below.
Read the profile as a table
| Clock hour | Measured, leaf-off | Leaf-on corrected |
|---|
Explore a street
Search named walkable OpenStreetMap features of at least 100 m. Each profile samples ground 8 to 15 m from the centreline. This explorer grain is broader than the arterial-only analysis in the guide.
Loading the street index.
Selected hour, 13:00 EDT
Measured, leaf-off Unknown
Leaf-on corrected Unknown
Read the street profile as a table
| Clock hour | Measured, leaf-off | Leaf-on corrected |
|---|
The bare road and the shaded walk
This guide was built to answer one question: does Toronto have a shade shortage on the streets people walk along? The test was written down before any citywide surface existed. A street segment counts as shade-poor if its samples are shaded in fewer than five of the fifteen frames, on median, which given the free frames at either end of the day works out at one or two shaded hours between 07:00 and 19:00. A citywide shortage means at least 25% of Toronto's arterial kilometres are shade-poor. Both numbers were fixed in advance.
Of the 1,128.6 arterial kilometres inside the city, here is the answer, measured where people actually stand.
Move the same measurement off the sidewalk and onto the traffic lanes and the picture changes completely.
That is the finding, and it is a contrast rather than a shortage. Toronto's arterial roads are shaded where people walk and bare where the cars drive. Street trees lean over the sidewalk they were planted beside and stop well short of the centre line, so the asphalt keeps the sun all day and the pavement beside it does not.
Which band counts, and who chose it
A sidewalk on a Toronto arterial sits roughly 8 to 15 m from the centre line, so that is the band the shortage test uses. The original plan sampled 6 m out, which turned out to be the roadway itself: only 0.23% of that strip falls under canopy, against 6.64% of Toronto's ground generally. Measuring 6 m from a centre line measures the road, and a claim about walking has to be measured where walking happens.
The band was chosen after both sets of numbers were visible, and it decides the title, so it is disclosed here rather than presented as though only one band had ever been computed. Both bands are published above for that reason. The road band clears 25% on either surface, and calling that a shortage for people on foot would be false.
Forty-six stops
A failed citywide condition does not mean nowhere is short of shade. The sunniest arterial in Toronto is Staines Road in northeast Scarborough. It reads 1.85 mean shaded hours of fifteen on the measured surface and 1.86 after the leaf-on correction, because the correction found almost no canopy there to give leaves back to.
46 of the 6,079 transit stops this guide could measure record no modelled shade during the usable day, on either surface. That is one stop in a hundred and thirty. Their single shaded hour is the 06:00 frame, the one that counts the whole city as shaded before anything is measured, so a rider waiting at any hour worth waiting in stands in open sun.
The other 2,353 of Toronto's 8,432 stops are not counted here, because this guide never measured them. A stop's published coordinate often lands on a shelter roof or a station canopy at two metres, and the shade value there describes the roof rather than the pavement a person stands on. Those stops are unmeasured, not sunlit, so they leave both sides of the ratio. That is the same rule this guide applies to a street with no sampled sidewalk.
Three of the 46, to put an address on it:
- Finch Ave West at Highway 27
- McCowan Rd at Highway 401
- Commissioners St at New Cherry St East Side
This is the finding that held. The citywide shortage did not, and the improvement-area gap came to twelve minutes. Nearly sixty kilometres of shade-poor sidewalk and 46 bare transit stops is smaller than the story this guide set out to tell, and it is bigger than a list of addresses.
Across the 6,079 stops standing on sampled ground, the mean is 6.71 shaded frames on the measured surface and 7.14 after the leaf-on correction.
Corrected 13 August 2026. This section published 533 stops, one in sixteen, from 6 August. That count sampled every stop without asking whether the pixel under it was ground, and 487 of the 533 sat on roofs and canopies. A roof is high and lit from first light to last, so it records exactly one shaded frame and lands in this set by construction rather than by observation. Restricted to the ground a person actually stands on, the count is 46. Every other figure in this guide was already measured on ground only and none of them moved.
Why every number here comes in twos
Averaged across every hour of the modelled day, Toronto's ground reads 6.201 mean shaded hours of fifteen on the surface the aircraft measured, and 7.197 on the same ground with the trees given their summer leaves back. Every figure in this guide is published both ways. Here is why.
Ask which part of Toronto sits in the most shade and the measured surface answers immediately: downtown. Towers throw long shadows and there are a great many towers in a small space. The three shadiest neighbourhoods are all tower districts, and the ranking looks settled.
Correct the same surface for summer leaves and the top of the table turns over. All three of the new leaders are leafy midtown neighbourhoods, and downtown leaves the top three entirely.
Measured, leaf-off
- Yonge-Bay Corridor10.90
- Downtown Yonge East10.60
- Church-Wellesley10.58
- Wellington Place10.24
- North St. James Town9.81
Leaf-on corrected
- Lawrence Park South11.30
- Rosedale-Moore Park11.25
- Mount Pleasant East11.17
- Church-Wellesley11.07
- Yonge-Bay Corridor11.01
The reason is the aircraft. Every lidar flight ever flown over Toronto has been flown in spring, when the ground is visible and the survey is cheap to fly. This one flew April to May 2023. A building looks the same in April as it does in July. A tree does not. So the measured surface records every tower at its full height and every deciduous crown as a bare frame, and the ranking it produces is partly a picture of the month the plane flew.
How big is the reversal, honestly
Small, and worth saying so. Church-Wellesley and Yonge-Bay Corridor are still fourth and fifth once corrected, and the whole corrected top five spans 0.29 hours, about seventeen minutes of the modelled day. The order changed. The distances did not open up. Downtown did not stop being shady, and on the other end of the table it beats Downsview, at 3.57 measured and 3.90 corrected, by a wide margin.
The correction is also the generous end of the range. Ground under a leaf-on crown is counted as shaded for the whole modelled day, and real crowns are not solid: light comes through them, and low sun arrives sideways underneath them. The true answer sits somewhere between these two columns, nearer the right one in July. That is the honest claim, and it is smaller than a headline would like.
Towers still work
The shadiest single arterial in Toronto is York Street, and it barely moves between the two surfaces: 11.70 mean shaded hours of fifteen measured, 11.74 corrected, four hundredths of an hour apart. York Street sits in a trench of towers and almost none of its shade comes from trees, so the correction has nothing to add. The point is not that towers fail to shade a street. They shade it reliably, and the aircraft measured them correctly the first time. The point is that towers and trees buy shade differently, and a spring flight can only see one of them properly.
The shadiest arterial outside downtown
The ranking outside downtown requires at least 1 km of sampled centreline. Without that floor, a 309.7 m Oxton Avenue feature tagged as an arterial wins a citywide superlative it is too short to carry. With the floor applied, St. Clair Avenue East is the leader: 9.99 mean shaded hours on the measured surface and 10.65 after the leaf-on correction, over 1.05 km of sampled centreline.
What fifteen frames actually means
The day runs from 06:00 to 20:00 EDT on 21 July 2026, sampled once an hour. Fifteen frames, computed on a 2 m grid across the whole municipality. Every figure in this guide counts how many of those fifteen frames found a patch of ground in shadow.
Fifteen frames are not fifteen equal hours. At 06:00 the sun sits 0.38° above the horizon, at or below the point the model treats as sunrise, so that frame finds the city shaded everywhere. Every patch of ground in Toronto scores one shaded hour before anything about it is measured. The 20:00 frame is nearly as generous: 83.8% of ground in shade on the measured surface and 85.2% corrected, with the sun under 8°. So seven shaded hours means seven frames of the modelled day, and two of them came free. It does not mean seven hours of useful shade, and this guide never says it does.
The hours that settle anything are the ones in the middle. The sun over Toronto peaks at 13:25 EDT on 21 July, not at noon: daylight saving takes an hour of the blame, and the rest is Toronto sitting west of the meridian its time zone is named for. Shade is thinnest at the modelled hour nearest that peak, and that hour is 13:00, when 10.73% of Toronto's ground is in shade on the measured surface and 20.73% corrected. The corrected fifth is the generous reading. The measured surface puts the city nearer nine tenths in open sun.
What I went looking for and did not find
The hypothesis this guide came to test is dead
5.26% against a threshold of 25%. The guide went looking for a citywide shade shortage on the walking network, wrote the threshold down before computing anything, and did not find one. It missed by nearly a factor of five. The title this guide would have carried if the condition had held, The Great Toronto Shade Shortage, is retired rather than kept back for a future run.
A guide that declares its own hypothesis dead is the most trustworthy thing in this atlas. The alternative was to quietly swap in the road band, publish 39.50% as though it were the sidewalk finding, and keep the better title.
Shade and the improvement areas
This guide expected shade to be handed out unevenly across the city and set out to show it. Toronto designates 33 Neighbourhood Improvement Areas. On the measured surface, ground inside them averages 6.027 shaded hours of fifteen against 6.246 outside, a gap of 0.219. After the leaf-on correction, the pair is 7.034 inside and 7.240 outside, a gap of 0.206 hours. That is about twelve minutes, or 1.4% of the modelled day. The direction is the one you would expect. The size does not carry a chapter, and dressing twelve minutes as a finding about inequality would be dishonest. Two things bound what the null is worth: the improvement-area designation is a dated instrument that does not track today's canopy, and ground shade at 2 m on one July day is not the only way to ask who has trees. This is reported because it was tested, not because it found anything.
The same city in January
Everything above describes one day in July. At 12:00 EST on 21 January, the sun sits 26.24° above the horizon, against 66.19° at the nearest modelled hour to solar noon in July. The lower January angle throws longer shadows, so more of the same ground is shaded at that frame: 47.22% measured, and 53.27% if the correction is applied, though that second figure is a summer-foliage counterfactual printed beside the measurement rather than a claim about January's canopy. January trees are bare, so 47.22% is the number to read, and it is just under half the city rather than most of it.
One frame says how much ground is shaded at midday. It does not say how long the shade stays there. And whether you want that shadow is not a question this map can answer: it records where the sun reaches the ground, and says nothing about what standing there is like, in either season.
What this map cannot tell you
- This guide maps shade, not temperature. A shaded asphalt lot can be hotter than a sunny lawn, and nothing here measures heat. Every figure above says where the sun was blocked and nothing at all about what standing there is like.
- The correction is the generous end of the range. Ground under a leaf-on crown is counted as shaded for the whole modelled day. Real crowns are not solid: light comes through them, and low sun arrives sideways underneath them. Wherever this guide prints two figures, the truthful answer sits between them, nearer the corrected one in July.
- The correction is measured, not assumed. It raises bare canopy by a step at 3 m, and 99.8% of the pixels it raised took a height measured from a neighbouring crown rather than a default. It still fixes canopy the flight missed entirely better than canopy the flight caught halfway.
- The land cover is 2018 and the lidar is 2023. They disagree in places. The largest single correction raised a pixel by 142.5 m, which is a 2018 tree polygon standing over a tower built since.
- Fifteen frames are not fifteen equal hours. The 06:00 frame sits at 0.38° above the horizon and counts the whole city as shaded. Read every count in this guide as frames of the modelled day, not as hours of usable shade.
- One day of one year. Everything here is 21 July 2026, 06:00 to 20:00 EDT. One measurement is added at 12:00 EST on 21 January 2026. It compares midday coverage and says nothing about a full winter day or season.
- The flight has a date. The lidar was flown April to May 2023, so anything built or felled since is missing. Roofs are inferred rather than measured, which matters most for shade cast from the tops of buildings.
- The grid is 2 m. A single narrow tree, a bus shelter, or a gap between two towers can fall between samples. The original plan called for 1 m and this run did not reach it.
- The walk band was chosen after both bands were computed, and that choice decides the title. The finding publishes the road band beside it so the choice can be checked rather than taken on trust.