One of the great features of the so-called gig economy is that many of its businesses operate with an asset-light model. Uber, for instance, relies on drivers showing up with their own cars. This is the opposite of, say, the real estate industry, which, for a lot of business models, is both capital-intensive and asset-heavy.

But there is one problem with the asset-light model, and it's that it may not work forever. The Financial Times just reported that Uber has committed to spending $10 billion over the next few years on actual cars and on equity investments in various strategic companies.

For instance, earlier this month, electric vehicle company Lucid announced that Uber will be investing $500 million in the company and buying at least 35,000 of its cars.

This is gig-economy blasphemy, but it's very obviously an existential concern for the company. Uber needs to be in the AV race, or else asset-light could be an asset-liability. The thing that helped Uber become successful in the past now seems to be what they need to overcome in this new mobility race.

On a loosely related note, I find it somewhat amusing that cities are now starting to push back against robotaxis out of fear that they will displace Uber drivers. If you were following Uber in its early days, you'll know that cities fought the company vehemently because of the taxi lobby. Now they're trying to protect it.

Cover photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

We have spoken many times before about the fact that Japan is built around rail-oriented urbanism. But if you have the time right now, I'm going to suggest that you read this longish article by Matthew Bornholt & Benedict Springbett called "Why Japan has such good railways," because nowhere else in the developed world uses rail for passenger kilometres more than Japan, and they explain why.

One common hypothesis, which is mentioned in the article, is that it's largely cultural. The Japanese are rule-abiding collectivists who are more willing to take public transit compared to us selfish and individualistic North Americans. But this doesn't seem right. In fact, one could argue that the Japanese solution is actually more free-market oriented.

The Japanese rail model seems to work so well because (1) most of the network is private, (2) liberal land-use policies have allowed Japan's urban centres to develop enough density to properly support the use of rail, and (3) the rail operators make money in a bunch of other ways beyond rail. They're typically also in the business of real estate.

Here's a quote from the article by the president of the Tokyu Group that I absolutely love:

I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company. In Europe for instance, railway companies simply connect cities through their terminals. That is a pretty normal way of operating in this industry, whereas what we do is completely different: we create cities and then, as a utility facility, we add the stations and the railways to connect them one with another.

This is a fundamentally different model that allows rail companies to capture some of the value that they inherently create. To use the example of Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown line, it's the difference between saying, "I'm going to build a rail line and then, presumably, other stuff will happen," and, "I'm going to develop this midtown corridor and then I'm going to run rail underneath it to maximize value creation."

If Japan can do it, so can we. Ironically, a big part of it means easing land-use controls and allowing transit-oriented development to simply be what it wants to be — dense and proximate to rail.

Cover photo by Mylène Larnaud on Unsplash

Charts from Work in Progress

I recently came across a real estate product called LandGlide. It's an app that provides parcel boundaries and detailed property information for over 99% of the US population. It's also "available" in Canada, but it doesn't tell you much about properties here. In the US, you can easily access things like:

• Owner’s name or legal entity

• Mortgage balance and terms

• Assessed value and tax amounts

• Square footage and year built

• Granular details (even down to whether the home has a fireplace)

The reason for this difference is that in the US, property data is generally considered public record, whereas in Canada, we have stricter privacy laws. But it's not like we make this information strictly private. We just gate it and make it more cumbersome and costly to obtain through services like GeoWarehouse.

I know that some of you will argue that it's better to "sort-of-kind-of" restrict this data from being freely displayed online. But hear me out: this philosophical data difference is an important one that hurts innovation.

In Canada, property data is monopolized and, therefore, cumbersome and expensive to access. It's an unnecessary barrier to innovation. In the US, the same kind of data has become commoditized. It's easy and cheap to access, and so the barriers to building new ideas on top of it are significantly lower.

For example, Paul Crowe, who is the CEO of a Toronto-based real estate company called House Beat, responded to one of my tweets by saying, "For what I can get in the US for $0.15 / API call from one provider, [it] would cost over $18 per call in Canada, across 2-3 integrations."

What this suggests to me is that we're okay allowing some/all of this data to get out there; we'd just like it to be harder and more expensive to access. Why?

Information, as the saying goes, wants to be free, which is why I'm so bullish on blockchain technologies. Blockchains are public databases that make information widely accessible and allow anyone to innovate on top of them. As the world continues to move on-chain, we are going to see the enormous benefits that this brings.

Already, we can see what happens when you don't have or allow it.

Cover photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash