And why urban messiness is an important feature of cities
I'm back in Toronto. And another "fresh pow annual" is in the books.
The BC interior is a specific kind of ski and snowboard trip. It's not about dancing on tables in neon onesies while Champagne gondolas fly overhead. It's about chasing champagne powder with like-minded middle-aged men, all pretending that they don't otherwise live a sedentary, low-range-of-motion lifestyle for the balance of the year.
And why urban messiness is an important feature of cities
I'm back in Toronto. And another "fresh pow annual" is in the books.
The BC interior is a specific kind of ski and snowboard trip. It's not about dancing on tables in neon onesies while Champagne gondolas fly overhead. It's about chasing champagne powder with like-minded middle-aged men, all pretending that they don't otherwise live a sedentary, low-range-of-motion lifestyle for the balance of the year.
We stayed in four different accommodations for this trip, and one of the things that became very apparent is that everyone is trying to over-optimize around "good service." In each case, I was getting text messages and emails before the stay, during the stay, and after the stay.
"Here's how to prepare before check-in." "Is there anything we can do to make your stay more enjoyable?" "How was your stay?" "Please share your experience with us here." In one case, I even received a phone call from the front desk as soon as I got to my room: "We just wanted to see if everything in your room is to your liking."
On the one hand, this level of communication and responsiveness is fantastic when you do need something. But on the other hand, it can be overwhelming. Blasting everyone with automated text messages and emails does not, in my opinion, stand out as exceptional hospitality, especially since everyone now seems to be doing it.
Outstanding hospitality is emotional, rather than technical.
In city-building news, Bloomberg recently published an article about why cities should embrace "messiness." In it, they cite a book that was assembled by some fellow Torontonians:
This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.
Messiness and allowing for ground-up urban interventions are themes that I have written a lot about on this blog over the years. I think we have gone overboard with rules and regulations, to the point that we stamp out many of the things that make cities so wonderful.
Top-down planning will never get everything right. It's impossible. And the big thing about over-planning is that, in the end, we don't actually know what we're missing out on. We don't know what might have been possible if only we had allowed for it or were more flexible in our approaches.
Messiness is a feature of cities, not a bug. We should be embracing it.
On January 23, a Waymo autonomous vehicle hit a child in Santa Monica, California. The age and identity of the child are not public, but "minor injuries" were reported. Waymo responded with this blog post where they essentially argued that "if this had been a human driver, the accident would have been worse."
The event occurred when the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph [~9.7 km/h] before contact was made.
To put this in perspective, our peer-reviewed model shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph. This significant reduction in impact speed and severity is a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver.
All car accidents causing human injury are unfortunate, but car accidents involving AVs are obviously more noteworthy right now. In my mind, it makes sense that a Waymo should be more responsive than a human driver in the face of a pedestrian jumping out into a roadway.
But being "less bad" is not going to win everyone over. The accident is being investigated to ensure "the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users.”
The headline is suboptimal for AVs, but it's very possible the Waymo did everything it could, and did it better than any one of us could ever do. We shall see.
I was surprised to learn this week (I should have already been aware) that France operates seven urban cable cars (or gondolas). Its first was built in Grenoble, at the foot of the Alps, in 1934, and its latest opened in December 2025 in the country's capital region.
Called Câble 1 (or C1), this latest line is 4.5 kilometres long, carries 11,000 passengers per day in 105 gondolas, and connects Villeneuve-Saint-Georges to the Métro Line 8 in Créteil (a southeastern suburb of Paris). The total trip takes 18 minutes, compared to an estimated time of 40 minutes by bus or car.
Importantly, the project only cost €138 million, or about €30.6 million per km, which is about 10-15% of what a subway might have cost based on data from the Grand Paris Express. Estimates for the latter were over €1 billion, meaning it would have likely been a non-starter.
Gondolas are most commonly used to navigate mountainous terrain, but they're increasingly being used in urban settings to stitch together isolated communities. Forty minutes to eighteen minutes is a significant quality-of-life upgrade. I think more cities should be considering cable cars as a possible mobility solution.
Cover photo via Région Île-de-France / Aymeric Guillonneau
We stayed in four different accommodations for this trip, and one of the things that became very apparent is that everyone is trying to over-optimize around "good service." In each case, I was getting text messages and emails before the stay, during the stay, and after the stay.
"Here's how to prepare before check-in." "Is there anything we can do to make your stay more enjoyable?" "How was your stay?" "Please share your experience with us here." In one case, I even received a phone call from the front desk as soon as I got to my room: "We just wanted to see if everything in your room is to your liking."
On the one hand, this level of communication and responsiveness is fantastic when you do need something. But on the other hand, it can be overwhelming. Blasting everyone with automated text messages and emails does not, in my opinion, stand out as exceptional hospitality, especially since everyone now seems to be doing it.
Outstanding hospitality is emotional, rather than technical.
In city-building news, Bloomberg recently published an article about why cities should embrace "messiness." In it, they cite a book that was assembled by some fellow Torontonians:
This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.
Messiness and allowing for ground-up urban interventions are themes that I have written a lot about on this blog over the years. I think we have gone overboard with rules and regulations, to the point that we stamp out many of the things that make cities so wonderful.
Top-down planning will never get everything right. It's impossible. And the big thing about over-planning is that, in the end, we don't actually know what we're missing out on. We don't know what might have been possible if only we had allowed for it or were more flexible in our approaches.
Messiness is a feature of cities, not a bug. We should be embracing it.
On January 23, a Waymo autonomous vehicle hit a child in Santa Monica, California. The age and identity of the child are not public, but "minor injuries" were reported. Waymo responded with this blog post where they essentially argued that "if this had been a human driver, the accident would have been worse."
The event occurred when the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph [~9.7 km/h] before contact was made.
To put this in perspective, our peer-reviewed model shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph. This significant reduction in impact speed and severity is a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver.
All car accidents causing human injury are unfortunate, but car accidents involving AVs are obviously more noteworthy right now. In my mind, it makes sense that a Waymo should be more responsive than a human driver in the face of a pedestrian jumping out into a roadway.
But being "less bad" is not going to win everyone over. The accident is being investigated to ensure "the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users.”
The headline is suboptimal for AVs, but it's very possible the Waymo did everything it could, and did it better than any one of us could ever do. We shall see.
I was surprised to learn this week (I should have already been aware) that France operates seven urban cable cars (or gondolas). Its first was built in Grenoble, at the foot of the Alps, in 1934, and its latest opened in December 2025 in the country's capital region.
Called Câble 1 (or C1), this latest line is 4.5 kilometres long, carries 11,000 passengers per day in 105 gondolas, and connects Villeneuve-Saint-Georges to the Métro Line 8 in Créteil (a southeastern suburb of Paris). The total trip takes 18 minutes, compared to an estimated time of 40 minutes by bus or car.
Importantly, the project only cost €138 million, or about €30.6 million per km, which is about 10-15% of what a subway might have cost based on data from the Grand Paris Express. Estimates for the latter were over €1 billion, meaning it would have likely been a non-starter.
Gondolas are most commonly used to navigate mountainous terrain, but they're increasingly being used in urban settings to stitch together isolated communities. Forty minutes to eighteen minutes is a significant quality-of-life upgrade. I think more cities should be considering cable cars as a possible mobility solution.
Cover photo via Région Île-de-France / Aymeric Guillonneau
