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We've been talking a lot about autonomous vehicles, and in particular Waymo, on this blog. In my opinion, the safety records — which Waymo has published after driving more than 100 million driverless miles — already suggest that none of us should be driving cars anymore. Some or many of you will disagree with this statement, but there's a reason why car crashes are the number two cause of death for children and young adults in the US.
So not only is this a tech breakthrough and a profound city-building shift, but it's also a public health breakthrough. Here's a recent opinion piece published in the New York Times by Dr. Jonathan Slotkin, the vice chair of neurosurgery at the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania. I found this statement particularly interesting:
In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early when the results are too striking to ignore. We stop when there is unexpected harm. We also stop for overwhelming benefit, when a treatment is working so well that it would be unethical to continue giving anyone a placebo. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do.
Now the imperative:
There’s a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles. More than 39,000 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes last year, more than homicide, plane crashes and natural disasters combined. Crashes are the No. 2 cause of death for children and young adults. But death is only part of the story. These crashes are also the leading cause of spinal cord injury. We surgeons see the aftermath of the 10,000 crash victims who come to emergency rooms every day. The combined economic and quality-of-life toll exceeds $1 trillion annually, more than the entire U.S. military or Medicare budget.
Dr. Slotkin goes on to talk about some of the cities that are pushing back against AV adoption, or simply erecting barriers, namely Washington, D.C. and Boston. That's too bad. This is a decision that can be easily guided by data: Which is the safest option for the greatest number of people? Just do that. Dr. Slotkin gets it right: "policymakers need to stop fighting this transformation and start planning for it."
Before laneway homes were permitted as-of-right in Toronto, many people couldn't imagine them being a viable housing solution, let alone a desirable housing solution. I vividly remember some critics arguing that only people of questionable moral fiber would want to live in a laneway. Toronto's laneways were only suitable for garages, cars, graffiti, and degenerates, apparently.
If you're a longtime reader of this blog you'll know that I've always felt differently. In 2014, I wrote a post calling laneway homes the new loft. And in 2021, after Mackay Laneway House was finished, I wrote that "slowly but surely, we will start to think of our lanes not as back of house, but as front of house." I went on to surmise that, one day, our laneways could even become the more desirable side of a property.
I was reminded of this prognostication earlier this week when a friend of mine, who is very active in the multiplex space, was touring me through one of his construction sites. What struck me is that he said that on every single one of his projects, the highest-grossing suite is always the laneway or garden suite. It commands the highest rent and it's what gets the most showings.
This, of course, makes sense. It's a standalone structure, whereas the other homes in a multiplex building are not. And if you have the site area to do two storeys, these suites can become relatively large — oftentimes between 1,200 and 1,400 sf. Laneways are also intimate and largely pedestrian-oriented streets, so a nice place to live.
But there's some hindsight bias in this obviousness. It wasn't that long ago that most Torontonians couldn't imagine a "house fitting behind a house." It was an unthinkable solution that would ruin the character of our low-rise neighborhoods. Now we have planning policies that not only allow them, but that are, in a way, promoting an inversion in the way our low-rise neighborhoods function.
Toronto's policies allow up to six suites on the "front" of certain properties, plus a laneway or garden suite at the "back," for a total of 7 suites. The effect is that an entirely new single-family house layer is today getting built on our laneways. An alternative way to think about this is that it's like taking an existing single-family house, pushing it to the back, and then building a small "houseplex" in the front.
This map, showing the right-of-way widths of Toronto's major streets, is one of my favorite maps. It tells you so much about the scale of the city.
Even if you were entirely unfamiliar with Toronto, you could look at this map and gather from the width and spacing of its major arteries that the orange streets (20 meters) represent the oldest parts of Toronto and that the red streets (36 meters) represent the newer and more suburban parts of the city.
It's also interesting to think about this map in the context of other cities. Manhattan, for example, has a famous grid plan that generally contains north-south avenues and east-west streets. Most, but not all, of the avenues are 100 feet wide, or ~30 meters. And most, but not all, of the streets are 60 feet wide, or ~18 meters.
I tried to get Gemini to create a New York version of the above map using the same color legend, but it hallucinated and didn't give me what I wanted. So you'll have to use your imagination. Manhattan's avenues typically correspond to the dark blue lines on Toronto's map, and its streets are even narrower than the orange lines.
If you were to overlay these two maps at the same scale, you'd see at least two things: one, Toronto doesn't have the same kind of broad avenues cutting through its most urban areas (meaning it's harder to move cars around) and, two, Manhattan has a much thicker web of urban streets. Consider the density that exists on Manhattan's 18-meter-wide streets.
Toronto did not lay out its urban grid ahead of time like New York did with its Commissioners' Plan in 1811. In many ways, Toronto feels more like an accidental global city. But that doesn't mean we can't look at our urban grid today and decide what it wants to be for the next 200 years. I think that would be a good idea.
Cover photo by Tianlei Wu on Unsplash
Ironically, all of these policies were born out of a deep desire to not change the character of existing neighborhoods. It's why no one would dare call these six-unit structures anything resembling an apartment. They are house-plexes, which are just like single-family houses, but with an added plex in the name. Nothing out of the ordinary to see here.
But our neighborhoods are changing and they will continue to change. The market is already speaking in terms of which new homes it finds most desirable. And in the end, that's a good thing. Change and evolution are features, not bugs, of cities. When Toronto stops growing and adapting, that's when we need to start worrying.
Back in 2014, I compared laneway housing to lofts because of the latter's origin story. When manufacturing began to leave cities and warehouses started to get converted to apartments, they were viewed as dangerous, illegal misuses of commercial spaces. It was housing that no respectable middle-class person would want to live in.
Then the opposite became true. Loft living became a symbol of urban cool, so much so that every new apartment somehow became a "loft." I'm not suggesting that Toronto's laneway suites are about to stage a global takeover in quite the same way, but some 11 years later, I do think it's following the same arc of desirability. The things we desire aren't as enshrined as they may seem.
Cover photo by Nikhil Mitra on Unsplash
