I just got home from the 34th annual BILD awards. It’s late and I’m tired, but I had a good time. TAS won a few awards, including green builder of the year, and I saw a lot of old friends and familiar faces.

For those of you not in the industry, BILD is the Building Industry and Land Development Association. And every year a gala is held where a bunch of awards are given out for things ranging from the best marketing brochure to the best suite design under 750 square feet. If you’d like to get a feel for the event, check out #BILDAWARDS.

It was held out in Woodbridge, which is a suburb of Toronto. So today, I did something that I don’t do all that often or even every week: I drove my car. That’s fine, but it reminded me that one of the perks of living in a dense and transit oriented area (like downtown Toronto), is that you never have to worry about drinking and driving.

I’m really disciplined about not doing that, but it’s nice not to have to worry about it. It can make driving feel like a liability. So there’s another reason to love cities. You can drink whenever you want.

If you’ve ever ridden a busy Toronto streetcar, you’ll know this story:

You’re waiting outside in the cold for a streetcar. When one–actually 4–finally arrive all bunched up together, they’re so packed with people that you’re not actually able to get on. You try one anyways and the driver makes an announcement for everyone to “move back” so that more people can onboard via the front door. After a few minutes of people shuffling to try and get further back, you’re finally able to squeeze on–even if you are virtually sitting on the driver’s lap. You then travel about 2 blocks before the streetcar stops and the same thing repeats. The result is an absolutely infuriating mobility experience that usually makes walking the preferred choice. Who said that downtown already has enough subways?

Over the weekend, I was watching this TED talk with Charlie Rose interviewing Larry Page of Google. One question that Rose asks Page is about why he’s so fascinated with transportation and mobility. That is, why is Google so committed to driverless cars? Page then talks about his experience of waiting for buses when he was a student at the University of Michigan and how he would think about all the inefficiencies in the system. He also talks about how half of the urban fabric of Los Angeles is made up of roads and parking lots and that this is a terrible outcome of the mobility choices made in that city.

I’ve said before that transportation is one of the biggest challenges facing Toronto today. And I truly believe that. But that’s probably the case in most, if not all big cities. Getting people around a city efficiently is such a fundamental need. It stimulates economic growth and it improves quality of life. And those are typically the reasons why people choose to live in cities: to make money and to have a better life. 

Now, I’m a big proponent of public transportation, but I’m also excited by the advances being made outside of mass transit. With driverless cars, electric cars, networks such as Uber and Hailo, and the emergence of the sharing economy, you could easily imagine a bunch of different ways in which mobility could be improved in our cities. Take, for my example, my own driving patterns. I probably drive my car 2, maybe 3 hours per week these days. That translates into a weekly utilization rate of roughly 1.2%! (2 hours / 168 hours week). That’s terribly inefficient. We can do better. And I think we will.

I woke up this morning in the City of London, Ontario, to a parking ticket. Apparently, I had committed an infraction by parking between the hours of 3:00 am - 5:00 am.

Here’s what the sign looked like, directly in front of my car. There were no other signs nearby other than one at the end of the street telling me where the parking area stopped.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but based on the signage provided, there’s absolutely no way for me to know that parking is not permitted between the precise hours of 3:00 am and 5:00 am. And truthfully, this seems like an odd set of hours to want to enforce. 

If there were some feasible way for me to fight this ticket, I would. But since cities make this purposely difficult, I’m just going to pay it. Even though I feel like fighting it out of principle.

But this post isn’t for me to complain about a parking ticket.

When I got the ticket this morning, it reminded me of a “theory” that someone once told me at an Urban Land Institute conference a few years back in Washington D.C. I actually can’t remember who it was, but the idea was that you can tell how global a city is by the quality of its signage and wayfinding signage.

I’m intrigued by this proposition because, if you think about it, a city unaccustomed to receiving outsiders has less of a need for quality signage. As a local, you begin to create your own mental map of the city and you intuitively start to understand what’s allowed, such as where you can park. The importance of good signage somewhat diminishes.

But outsiders are coming with no understanding. They’re looking for directions and instructions. So you should make sure that your city is giving it to them. However, at the same time, there are lots of big global cities, such as New York, which are or were notorious for bad signage. So signage quality is probably not perfectly correlated with globalization.

Regardless, signage matters. It’s one of the ways in which a city talks at you and others. How clearly does your city communicate?