The City of London, also known as the "Square Mile," is the financial district of London. Some 678,000 people work in the area, nearly 9,000 people live in it, and millions visit it each year. So it's an intensely used square mile (~1.12 square miles or ~2.9 square kilometers). Given this intensity, do you think that it would be reasonable, or even possible, for all 678,000 people to drive their own car to work and not experience crippling traffic congestion?
Obviously not, and the data reflects that:
Motor vehicle usage within the City of London is nearly a third of what it was in 1999. This is a result of moves like the city's Congestion Charge (introduced in 2003) and new Cycling Superhighways (introduced between 2015-16).
Cycling increased 57% from 2022 to 2024. Personal bike usage increased 36%. Shared dockless bike usage increased 4x and now makes up 17% of all people cycling. During daytime hours (7am to 7pm) cycling represents about 39% of all on-street traffic, which is nearly 2x the amount of cars and private hires. And based on current trends, cycling is forecasted to become the dominant all-around mode of transport within as soon as two years.
People walking, wheeling, and cycling now make up three quarters of all travel, up from two-thirds in 2022. This is a huge percentage.
For more data, check out the City of London's City Streets 2025 Summary Report.
Cover photo by Frans Ruiter on Unsplash
New York City is projecting that Lower Manhattan is likely to see more frequent flooding by as early as the 2040s. This could move to monthly flooding by the 2050s and daily by the 2080s. These time horizons may seem like a ways away, but I'm personally going to try my damnedest to see the 2080s.
In light of these projections, New York City released a new Financial District and Seaport Climate Resilience Master Plan at the end of last year. The plan is projected to cost somewhere between $5 to $7 billion and entails building out a new multilevel waterfront that extends the current shoreline into the East River by up to 200 feet.
Here are a couple of renderings:
The upper level will be elevated by about 15-18 feet (designed to protect against storms like Sandy) and the lowest level will be a continuous waterfront esplanade (designed to connect humans to the water). Overall, the plan encompasses about one mile of waterfront, running from The Battery to the Brooklyn Bridge.
City building take times. In the case of this plan, it is building for the next century.
For a copy of the full press release, click here.
Images: NYC Economic Development Corporation
Today was a historic day for Toronto, for Canada, and for the game of basketball in this country. The Toronto Raptors are world champions for the first time since their founding in 1995. Soak it in. Here is a photo that I took of the parade coming through the Financial District at around 2:30pm:
Some of the estimates going around are that 1 to 2 million people attended today's championship parade. But 2 million seems like a lot, even though today was frenetic (see above photo, again). I mean, that's 1/3 of the population of the Greater Toronto Area.
The fact that some of the "official" estimates also have a 1 million person spread tells me that, as of right now, we actually have no idea how many people were at today's parade.
So that got me thinking: How do people count crowds? And are we using drones to do it, yet? Subway and rail ridership for the day -- which surely spiked -- will give us some indication. But definitely not the full picture.
It turns out that the typical approach to counting crowds is known as Jacobs' Method. It was invented in the 1960s by a professor at UC, Berkeley, named Herbert Jacobs. He came up with the method while trying to count the number of students protesting the Vietnam War.
The concept is simple: It's area x density. And permutations of his method usually use this same principle. What you do is take the area filled with people, break it up into a smaller grid, and then come up with a population density estimate for each square.
He had some rules of thumb for that. A light crowd was about 1 person per 10 square feet. And a dense crowd (such as a mosh pit or an NBA championship parade in Toronto) was about 1 person per 2.5 square feet.
Using this method and aerial photos of today's parade, I would imagine that we could eventually get to a more precise estimate than 1 to 2 million people. But surely somebody has figured out how to program a drone (or other UAV) and do this even more accurately.
Crowd data is valuable information, particularly for political rallies and protests (I would imagine). If you know of a company doing this, please leave it in the comment section below. And if it doesn't yet exist, well then, now you have a new business idea.