Category: Mobility

• What does Toronto want to be?

  So, what bold and uncomfortable 21st-century master plan should Toronto adopt? I don’t know exactly, but what I was getting at in my lead-up post is that it’s hard not to sometimes feel like Toronto is trying to run a 21st-century global city on a 19th-century Victorian street grid, surrounded by Houston.

  In the core of the city, we have narrow, generally 20-metre rights-of-way. Many of these east-west arteries are beautiful streets to walk on with fine-grained retail patterns, but the streets themselves have slow-moving streetcars in the middle two lanes and on-street parking on both sides. The result is streets that don’t move and are frustrating to navigate for all users: drivers, transit riders, and cyclists. It can take an hour to drive 10 km.

  Other major streets don’t have streetcars or much retail activity, but the land-use pattern reflects a bygone era. It doesn’t make sense to have only single-family housing on Toronto’s busiest arteries. It’s time for these streets to grow up. (To be fair, the City of Toronto is trying to achieve this with its new Major Streets policies, but the development economics do not make these changes feasible at scale.)

  As you move out of the core, Toronto’s major streets naturally widen along with the recency in which they were built. Now we have the opposite problem where we’re faced with “stroads” with little to no urbanity. Overall, it’s the result of a city that grew organically over time without the same kind of defined plan seen in cities like New York, Barcelona, and Paris (after it had already been built out).

  Here’s the thing: Toronto’s low-rise single-family era is over. Virtually the only single-family housing that gets built nowadays is when somebody demolishes an existing house and builds anew. The future is a uniformly higher-density city built on the backbone of robust transit, vehicular, and cycling networks; not a monocentric downtown that people commute to.

  So what might that mean exactly?

  To start, I believe it means getting our transit vehicles onto their own dedicated lanes, widening certain major streets (for the benefit of cars), shrinking and pedestrianizing others (for the benefit of human-scaled urbanism), carving through new major streets to fix connectivity gaps, and pricing congestion as a means of funding constant transit expansion. My fellow urbanists may not want to hear me advocate for the selective widening and creation of arterial roads, but we have to stop pretending that cars are going to disappear.

  Once the bones are in place, it’s then a matter of getting the land-use policies right and letting the private sector do what it does best — build for the future. Now, I don’t profess to know the exact combination of major street widths, one-way patterns, and whatever else should be done, but I do feel strongly that it’s time for a bold and uncomfortable 21st-century master plan for Toronto.

  What does Toronto want to be? We should host an international design competition and find out.

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  Cover photo by Oles Borys

  2026.07.28

• Uber and Waymo are breaking up

  The writing is always on the wall when aggressive lobbying starts. Here’s the situation. A proposed bill has been put forward that would allow autonomous vehicles to operate in Washington, D.C., updating a prior Autonomous Vehicle Act from 2012. Uber is opposing the bill, arguing that it would displace for-hire human drivers and hand Waymo a de facto monopoly in the District, according to TechCrunch.

  Instead, the company is lobbying for a system that would require robotaxis, like Waymo, to operate on a ride-hailing network that also uses human drivers. This would give consumers the ability to access both. Do I want to make small talk or not?

  Now, Uber’s position in the face of autonomous vehicles has always been that human drivers aren’t going anywhere because it’s simply too expensive to own and operate a fleet of AVs based on peak demand times. The only option is to top up the supply base with human drivers, and this is why the Uber marketplace will always remain essential.

  This narrative was initially supported by a series of announced partnerships, but now there seems to be a growing divide between the companies, and it’s not so clear that Waymo needs Uber as much as Uber would like. Because if Waymo were truly concerned about having human drivers, then the two companies wouldn’t be on opposite sides of the table with this bill. Uber knows this could be existential.

  At the end of the day, Uber disrupted traditional taxis and changed how our cities operate. Autonomous vehicles are set to do the same. Should we feel bad? Monopolies are, of course, bad. But creative destruction is not.

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  Cover photo by Dan Gold

  2026.07.22

• What happens when Uber doesn’t have to pay its drivers?

  This is an interesting video by Phil Andrews of Maxinomics talking about the economics of Uber and what it could stand to gain from autonomous vehicles.

  As part of this, he touches on the exclusive partnership that was announced between Uber and Waymo back in September. That was a big deal.

  I find this topic fascinating because it’s hard to imagine it not reshaping the landscape of our cities. And it continues to get more real by the day.

  2024.11.18

• Manhattan’s congestion charge is back, maybe

  I first wrote about Manhattan’s proposed congestion charge back in 2018. Naturally, some people supported it and some people opposed it. Four years later, it was reported that the charge was still being considered for the area of the island south of 60th Street, and that it could generate an additional $1 billion in revenue for the city’s transportation authority. But then in June of this year, right before the charge was set to come into effect on June 30, 2024, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said “nah, let’s pause this indefinitely.” And at that point, it felt mostly dead.

  Nope: A revised tolling plan has just been announced — the charge has been reduced from $15 to $9 — and Hochul is now trying to jam it through before Trump takes office in January. Trump opposes the charge and has branded it the “most regressive tax known to womankind”, so there’s a real deadline here. This could get interesting. Do you think it will actually happen, some 6 years later? (In reality, the timeline is far longer. Congestion pricing also looked promising during the Bloomberg era, but then similarly died. And I’m sure there were even earlier proposals.)

  2024.11.14

• Paris introduces new limited traffic zone

  As counterintuitive as it may sound, one way you could try and improve traffic congestion is to discourage people from riding their bikes and instead encourage them to drive more. That’s what’s happening in Toronto right now. Another way is to dramatically restrict car usage. And starting this Monday, that’s what Paris will be doing with its new limited traffic zone (zone à trafic limité) in the center of the city:

  

  This new ZTL is approximately 5 square kilometers. About 100,000 people live within its boundaries, and it is estimated that somewhere between 350,000 to 500,000 vehicles enter it each day. But according to the city, it is estimated that only around 30% of these trips are absolutely necessary (because of a lack of alternatives, for example). The purpose of the ZTL is to reduce the unnecessary ones.

  The way it will work is that drivers will no longer be allowed to drive through this zone. You’ll only be able to enter if you plan on stopping for a legitimate reason. It’s not yet clear what this exact list of approved reasons will be, but the general idea is that if you want to drive in for dinner or to attend a meeting, that’s fine. What you can’t do, though, is just drive around in a souped-up Honda Civic blasting Taylor Swift.

  The next 6 months are planned to be a period of education. Drivers exiting the zone are just going to be told that there’s this new ZTL and that they better have stopped somewhere. But eventually there will be a 135 euro fine and eventually drivers will be expected to furnish some sort of supporting evidence for their stop, such as a restaurant receipt. There’s also talk of adding automatic cameras.

  Of course, this creates a lot of gray areas. What about if you’re just going over to a friend’s place for dinner? Will they then need to write you a note saying that you went over for some homemade bouillabaisse? Yeah, I don’t know the answer to this. But you have to admit that this is a bold city-building move, and a far more effective way of improving traffic flows.

  Unlike removing bike lanes, this plan will actually work.

  2024.11.01

• Canada announces high-speed rail between Quebec City and Toronto — finally!

  The train from Paris to Marseille takes just over 3 hours:

  

  To drive this same distance, it would take just over 8 hours:

  

  So unless you had a very specific reason, I don’t know why you’d ever want to drive this route. I certainly hate long drives and would avoid this at all costs.

  On a related note, the Canadian government announced this week that it will actually be moving forward with a high-speed train linking Québec City to Toronto, stopping in Peterborough, Ottawa, Montréal, Trois-Rivières, and Laval. And unlike previous announcements, it will actually go pretty fast — upwards of 300 km/h, which is comparable to what the TGV does on the above route.

  There are three consortia currently competing for this contract, but apparently the federal government has already chosen a winning bidder. An announcement is expected next month. At the same time, the project office owns all of the bids, and so there’s a chance that elements from each of them could be used in the final project.

  According to official messaging, the design alone is expected to take some 4 to 5 years, which is an eternity and way too long. But at least we seem to be moving forward. This rail link is a no brainer. It will compress the geography of an importantly bilingual corridor with nearly 20 million people — about half the population of Canada! It’s our megalopolis.

  Now we just need to move forward with urgency and with an unwavering commitment to creating the best high-speed rail service in the world. Let’s not accept mediocrity. And let’s not cancel it once we’ve already sunk millions into it. That would be a terrible outcome for such an obviously important nation-building project.

  LFG.

  2024.10.29

• Mass transit with on-demand service

  

  Here’s what we know:

  In the mid-20th century, the US made a pivotal choice that shaped its cities, economy and lifestyle. It chose highways and cars over public transit. At the time, this seemed like the future: the freedom of the open road, the allure of suburban living, and the booming post-second world war economy all converged to push America towards a car-centric culture.

  The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 cemented this vision, unleashing a highway system that encouraged suburban sprawl, fuelled the automotive industry and sidelined public transit. Rail systems were seen as relics of a slow, industrial-era technology ill-suited to America’s postwar aspirations. The car was king. 

  But this congested system is breaking. In 1950 about 30 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities. By 2030 this is expected to reach 60 per cent. Infrastructure cannot keep up with this growth. An increase in cars further reduces street capacity.

  What we don’t have a clear consensus on, though, is the path forward. Is it more highways? More public transit? More bike lanes? Or will autonomous vehicles finally arrive and bail us out? The answer will depend on who you ask.

  In this recent opinion piece, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla makes the case for something else: personal rapid transit systems (or PRT). Conveniently, he also happens to be an investor in one — a company called Glydways.

  The promise is an on-demand mass transit system that offers the convenience of a personal car, but with the capacities and price points of public transit. And it is based on small autonomous vehicles riding in their own dedicated lanes.

  Each lane only needs to be 1.5 meters wide, which is less than the 2.3 meters that the Dutch see as the ideal width of a one-way bike lane. And with this, the company claims that it can reach capacities of up to 10,800 people per hour.

  To further put this into perspective, the standard width of a two-way parking drive aisle here in Toronto is 6 meters. So this would mean that each drive aisle could, in theory, have 4 lanes dedicated to these “Glydcars.” That’s how narrow they are.

  Here’s a video of them in operation:

  This, of course, isn’t an entirely new idea. You might remember that Masdar City in Abu Dhabi claims to have opened the world’s first PRT system in 2010 — a 1.4 km line with only two stations. That said, Glydways has already been awarded three projects in the US. So for fun, I think I’ll keep an eye on them.

  2024.10.27

• We need far better urban data

  The divisive debate over bikes lanes in Toronto continues to remind me that we need far better urban data. People and politicians keep touting “evidence-based decisions,” but what exactly is that evidence? The high-level figure being thrown around by the anti-cycling side is that only something like 1% of residents use bike lanes. So obviously it only makes sense to focus on the 99% and not give up any space to this small minority group.

  But this is highly aggregated data. It also doesn’t speak to any of the externalities associated with introducing new bike infrastructure. Looking at 2021 Census data, the number of cyclists was actually around 5% for the old City of Toronto and in some areas it was between 15-20%. However, it’s absolutely critical to note that this is only the people who selected cycling as their “primary mode of commuting” when submitting their responses to the last census.

  

  Meaning, it excludes people who maybe only cycle 1-2 days a week, or who ride for leisure and/or for exercise, or who ride to their French class in the evenings (like me). I would also assume that these numbers have generally grown since 2021 given the overall investments that have been made in biking infrastructure. So overall, this is weak data. It’s a few years old. And it excludes many types of users. We need to get more granular.

  Like, it’s great to see local business owners speaking out about the benefits that they have seen as a result of the Bloor bike lanes, but in the end, this is also anecdotal. We need real-time data, precise modal splits, the throughput of every major street, and much more. Then maybe we’ll be able to better optimize around the fact that we are a city divided by built form and by politics. That’s the thing about evidence-based decisions, they tend to get stronger with accurate evidence.

  2024.10.26

• This is what happens when you price roads

  As a general rule, road pricing isn’t popular. But that’s not because it doesn’t work. The problem is that it works too well, and people don’t like the idea of driving less and paying for roads (that currently have a zero marginal cost).

  Here’s a recent study by Robert Bain and Deny Sullivan that looked at just how well it can work. In it, they examine 76 data points from 16 countries, including roads, bridges, tunnels, and cordons (areas).

  The question: What happens to demand once the marginal cost of using a road goes from $0 to some cost greater than zero? (As part of this, they also looked at whether the road or bridge in question has viable alternatives.)

  The results:

  

  The median traffic reduction was 25%. But the interquartile range was -17% to -44%. This is all very significant. Said differently, the traffic impact in nearly a quarter of the examples was -45% or more. So almost a halving of traffic congestion.

  These reductions are obviously a function of the cost of using each road, but regardless, the overarching takeaway remains the same: You may not like or want road pricing, but it totally works.

  2024.10.24

• Social friction

  Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect based in New York City. He is the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) and the author of two books.

  His first book, published in 2013, was A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America. And as the title suggests, it was about the virtues of dense urban agglomerations. You know, the kind of cities that I like and have good bike lanes.

  His second book, which just came out, is called The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy. In this one, he talks about the role of architecture and urbanism in fighting both climate change and social division.

  Below is an excerpt from a recent interview in Bloomberg where he discusses the book’s theme of “social friction.” This snippet is also a timely follow-up to yesterday’s post about autonomous vehicles:

  Cars are problematic when it comes to connective design. It doesn’t matter if they’re electric because the problem with a car is it’s a divider. It’s a metal bubble and it keeps you from interacting with your neighbors. So the virtues of mass transit, public parks and well-designed buildings in cities are not just that they are good for the climate. They are also good for this sense of social coherence. If we’re going to live up to our promise as a country — a multicultural democracy — we need to have spaces that both reflect and perpetuate that.

  I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds like it’s in the wheelhouse of this blog. If you’d like to, here’s a link.

  2024.10.23