Okay, so the official title is Chief Congestion Officer.

But whatever. What's important is that the City of Toronto is apparently close to hiring a human that will become the so-called "congestion lead". This will be, in their words, a senior strategic cross-divisional leadership role that reviews programs and projects, and then works to minimize traffic congestion (this is among other things).

Translation: Construction is causing too much congestion so let's make sure we're better at managing what happens on Toronto's streets. Fine. Nobody is going to argue against being too coordinated. But there are at least two problems with the overall framing of this position.

Firstly, it is likely that this czar will go after things like construction lane closures. Maybe the city will make them harder to get and/or maybe they'll increase the occupancy fees they charge. (Reminder: Developers pay cities lots of money to occupy public streets.)

Regardless of what is done, it's important to keep in mind that there's a trade-off here. Any time you make construction more difficult, you add costs. And when construction costs are added, they have to go somewhere. Typically that means they get passed on to buyers and renters. So depending on how hard this czar goes after road closures, we could be indirectly increasing the cost of new housing.

Pick your poison.

But the even bigger problem with this new role is this: It presupposes that if only we did X, Y, and Z, we could solve traffic congestion. This is a fallacy. It's not going to happen. Of course, I'm not saying that better coordination wouldn't improve traffic flows; I'm saying that we're ignoring the root problem.

The Greater Toronto Area has a population of nearly 7 million people, and there’s simply no conceivable way we could all drive around everywhere and still have free-flowing traffic. It’s impossible — no matter how well we coordinate roadwork or how many people with whistles we plant at major intersections during rush hour.

The only way to solve this problem is to embrace a multi-modal approach to urban mobility. And so rather than a "traffic czar" narrowly focused on car congestion, what we really need is a "mobility czar" focused more broadly on moving the most number of people as efficiently as possible — across all modes of transport.

Uber's stock has done exceptionally well this year. At the time of writing this post, it's up over 60% year-to-date. But at the same time, it remains unclear to me what the relationship will be between Uber and this brave new world of autonomous vehicles.

I mean, right now, if you're in Phoenix, I'm told you can order a Waymo car through Uber's app. But if you're in San Francisco, Waymo customers must use the Waymo app. It's all bit mirky right now, but Uber is just trying to put "as many cars on Uber's network as possible."

There's also an argument that, for the foreseeable future, ride-hailing networks are going to need some mixture of both human and robot drivers. I get this argument. But beyond the short term, I think there will be strong incentives to completely eliminate human drivers.

Last month, the New York Times announced that Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick, the company's co-founder who got pushed out 8 years ago, to help him buy autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai.

It's a bit of an interesting story. Pony is a Chinese company, but because the US doesn't want Chinese tech to become too deeply embedded in the American economy — and has become increasingly hostile to such companies — it has been readying a clean US subsidiary of the business for sale.

This is what Travis allegedly wants to buy with the help of Uber. And it's particularly noteworthy because it could be an indication that Uber is worried about Waymo and wants to have its own AV unit (which it had previously, but then sold off in an effort to quickly reach profitability).

Okay, so the official title is Chief Congestion Officer.

But whatever. What's important is that the City of Toronto is apparently close to hiring a human that will become the so-called "congestion lead". This will be, in their words, a senior strategic cross-divisional leadership role that reviews programs and projects, and then works to minimize traffic congestion (this is among other things).

Translation: Construction is causing too much congestion so let's make sure we're better at managing what happens on Toronto's streets. Fine. Nobody is going to argue against being too coordinated. But there are at least two problems with the overall framing of this position.

Firstly, it is likely that this czar will go after things like construction lane closures. Maybe the city will make them harder to get and/or maybe they'll increase the occupancy fees they charge. (Reminder: Developers pay cities lots of money to occupy public streets.)

Regardless of what is done, it's important to keep in mind that there's a trade-off here. Any time you make construction more difficult, you add costs. And when construction costs are added, they have to go somewhere. Typically that means they get passed on to buyers and renters. So depending on how hard this czar goes after road closures, we could be indirectly increasing the cost of new housing.

Pick your poison.

But the even bigger problem with this new role is this: It presupposes that if only we did X, Y, and Z, we could solve traffic congestion. This is a fallacy. It's not going to happen. Of course, I'm not saying that better coordination wouldn't improve traffic flows; I'm saying that we're ignoring the root problem.

The Greater Toronto Area has a population of nearly 7 million people, and there’s simply no conceivable way we could all drive around everywhere and still have free-flowing traffic. It’s impossible — no matter how well we coordinate roadwork or how many people with whistles we plant at major intersections during rush hour.

The only way to solve this problem is to embrace a multi-modal approach to urban mobility. And so rather than a "traffic czar" narrowly focused on car congestion, what we really need is a "mobility czar" focused more broadly on moving the most number of people as efficiently as possible — across all modes of transport.

Uber's stock has done exceptionally well this year. At the time of writing this post, it's up over 60% year-to-date. But at the same time, it remains unclear to me what the relationship will be between Uber and this brave new world of autonomous vehicles.

I mean, right now, if you're in Phoenix, I'm told you can order a Waymo car through Uber's app. But if you're in San Francisco, Waymo customers must use the Waymo app. It's all bit mirky right now, but Uber is just trying to put "as many cars on Uber's network as possible."

There's also an argument that, for the foreseeable future, ride-hailing networks are going to need some mixture of both human and robot drivers. I get this argument. But beyond the short term, I think there will be strong incentives to completely eliminate human drivers.

Last month, the New York Times announced that Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick, the company's co-founder who got pushed out 8 years ago, to help him buy autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai.

It's a bit of an interesting story. Pony is a Chinese company, but because the US doesn't want Chinese tech to become too deeply embedded in the American economy — and has become increasingly hostile to such companies — it has been readying a clean US subsidiary of the business for sale.

This is what Travis allegedly wants to buy with the help of Uber. And it's particularly noteworthy because it could be an indication that Uber is worried about Waymo and wants to have its own AV unit (which it had previously, but then sold off in an effort to quickly reach profitability).