Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Okay, this is neat. Stanford has created what is effectively Google Maps for the Roman Empire.
What it shows you is the principal routes of the Roman World: the road network, the main navigable rivers, and the hundreds of sea routes that crossed the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the coastal Atlantic.
The tool then attaches both time and expense to these routes (which would have been used for the transportation of goods and people, but also for general communication across the Roman Empire).
So if, for example, you are curious about how many days and how many denarii it would have cost you to deliver an important dinner invitation from Roma to Alexandria during the summer months of antiquity, you now have an online tool. It's about 14 days.
Canada Day weekend was a lot of fun in Toronto. This city was alive and it felt like people had come far and wide to visit downtown. But it was a good reminder that even if all of our cars were electric and even if they were all able to drive themselves, we would still have this problem:
https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1543642057088049152?s=20&t=kt9GmjDLPvfeueMzbshQcA
I was in an Uber on Saturday afternoon heading over to the west side of downtown and we had no choice but to declare bankruptcy and hop out in the middle of Bay Street. We thought about waiting for the Ontario Line to be ready, but that seemed a bit far out.
So we rented bikes instead and rode along the waterfront, which was a considerably better experience. But then we couldn't find any docks with available slots, so we had to ride up into Liberty Village, drop our bikes off there, and then walk back down to Ontario Place.
Of course, this was still the better option. I'm fairly certain that we'd still be in that Uber had we stuck it out. And maybe not finding a bike dock is just part of life in the big city on a beautiful long weekend in the summer.
Still, it was frustrating. So I'll use this opportunity to once again ask our city leaders to reconsider their ban on dockless electric scooters. Toronto clearly needs all the mobility support it can get.
Okay, this is neat. Stanford has created what is effectively Google Maps for the Roman Empire.
What it shows you is the principal routes of the Roman World: the road network, the main navigable rivers, and the hundreds of sea routes that crossed the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the coastal Atlantic.
The tool then attaches both time and expense to these routes (which would have been used for the transportation of goods and people, but also for general communication across the Roman Empire).
So if, for example, you are curious about how many days and how many denarii it would have cost you to deliver an important dinner invitation from Roma to Alexandria during the summer months of antiquity, you now have an online tool. It's about 14 days.
Canada Day weekend was a lot of fun in Toronto. This city was alive and it felt like people had come far and wide to visit downtown. But it was a good reminder that even if all of our cars were electric and even if they were all able to drive themselves, we would still have this problem:
https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1543642057088049152?s=20&t=kt9GmjDLPvfeueMzbshQcA
I was in an Uber on Saturday afternoon heading over to the west side of downtown and we had no choice but to declare bankruptcy and hop out in the middle of Bay Street. We thought about waiting for the Ontario Line to be ready, but that seemed a bit far out.
So we rented bikes instead and rode along the waterfront, which was a considerably better experience. But then we couldn't find any docks with available slots, so we had to ride up into Liberty Village, drop our bikes off there, and then walk back down to Ontario Place.
Of course, this was still the better option. I'm fairly certain that we'd still be in that Uber had we stuck it out. And maybe not finding a bike dock is just part of life in the big city on a beautiful long weekend in the summer.
Still, it was frustrating. So I'll use this opportunity to once again ask our city leaders to reconsider their ban on dockless electric scooters. Toronto clearly needs all the mobility support it can get.
We've talked about this before. If you live in New York City, you're probably about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average American. And if you live in Paris, you're probably about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average New Yorker.
These stats might feel a bit intuitive to you. Both New York and Paris are big and dense metros with high public transit ridership. And that usually translates into less car accidents. As for the divide between these two cities, Paris is in Europe. It's old. Most of its streets were built before the car had been invented. And all of these things are generally good for pedestrians. Makes sense.
But David Zipper asked a good question today: So what's going on with Canada? Canada is not in Europe (though some might argue that it sits culturally somewhere between the US and Europe). It's not that old. And it generally has a car-oriented landscape just like the US. So why is it that in 2020, Americans were 2.5x more likely than Canadians to die in a car crash? The trend lines are also diverging between these two countries. Between 2010 to 2020, US road deaths increased 19% on a per capita basis, whereas Canada's rate declined by about the same rate, according to David.
Ultimately, we are probably going to need Malcolm Gladwell to write a book about this so that we can really figure out what's going on. But in the interim, David does propose a few possible explanations ranging from Canadians buying slightly smaller vehicles to Canadians being slightly more law-abiding than Americans and so less likely to run people over. But one of the most persuasive explanations for me is that maybe our urban landscapes aren't actually the same.
More than a third of Canadians live in our three biggest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. And this number would be even higher if you looked at the full urban catchment areas of each. Either way, this is a significantly higher concentration than in the US, where about 13% of Americans live in the metro areas of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Part of this difference is because the US has almost 9x more people and has many more big cities to choose from. But it doesn't change the fact that, despite our reputed love for things like forests and beavers, Canadians are actually quite urban. And as we have discovered, that's a good thing for pedestrians.
Photo by Jamshed Khedri on Unsplash
We've talked about this before. If you live in New York City, you're probably about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average American. And if you live in Paris, you're probably about a third as likely to die from a transportation-related accident as compared to the average New Yorker.
These stats might feel a bit intuitive to you. Both New York and Paris are big and dense metros with high public transit ridership. And that usually translates into less car accidents. As for the divide between these two cities, Paris is in Europe. It's old. Most of its streets were built before the car had been invented. And all of these things are generally good for pedestrians. Makes sense.
But David Zipper asked a good question today: So what's going on with Canada? Canada is not in Europe (though some might argue that it sits culturally somewhere between the US and Europe). It's not that old. And it generally has a car-oriented landscape just like the US. So why is it that in 2020, Americans were 2.5x more likely than Canadians to die in a car crash? The trend lines are also diverging between these two countries. Between 2010 to 2020, US road deaths increased 19% on a per capita basis, whereas Canada's rate declined by about the same rate, according to David.
Ultimately, we are probably going to need Malcolm Gladwell to write a book about this so that we can really figure out what's going on. But in the interim, David does propose a few possible explanations ranging from Canadians buying slightly smaller vehicles to Canadians being slightly more law-abiding than Americans and so less likely to run people over. But one of the most persuasive explanations for me is that maybe our urban landscapes aren't actually the same.
More than a third of Canadians live in our three biggest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. And this number would be even higher if you looked at the full urban catchment areas of each. Either way, this is a significantly higher concentration than in the US, where about 13% of Americans live in the metro areas of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Part of this difference is because the US has almost 9x more people and has many more big cities to choose from. But it doesn't change the fact that, despite our reputed love for things like forests and beavers, Canadians are actually quite urban. And as we have discovered, that's a good thing for pedestrians.
Photo by Jamshed Khedri on Unsplash
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