I'm late to the party here, but I was reading this morning about how New York City recently completed the rollout of its One Metro New York (OMNY) fare payment system. What this does is allow you to use contactless payment systems, like Apple Pay, to get on the subway. ONMY is now available across the five boroughs on every bus and at all 472 subway stations (feel free to impress your friends at virtual parties with this stat).

Metrolinx here in Toronto is similarly piloting contactless payments on the Union Pearson Express. You now have the option of tapping a credit card, a phone, or a watch. Maybe this doesn't seem like such a big deal, but I still remember when the PRESTO payment card was first rolled out -- it felt late to me. Apple added near-field communication (NFC) to iPhone in 2014, and at that point I think it was fairly obvious that standalone payment cards wouldn't be around much longer.

That time has arrived for New York City and will be hopefully arriving shortly for Toronto. And I think it will be particularly useful for tourists who may not have a Metrocard (NYC) or PRESTO card (Toronto) and just want to jump on a train. I've only taken the subway a handful of times during this pandemic, but I'll be back at it once the world fully resumes. And I definitely can't wait to take the UP Express to the airport again (and to the Junction).

Here's some food for thought around electrical vehicles. In this recent article in The American Conservative, Jordan McGillis argues that, "the electric vehicle is the climate idol of the unimaginative."

Rather than simply changing what's under the hood of our cars, we should be reexamining the broader impacts that the car has had on the urban landscape. Here's an excerpt that speaks to this:

"All of the effort directed towards EV adoption would be better expended on improving our development patterns, bringing them to human-scale and reducing the necessity of the automobile. The obvious reform candidate is zoning. According to the New York Times, it is illegal to build anything other than a single-family home on 75 percent of land zoned for residential use in the United States. Zoning exclusively for single-family homes artificially flattens our cities, necessitates daily automobile commutes, and increases our greenhouse gas emissions. As Istvan Bart has documented for the Climate Strategy Institute, suburban sprawl bears more responsibility for increased emissions from transportation than either population or GDP."

There is no question that electric vehicles are helpful to addressing climate change. But Jordan is also not wrong. We can't ignore that built form is crucial to this discussion, and likely even more important.

I'm late to the party here, but I was reading this morning about how New York City recently completed the rollout of its One Metro New York (OMNY) fare payment system. What this does is allow you to use contactless payment systems, like Apple Pay, to get on the subway. ONMY is now available across the five boroughs on every bus and at all 472 subway stations (feel free to impress your friends at virtual parties with this stat).

Metrolinx here in Toronto is similarly piloting contactless payments on the Union Pearson Express. You now have the option of tapping a credit card, a phone, or a watch. Maybe this doesn't seem like such a big deal, but I still remember when the PRESTO payment card was first rolled out -- it felt late to me. Apple added near-field communication (NFC) to iPhone in 2014, and at that point I think it was fairly obvious that standalone payment cards wouldn't be around much longer.

That time has arrived for New York City and will be hopefully arriving shortly for Toronto. And I think it will be particularly useful for tourists who may not have a Metrocard (NYC) or PRESTO card (Toronto) and just want to jump on a train. I've only taken the subway a handful of times during this pandemic, but I'll be back at it once the world fully resumes. And I definitely can't wait to take the UP Express to the airport again (and to the Junction).

Here's some food for thought around electrical vehicles. In this recent article in The American Conservative, Jordan McGillis argues that, "the electric vehicle is the climate idol of the unimaginative."

Rather than simply changing what's under the hood of our cars, we should be reexamining the broader impacts that the car has had on the urban landscape. Here's an excerpt that speaks to this:

"All of the effort directed towards EV adoption would be better expended on improving our development patterns, bringing them to human-scale and reducing the necessity of the automobile. The obvious reform candidate is zoning. According to the New York Times, it is illegal to build anything other than a single-family home on 75 percent of land zoned for residential use in the United States. Zoning exclusively for single-family homes artificially flattens our cities, necessitates daily automobile commutes, and increases our greenhouse gas emissions. As Istvan Bart has documented for the Climate Strategy Institute, suburban sprawl bears more responsibility for increased emissions from transportation than either population or GDP."

There is no question that electric vehicles are helpful to addressing climate change. But Jordan is also not wrong. We can't ignore that built form is crucial to this discussion, and likely even more important.