Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Mobility

  • Istanbul may have the worst traffic congestion in the world

    I just learned about the TomTom Traffic Index today. It covers 404 cities across 58 countries, and uses anonymized traffic data from more than 600 million drivers (people who use TomTom’s tech) to come up with a list of the cities with the worst traffic congestion.

    Here’s the global top 10 (for 2021):


    And here’s the North American top 10 (also for 2021):

    The way to interpret these congestion level percentages is to think of them as additional time over and above baseline free-flowing traffic times. For example, a 62% congestion level for Istanbul, means that a trip that would take 30 minutes without any traffic congestion, will instead take, on average, 18.6 minutes longer (0.62 x 30 minutes).

    We all like to complain about traffic in our home city, but these percentages certainly help to put things into a global perspective.

  • F-150 trucks are powerful and rugged

    It is perhaps well known that the Ford F-Series has been the best selling vehicle for the last 41 years in the US. In 2022, sales surpassed 640,000 trucks, meaning one was sold about every 49 seconds. Of course, much has been written about what this means for overall safety in our cities. According to Axios, the average 8 year old is completely out of view when in front of an F-150. And the death rate of car drivers colliding with a truck versus even an SUV, looks something like this:

    Another important thing to point out is what has happened to the bed sizes on these trucks: they have continuously gotten smaller. Between 1961 and 1979, the bed portion occupied 64% of the length of the truck. But starting in 2021, the bed had gotten down to 37%. The reality, at least according to this consumer survey, is that the most frequent use case for these trucks is actually just “shopping/errands.” It is not hauling or towing.

    So like all cars, and most things, probably the real reason these trucks are so popular is that they evoke a particular self-image. In this case, it is something about appearing “powerful” and “rugged.” Lots of people clearly want these adjectives. But even if powerful and rugged aren’t what you’re going after, it is almost certain that you have simply chosen different words and found different ways to communicate that self-image.

  • Global electric vehicle adoption

    This is the current state of global electric vehicle adoption:

    • Last year was the first year that global electric-vehicle sales reached 10% of all car sales — the total was around 7.8 million cars (see above chart)
    • Fully-electric vehicles accounted for about 5.8% of all car sales in the US, 11% of all car sales in Europe, and about 19% of all car sales in China — China is leading in this department
    • The US saw 807,180 fully-electric vehicle sales last year — Tesla remains the biggest EV maker in the world
    • In Germany, electric vehicles accounted for about 25% of all new vehicles produced last year — BMW reported a 5% decline in new-car sales, but saw its EV sales more than 2x
    • Similar story with Volkswagen: 7% decline in new-car sales; 26% increase in EV sales
    • This year, some are predicting that China will see EV sales increase to every third car, and that it will reach its tipping point sometime between 2025-2030

    It is obvious where all of this is heading. It is simply a question of how fast, and who will be the leaders at the end of the day.

    All data sourced from the WSJ

  • Our current public transit problem/opportunity

    Over the past few years, I have been writing about the fall off in public transit ridership that we have seen as a result of the pandemic. Most recently, I mentioned it in my predictions for 2023.

    This topic doesn’t seem to get a lot of air time, but it is a problem. Because the standard way to operate a transit system in North America is at a loss.

    According to this recent WSJ article, the average fare recovery ratio across the US is somewhere around 1/3, with the remaining 2/3 of operating costs being covered by public money.

    (Somehow Japan has figured out a way to make money on rail.)

    During the pandemic, federal aid was disbursed in order to maintain service levels. The MTA in New York, for example, received $15.1 billion. But these aid packages will eventually run out, and ridership has yet to fully return:

    New York’s subway system has regained about two-thirds of its pre-pandemic ridership with about 91 million trips in November, according to the MTA. But that is about 50 million fewer rides than in November 2019. Officials worry usage has stalled out at that level.

    In San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, recorded 3.7 million trips in November—a little more than one-third of the ridership before Covid.

    The obvious answer is likely to be a combination of service cuts and/or more public money. But an even better answer would be to use this opportunity to figure out how to make our transit systems a little more Japanese.

    That is, let’s make them more financially sustainable. And yes, that is going to necessarily involve looking at how we build around and on top of transit.

  • 2 storeys not 12

    I came across this poster — related to this development application — over the weekend:

    And I think it raises a number of important questions:

    • Is 2 storeys appropriate for next to a subway station and next to an existing mid-rise building?
    • Is a mid-rise building truly unprecedented in this context? See below.
    • Are mid-rise homes inappropriate for “residential streets?”
    • How does building height factor into flood plain concerns? Wouldn’t lot coverage be more relevant?
    • And when does a mid-rise become a “high-rise?”

    For more context, here’s the proposal and its immediate surroundings:

    I fully appreciate that there’s little incentive to support new development in a place where you already live — even if you happen to live in a similarly-scaled building across the street. And I am sure that I’ll receive a number of emails following this post.

    But optimizing the use of land around our existing transit stations is one of the best things we can do as city builders.

    Update: I have redacted the contact information on the above poster.

  • An interactive map of industrial space in southern California

    Here is an interactive map, created by the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, showing the approximately 1,573,777,062 square feet of industrial space that can be found in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino.

    The map allows you to zoom in on specific parcels to see things like site area, warehouse size, and year built. You can also play around with different map radii to create a rollup of warehouse space within a specific area, which includes an estimate of daily truck traffic and CO2 produced.

    The Guardian also used this data to create the following chart, which is helpful in showing the dominance of certain cities, as well as how much of this industrial space has been built since 2010:

    The point of this interactive map, this data, and the accompanying articles is to highlight just how disruptive all of this new industrial space is to these southern California communities and to the environment in general. But I think it is also an important reminder that, whether we like it or not, our online activities have real-world physical implications.

    Online shopping requires warehouses and logistics. Online food delivery requires (ghost) kitchens. And online activity, in general, requires the storage of unprecedented amounts of data. All of these “back-end spaces” take up room, even if they’re mostly easy to ignore when we’re just looking at our phones.

    This is our new “phygital” world and, yes, it is changing the landscape of our cities. Now our task is to figure out how to do this in a way that respects communities and respects the environment.

  • Where the rich don’t drive — is density the new luxury?

    This data is from 2019, but I imagine that things would look pretty similar today and that it might even be a little more pronounced. The dataset from the above article looked at how many people have cars in a given area (a darker dot = fewer cars) and then plotted this against population density and income per capita.

    Here’s what that looks like for the regions of New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Houston (data from 2013 to 2017):

    What is fascinating about these charts is that they show two different correlations. In dense and transit-rich cities such as New York and Boston, car usage is most closely linked with population density and not with income. The dark dots form a horizontal line near the top.

    However, in the case of Los Angeles and Houston, car usage is instead most closely linked with income and not with population density. The dark dots form a vertical line near the left — the lowest income per capita.

    So what does this tell us?

    It tells us that if you design a city to broadly require a car, then you are likely to sort people based on those that can afford a lot of car and those that cannot. On the other hand, if you design a city around transit, then you are likely to instead create a place where both the rich and poor get around in similar ways.

    There is also evidence that the latter is being increasingly viewed as more desirable. 2017 was the first year in the US where high-income young people (ages 26 to 33) drove less than low-income young people. Presumably these high-income people had choices, and so I tend to view this as a preference.

    As a whole, this is surely a good thing for our cities. But now I think we need to be careful not to allow density and walkability to become the new luxury that only the rich can afford.

  • Warren Buffet doesn’t like crypto and streetcars

    I have a great deal of respect for Warren Buffet. Much of what I know (or think I know) about investing has come from listening to and watching him and his partner Charlie Munger. Surely they have got to be the most successful investors living today.

    But there are some things that I don’t always agree with them on. The first and most obvious one is crypto. Warren thinks it is speculative rat poison and I think it is the future of the internet. I understand where he is coming from in that it does not produce cash in the same way as say a farm or an apartment building. But that doesn’t mean it won’t have value.

    The second one, as I have learned today, is maybe streetcars. As a rule, Warren doesn’t typically engage in local politics. But he recently decided to break that rule through a letter he wrote to the editor of the Omaha World-Herald, lobbying against a new $306 million project that I believe is going ahead regardless.

    Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

    “Residents can be far better served by extended or more intensive service by the bus system,” Buffett wrote. “As population, commerce and desired destinations shift, a bus system can be re-engineered. Streetcars keep mindlessly rolling on, fuelled by large public subsidies. Mistakes are literally cast in cement.”

    I should, however, be clear that (1) I know nothing about Omaha and this streetcar project, and (2) “streetcars” can be nuanced. There are streetcars that compete with car traffic and have short station spacing, and there is light rail transit on its own dedicated tracks and with farther station spacing. One size does not fit all.

    Here in Toronto, we have lots of the former and they generally move you around at the slowest possible speeds. Sometimes it is faster to just walk. But we are also getting a new light rail line next year and that should move much faster. I can also tell you that when I worked in Dublin many years ago, I took their Luas to the office every day and loved it.

    Again, I don’t know the specifics of Omaha’s streetcar project. Maybe Warren is right or maybe he is wrong. And that’s why I was careful to say “maybe” above. But I do know that in the right urban contexts and when done well, I am a fan of light rail transit.

  • Agenda-setting headlines

    I am so tired of sensational headlines:

    The Ontario Line will zip across the core and up to Eglinton, easing gridlock and alleviating TTC misery. It will also plow through peaceful Toronto neighbourhoods, displacing homes, businesses and everything in its path.

    I know exactly what business model it is serving and why it is done, but I’ll ask the question anyway: Why do we need to make everything out to be a problem?

    In this case, we’re talking about a new and important piece of city building infrastructure. A subway line that will run through the densest parts of this country and alleviate congestion at key interchanges, as well as broadly across the city.

    It is something that we, as a city, have been griping about for many decades. And now, it is finally happening! Will it involve constructing things? Yes. Will it actually displace “everything in its path?” No.

    But as we all know, this is the way media works today. They set the agenda (i.e. tell us what we should be terrified and/or pissed off about) and then they sell our attention. And an effective way to do that is to make sure that the headlines get us really worked up.

  • What happened in 2022 and how I did on my predictions

    It has become tradition around here that at the end of each year I write down my predictions for the following one. And in 2022, I did that here. The overarching point of writing something like this down publicly is not necessarily to be right (because you can do that through obvious predictions). The point is to dedicate time to thinking (which is oftentimes hard to do throughout the year), to search for non-obvious things, and to generally be okay with being wrong. So I plan to do this again in the coming weeks for 2023.

    But first, let’s see how I did with my 2022 predictions:

    1. COVID: I argued that 2022 would be the year that the pandemic becomes endemic and it reaches a point where it no longer factors into decision making in the same way that it has since 2020. Some of you may disagree whether this is a good thing, but I would still say that this happened, at least in this part of the world. I started the year in lockdown here in Toronto and I ended the year having taken multiple overseas trips where testing was no longer required. (Right)
    2. Return to office: I was kind of close. I thought that the majority of people would be back in their offices by September. I didn’t say that hybrid/flex work was going to disappear, but that we would see a great return. That did happen, according to my super scientific Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index. But if you look at the latest swipe card data for the 10 largest US cities, average occupancy is hovering just below 50%, which is not a majority. (Wrong)
    3. Recreational/fringe housing: I felt very strongly that we would see a pullback in residential real estate this year, specifically recreational properties and properties in tertiary markets. This 100% happened, but I’ll be honest in that I was not thinking about the interest rate hikes that we saw. I just saw it as a pandemic bubble. I also thought that apartment rents would do very well and surpass pre-pandemic levels. This happened in many markets. (Right)
    4. Return of travel: Yup. (Right, but maybe too obvious?)
    5. Intensification of single-family home neighborhoods: This continued to be an important topic in 2022. Did we see some a tipping point-like moment, like I had predicted? I think it depends on the market, but here in Toronto we did see things like Bill 23, as well as additional efforts on the part of Mayor John Tory. (Right)
    6. Autonomous vehicles: Progress was made this year. You can now hail an autonomous taxi in places like San Francisco. But I also thought that this would be a fantastic year for Uber as the world reopened, and that they’d finally become profitable. As of Q3 of this year, that had not happened. (Wrong)
    7. Public transit and micromobility: I got the public transit ridership piece correct. I assumed that ridership levels would remain depressed. Perhaps an obvious one. But I also figured that e-scooters would be one of the main beneficiaries. While it is true that e-scooters remain very popular, particularly with French people, we did see ridership decline in the US, as the availability of cheap capital waned. (Mostly right)
    8. NFTs and augmented reality: There’s a lot happening in this digital world and I continue to be incredibly bullish. But we are certainly in a “crypto winter.” I also thought that Apple would announce something big related to augmented reality this year, but supposedly that has been pushed to next year. (Wrong)
    9. Climate change and carbon prices: I thought that the price of carbon on the EU’s Emissions Trading System would surge this year. It did not. Right now it’s looking like it’ll end up being fairly flat for the year. Of course, I also had no idea that Russia would do terrible terrible things to Ukraine, which has had dramatic impact on energy markets. (Wrong)
    10. More crypto (Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana): Well, I got this last one really wrong. ETH is down ~70% over the last year relative to the US dollar. I was not predicting a “crypto winter.” And I did not know that Sam Bankman-Fried was operating a weird cult-like ponzi scheme out of a penthouse in the Bahamas. None of this changes my views on crypto, but I was still wrong in 2022. (Wrong)

    Looks like I’m somewhere around 5/10.

    Stay tuned for my predictions for 2023. In the meantime, if any of you have predictions of your own, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below or on Twitter.