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

  • In-person spending in Britain’s commuter towns

    As I understand it, there is now something called hybrid work. The way this works is that on some days you go into the office and on some days you work from home, or from some “third space” near to your home. As a result of this, there are now more people, at least for the time being, that seem to be willing to live further out from large urban centers. And this is reflected in the data that the Financial Times recently published in an article about “how the pandemic transformed Britain’s commuter towns“:

    In-person spending in the City of London has yet to fully recover. It remains below 2019 levels. Whereas a number of places that I am generally unfamiliar with (see chart) are now above where they were pre-pandemic. This, again, makes intuitive sense: more decentralization, more time at home, and less time in the City of London. Though we could also be seeing some low base effect here. Either way, my gut continues to be that a lot of people are still underestimating the stickiness of cities and the importance of in-person interactions.

  • The West Toronto Railpath needs to be extended to Union Station

    Following my recent post about cycling to the office, Richard Witt of BDP Quadrangle suggested that I do a post on the West Toronto Railpath and use the little influence that I have to try and encourage further expansion. I thought this was a reasonable idea and so here I am writing about it today.

    For those of you who may not be familiar, the WTR is a multi-use trail that can be used for “human-powered activities” such as biking, running, or unicycling. And as the name suggests, the path runs on an old rail line on the west side of Toronto. Here is the current route map (we’re talking about the dark orange line):

    And here’s what it looks like today:

    It’s an incredible amenity and piece of infrastructure on the west side of Toronto, but it’s probably also a little underrated. I think of part of this has to do with it being somewhat hidden. And I think another part of this has to do with it being too short.

    Right now the WTR runs from Cariboo Ave in the north — which is around the corner from Junction House — down to Dundas Street West & Sterling Road in the south. But according to the City of Toronto, an expansion phase has already been funded and construction will start next year. This will take its southern terminus down to Queen Street & Sudbury Street:

    All of this is, of course, excellent news. But you and I both know that the WTR needs to be further extended to Union Station, then up north, and probably elsewhere too. So I am here today to advocate for that to happen. If we can find a few billion hanging around to rebuild the Gardiner East (ugh), then surely we can scrape together a few more million for this.

    Images: Friends of West Toronto Railpath

  • The Derek Zoolander autonomous vehicle problem

    According to McKinsey, something like $100 billion has been invested in trying to get autonomous vehicles to work and yet the industry remains stuck with problems like this one here:

    State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns.”

    The industry says its Derek Zoolander problem applies only to lefts that require navigating oncoming traffic. (Great.) It’s devoted enormous resources to figuring out left turns, but the work continues.

    Right now certainly feels like an autonomous vehicle winter (we have many winters going on at the moment). The industry has spent a lot of time and money getting maybe 90% of the way there, but this last bit has proven to be a lot more challenging than I think most people anticipated.

    This has a lot of people thinking that it’s going to be many decades before we finally get full autonomy (if ever) and that, in the interim, all we will have are very specific use cases: trucks on highways, mining machines (the above article writes about this), and so on.

    This may very well be the case. Frankly, I don’t know. But it’s perhaps important to remember two things: (1) pessimists aren’t usually the ones who change the world and (2) there is something known as the Gartner hype cycle, which is a graphical representation of how new innovations typically get adopted.

    The Gartner hype cycle has five phases. The important ones for this discussion are the first three. First there is a technology trigger. Second there is an inflation of expectations (until it hits a peak). And then third, there is a trough of disillusionment. This is the moment where interest wanes and people begin to think it’ll never happen (until it does happen).

    That might be what we’re living through right now, or it might not be. But my gut tells me that it’s the former.

  • New York City proposes a bounty for reporting bike-lane blockers

    The general rule when it comes to bike lanes is that, if you build them without some sort of grade-separation, at some point a car is going to park in them. But here are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is that you could build some sort of grade-separation that can’t be driven over. And the second is as follows:

    Now a New York City Council member is pushing a bill that would give civilians the power to report bike lane scofflaws, as well as vehicles that block entrances or exits of school buildings, sidewalks and crosswalks. New Yorkers who submit evidence of a parking violation can earn 25% of a proposed $175 ticket. The Department of Transportation would review the evidence to determine whether an infraction has occurred, according to the bill’s text.

    What this essentially does is decentralize rule enforcement by paying people to be rats. Off hand, I can’t think of any other cities that have done something like this and so I don’t know how effective it might actually be. But being a rat sounds like it could be a good paying job.

    Let’s assume that somebody decided to treat this as their full-time job and work 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday. And then let’s assume that they were able to rat out one person per hour. Here’s how much money they could make in a year:

    • $175 x 25% = $43.75 per illegal incident
    • $43.75 x 8 incidents per day = $350 per day
    • $350 per day x 5 days a week = $1,750 per week
    • $1,750 per week x 52 weeks = $91,000 per year

    Now, if the goal of this rat-people-out program is to ultimately change behaviors, then it might make sense to assume that your revenues would decline over time as more people start following the rules. Either way, something tells me that more than a few people would be happy to take on this job.

  • It’s not too late for the Gardiner Expressway East

    Boy, time sure does melt away when you’re writing a daily blog and trying to build buildings. It’s hard to believe that it has already been 7-8 years since I was writing incessantly about the merits of Toronto removing the eastern portion of its elevated Gardiner Expressway.

    For those of you who may not be familiar, Toronto has an elevated highway that runs along the waterfront. It is old. Pieces sometimes fall off. Lots of water will drip on you. And so remediation works are underway. Several years ago, there was also a great debate that took place in the city about what should happen with its eastern leg. I even spoke at a Jane’s Walk where I was, for the most part, not very popular.

    The two options under consideration ended up being: 1) remove it and replace it with a grand surface boulevard or 2) remove it and rebuild it with a slightly different alignment. This second option was dubbed the “hybrid” option, but that was mostly political speak so that it sounded like some sort of generous compromise. You can think of it as the more expensive rebuild option.

    City Council voted on these two options as one would expect. Councillors in the core of the city did not want an elevated highway running through their neighorhoods, and the Councillors and people in the inner suburbs — who might use it for commuting — were by and large more accommodating. Apparently there are somewhere around 15,000 commuters who use it each rush hour.

    But here’s the thing.

    This vote took place in June 2015 and the thing still hasn’t yet been rebuilt. So maybe it’s not too late! Maybe there’s an opportunity to save a few hundred million dollars between us friends. Also, if anyone is interested, I’m still available for controversial Jane’s Walk presentations. One new idea I have is an elevated highway that runs through the inner suburbs and connects the best weekend brunch spots.

  • CloudKitchens quietly expands across Latin America

    Despite having somewhere around 4,000 employees and being valued at upwards of $15 billion (2021 figure), CloudKitchens remains an incredibly secretive company. In 2020, it was reported that they had spent over $130 million in the preceding two years on properties in about two dozen cities, and this week the Financial Times reported that they have been quietly building “dark kitchens” across Latin America, alongside a new food and convenience goods business called Pik N’ Pak.

    The way this all supposedly works is that the “dark kitchens” prepare the food for delivery and pick-up takeaway, and any excess space within these buildings is used to store convenience goods like over-the-counter medicines and pet foods. I guess it is literally about picking and packing various items that you can then attach to takeout orders. In both cases, the food and goods are delivered to customers using local app companies such as Uber Eats.

    All of this appears to represent a shift in the supply chain for takeout food and various convenience goods. But what I am really curious about right now is what the real estate footprint of this network looks like within our cities. What is the optimal square footage of a ghost kitchen? What radius do they serve? And how does this ultimately change the landscape of our cities? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but change appears to be underway. Here’s an excerpt from the above FT article:

    “…the growth of dark kitchens across Latin America has caused controversy in certain cities. The proliferation in São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas, sparked objections from residents living nearby, with banners against new facilities appearing in well-heeled neighbourhoods. The town hall has proposed local regulation of dark kitchens and earlier this year placed a temporary ban on the issue of new licences. People have complained about noise, smells, smoke and motorcycle drivers — known colloquially as motoboys — waiting outside to collect orders. One unhappy local said his son had been nicknamed “bacon” and bullied in school because of the odour on his clothes, according to Cris Monteiro, a city councilwoman.”

    Travis Kalanick seems to have a knack for upsetting people and changing the way our cities operate. Although, the same could be said about a lot of other startups.

  • Salt Lake City’s urban street grid

    Salt Lake City is not a walking city. The blocks are too big (660 feet x 660 feet) and the streets are too wide (132 feet) for that. This has translated into many of the streets have upwards of 6 lanes. To put this into further context, here is a block comparison chart from 99% Invisible:

    In the past, I have called this inheritance one of the greatest city building challenges. Because once you’ve designed a city around the car, it can be hard to move away from that. But as I have also said in the past, there are, of course, lots of things that can be done to make a place more hospitable to pedestrians.

    What is also interesting is that, according to 99% Invisible, the original intent for Salt Lake City’s urban grid was not for its large 660 x 660 blocks to serve as a rigid and immutable plan for the city. The intent was that its large blocks would be further subdivided into smaller blocks as the city grew and developed.

    Other than maybe a few examples, this never happened. Salt Lake City’s large blocks remain a defining characteristic of the city. But who is to say it’s too late for change?

  • California is set to ban gasoline cars by 2035

    According to this recent New York Times article, California is set to put into effect a new mandate that would require 100% of passenger vehicle sales in the state to be fully electric by 2035. Included within this mandate are also interim targets: 35% of all sales by 2026 and 68% of all sales by 2030.

    When I first read the article, my first thought was: “Isn’t 2035 kind of far away? Can’t we do this sooner?” And this is usually how my mind works when I see some date in the future. But then I remembered that EV sales last year in the US only totaled somewhere around 5% of all sales.

    So there is work to be done, and mandates like this will certainly help. As I understand it, this will be the first mandate of its kind in the US and also one of the strictest in the world. A lot of other countries have simply set targets, rather than all-out bans.

    This is what it means to lead. You do things before others.

  • Optimizing for cars

    Vox recently profiled what they are calling the deadliest road in America — a certain section of US-19 running along the Gulf Coast of Florida. It is generally an 8-lane road — 9 at most intersections — and so as you might expect, it is place that was designed for cars.

    From 2017 to 2022, US-19 saw 34 pedestrian fatalities involving a car for every 100 miles. Indeed, this stat makes it the deadliest highway in the state of Florida for people on foot.

    The other telling stat for me is the road’s crosswalk spacing. This is a place that is lined with restaurants, hotels, and many other commercial uses, and yet the crosswalks are sometimes spaced miles apart.

    This kind of street scale is mind boggling for pedestrians. No one in their right mind is going to go out of their way a mile or two just to cross a road, and so it’s no wonder that people are jaywalking and that too many people are getting hit.

    I know that our tendency is to try and solve these problems with things like flashing lights, speed radars, and orange flags that people can unceremoniously waive as they cross the street. But at the end of the day, this is an urban design problem.

    Spaces that are optimized for cars are, by definition, not optimized for pedestrians. The choice is ours.

  • Casey Neistat needs to make a YouTube video about cycling in High Park

    I love High Park. It’s the second largest green space in the City of Toronto and right beside the Junction neighborhood. But there are some problems. Despite having a subway line on its northern boundary, we’ve gotten the built form along its edges all wrong.

    There’s very little functioning retail. The densities and heights are not nearly high enough. The streets aren’t great walking streets. And we’ve even gone and created undignified bus stops like this one here.

    On top of all this, we’re now doing this silly thing where police are ticketing cyclists for riding around the park with too much vigor and enthusiasm. I’m sure somebody called to complain and this is all reactionary politics, but an even bigger reaction has now been set off.

    For those of you who haven’t been following or aren’t from Toronto, hundreds of cyclists took to the streets this week to peacefully protest what has been going on in High Park.

    The Globe & Mail then followed it up with this important piece calling for an end to cars inside the park. The boundaries currently house about 5 km of roads and almost 600 parking spots.

    Given all this, I figured now is probably a good time to revive one of Casey Neistat’s original YouTube videos called “bike lanes.” The story is that he gets a ticket for not riding in a bike lane. And so he films a video of himself only riding in bike lanes — even if there are obstacles in his way.

    It’s an awesome video with nearly 30 million views. And I’m sure that many of you have felt like doing exactly what he does when faced with this same situation. I know I have.