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

  • Distribution of trips by distance across the US

    The US Bureau of Transportation Statistics has just published some recent data looking at average trip distances across the country. What it allows you to do is drill down to the county level and see exactly how many trips people take that are less than 1 mile, between 1-3 miles, between 3-5 miles, and so on. This is interesting, in my view, for two reasons.

    One, it showcases the fact that most of our trips tend to be short ones (a trip is defined as being away from your home for more than 10 minutes). If you look at the data you’ll immediately see this, which is, of course, a pretty good argument for trying to encourage other forms of mobility besides driving.

    And two, it is yet another example of how much data our mobile phones are constantly off-gassing. I mean, how do you determine where someone’s home is so that you know when they’re taking a 10 minute trip away from it? You figure out where their phone spends long periods of time (particularly at night) and you likely have that person’s home.

    What would be even more interesting to see is how this data correlates with built form. In other words, to what extent are higher densities inversely correlated with trip distances? This should certainly be the case, but it would be cool to see the data.

  • 1912 Michelin Guide to France

    This is a copy of the 1912 edition of the Michelin Guide to France. Most of you have probably heard of Michelin star restaurants, but some of you may not be familiar with how it all started.

    First published in 1904, the Michelin Guide is, as you might suspect, a product of French tire company Michelin. And since the beginning, this free guide has had a pretty clear objective: Its goal was to get you to drive more.

    At the turn of the 20th century, there were only a few thousand cars on the road in France. This guide tried to change that by giving you places to go, as well as telling you where to stop along the way should you need to change a tire or two.

    However, its famous starred ranking system for restaurants was not introduced until 1931, and the criteria for said ranking was not revealed until a few years later:

    • One Star: “A very good restaurant in its category” (Une très bonne table dans sa catégorie)
    • Two Stars: “Excellent cooking, worth a detour” (Table excellente, mérite un détour)
    • Three Stars: “Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey” (Une des meilleures tables, vaut le voyage)

    Curiously enough, Canada has no Michelin star restaurants. I’m not exactly sure why, but I have heard that it’s because we’re not giving money to the right people. Maybe that’s wrong. I don’t know.

    I do, however, find it interesting that this celebrated restaurant ranking system started as a marketing tool for motorists. Oftentimes you never know where a new idea might lead you.

    P.S. I’m also not sure how the above 1912 copy is the 13th edition when the first Michelin Guide was supposedly published in 1904.

  • What Seattle learned from its electric scooter pilot program

    Electric scooters are an unsanctioned form of mobility here in Toronto, mostly because people think they’re dangerous, but also because I think people are worried about them cluttering up our sidewalks.

    The problem with this position is that electric scooters are also a lot of fun to ride and people seem to find them useful. The last time I rode one was in Paris and it seemed perfectly safe to me, though it may have been because there were two of us on it and we were kind of overloading the thing.

    In any event, lots of cities either have them or are piloting them. Seattle just finished year one of its pilot program and here’s what they learned:

    • From September 2020 to October 2021, Seattle saw 1.4 million trips taken by over 260,000 riders
    • Electric scooter ridership greatly exceeded that of public bicycles, with 300,000 scooter trips taken in September alone, compared to about 35,000 bike trips
    • 54% of surveyed scooter riders said that they would have taken a taxi or driven their personal vehicle had a scooter not been available
    • 21% of riders said that they used it to connect to public transit (helping to solve that pesky last-mile problem)
    • 17 collisions involving a scooter and a car were reported during the pilot year (though, for what it’s worth, some/many of the incidents involved a scooter that was privately owned and not part of the actual pilot program)

    As much as I love riding a bike, it’s a bit more of a commitment compared to riding an e-scooter, which is why I think the numbers look the way that they do here. Not everybody wants to bring a change of clothes and shower at the office.

    So I think it’s really too bad that Toronto just shut these down before exploring ways to make them both safe and useful.

  • Le Pen’s voter base: France’s poor rural drivers

    The presidential election that is underway right now in France is playing out exactly as one might imagine. The first round of votes took place on April 10, and the second and final round — which is now between Macron and Le Pen — will take place on April 24.

    How people voted in the first round can be mostly explained by geography. If you live in an urban center, an attractive tourist center, or have reasonably good rail connectivity to either of these two kinds of places, you likely voted for Macron.

    On the other hand, if you live in a poorer rural area, you were more likely to vote for Le Pen. Our spiky unequal world remains, even in France, where more wealth tends to be redistributed compared to places like the UK and the US.

    But there’s another potentially correlative factor that should interest readers of this blog (even if it is somewhat obvious). If you voted for Macron in the first round, you were also less likely to rely on a car to get to work. Here are two charts from the Financial Times:

    This point is perhaps obvious because geography and built form largely determine whether or not you want/need to drive. And the way to not drive is to live in a dense city. But I think it’s also a useful reminder that owning a car does not necessarily need to correlate with high economic status.

    In fact, when I look at these charts, not having to drive to work feels like a good thing.

  • Transit data tells us that people don’t like Mondays

    My unscientific Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index has led me to believe that flexible hours have resulted in more people working from home on both Mondays and Fridays. The middle of the week seems to when demand peaks for delicious lunchtime souvlaki.

    But that may only be half right. According to some recent transit data from New York City, which looked at weekday subway ridership between October 2021 and March 2022, it seems to only be Mondays where people really prefer to stay at home:

    What you are seeing here is subway ridership per day (with any holidays removed from the data set). Mondays, on average, saw 2,815,166 rides per day, whereas the average for non-Mondays was 3,026,371 per day. So over this particular 6 month period, Monday ridership was about 7% lower.

    The probable takeaway: People seem to like to ease into the week.

  • An undignified bus stop in Toronto

    I was driving to the office from the Junction last week, and I passed a brave individual waiting at this bus stop on Parkside Drive:

    I immediately thought to myself, “what an undignified and silly bus stop.” There’s a little bit of paving so you have a place to stand while you’re waiting, but how do you even get there?

    There are no sidewalks actually leading to said bus stop, and so you really only have two options: 1) jaywalk or 2) cross at some far away intersection and then walk unceremoniously on a narrow strip of grass and dirt on the side of a busy street.

    Not surprisingly, this was the first time I had ever seen anyone waiting at this stop even though I take this route all the time on my way to and from Junction House.

    I recognize that I was operating a motor vehicle when I saw this guy waiting for the bus. But I also took transit last week. And I know that we have it in us to do much better than what you’re seeing in the above street view photo.

    It’s also a reminder that while High Park is really great, we need to work on its edges. Both the urban edge that I’m describing above, and the built form that surrounds our magnificent park. High Park is an urban park, but we seem to be a little uncomfortable with that idea.

  • How do you charge an electric vehicle if you park on-street?

    Last year, about 10% of all new motor vehicles registered in Canada were some form of electric vehicle (battery, hybrid, or plug-in EV). But this number is rising. And even though we’re still early on in the adoption curve, you can live a pretty great life with an electric vehicle today.

    The caveats are perhaps as follows: (1) it really helps to have some kind of garage or driveway (so you can install a dedicated charging station) and (2) depending on your lifestyle, you may encounter the occasional feeling of “range anxiety.”

    I drive to the mountains to go snowboarding every winter and my sense is that we need to get far more serious about blanketing our most densely populated regions with charging stations.

    But here’s another problem that came up this week in conversation: How do you charge your EV if your only option for parking is on-street?

    Do you have to run a cable from your home across the sidewalk? And then what happens if the spot in front, or nearby, isn’t available? Is it really going to be feasible/desirable to have charging stations on the sidewalks of every residential street when EV penetration reaches the majority?

    This is clearly a problem that will need to be solved, and I know that many people and cities are working on it as we speak. I don’t know how advanced this is, but Norway, for instance, is working on wireless charging roads that power up vehicles from below.

    What other possible solutions have you seen out there?

  • Higher gas prices impact cities differently

    Gas prices are up. And here is a chart to support this statement:

    If I were trying to be as sensational as possible, I would likely leave things here. But since that is generally not what I try and do with this blog, here is another chart showing gas prices over a longer time horizon.

    Shown this way, gas prices don’t seem as crazy. In fact, we’re only now returning to where prices were back in 2008.

    That said, these swings do impact things. And it is interesting to consider how these impacts might be felt differently across different cities.

    So here is one more chart from City Observatory looking at the average number of miles driven per person prior to COVID:

    One way to think about this chart is that it generally speaks to built form. Compact cities with higher densities and greater access to public transport, generally translates into people driving less.

    The result is something that City Observatory refers to as a “green dividend.” Less driving, means you save money on cars and gas. And so when gas prices go up, so does your green dividend.

    Of course, if you were to get really serious about calculating your green dividend, you’d also want to look at your housing costs, as land prices tend to decline as you sprawl outward.

    Ultimately, this is a trade off between housing costs and transportation costs (both direct and indirect, such as the cost of your time).

    But I think that there should be another dimension to this green dividend and that is the environmental benefits of less vehicle miles travelled. That too, of course, can be measured.

  • San Francisco now has autonomous vehicle taxis

    These are two short videos of autonomous Cruise vehicles driving around San Francisco. Cruise, which is owned by General Motors, received a permit from the state of California to operate autonomous vehicles — without a safety driver — in September of last year. In November 2021, one of the cofounders of Cruise took the first ever driverless taxi ride in the company’s history. And on February 1, 2022, Cruise announced that it was opening up to the public.

    If you read the comments on Twitter you’ll see that some people have found these vehicles to be hyper reactive to traffic lights and to do oddly long pauses at stop signs. So I guess they’re not perfect. But oddly long pauses are certainly better than not stopping at all. Either way, this is a big deal. I’m not sure if these are the first unsupervised autonomous vehicles out in the wild, but they are easily some of the first.

    There has been a lot of discussion over the last few years about autonomy being a hugely tricky technical problem to solve. One that is perhaps more difficult than a lot of people thought it would be at the outset. I’m assuming that this is at least one of the reasons why ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft ended up selling off their AV divisions while searching for profitability.

    But the market never gave up and it’s pretty exciting to see this coming to fruition. Oliver Cameron is VP, Product at Cruise and the former CEO of Voyage (which was acquired by Cruise last year). If his tweets (above) are any indication, San Francisco is going to be seeing many more autonomous vehicles in the coming months.

    This is going to have a profound impact on the unit economics for ride sharing companies like Uber, but more importantly it is likely to have a profound impact on our cities. Mobility innovations have a way of doing that. Some of the impacts might be negative, but I believe that many of the impacts can and will be positive.

    As most of you will know, I am a believer in dense and walkable cities. I do not believe in planning cities around cars. And so that is not what I am advocating for here. My view is simply that I think autonomy grants us the ability to rethink our definition of a “vehicle.” And maybe it becomes something that more closely resembles public transit. That could be a positive thing for our cities and something that draws people away from private vehicle ownership.

    So I remain both optimistic and excited about what’s to come.

    Have any of you had a chance to ride in an autonomous vehicle? If so, leave a comment below or on Twitter.

  • Cars make cities less compact

    The relationship between car ownership and urban density is a fairly intuitive one. Below are two charts from a study by Francis Ostermeijer, Hans Koster, Jos van Ommeren, and Victor Nielsen, showing how urban density is inversely correlated with car ownership. In other words, the more people with cars, the less dense that a particular place is likely to be.

    But there’s an interesting chicken-and-egg question here. Does Atlanta, which is near the bottom right in the above chart, have a lot of cars because it wasn’t dense enough to support other modes of transport, or did the prevalence of cars in Atlanta cause the city to spread out and become less dense? And that is exactly what the above researchers set out to determine.

    To do this, they started by looking at the presence of commercial car manufacturers in the above geographies in the 1920s. One of the things they found was that having a car manufacturer in your city at this time appears to have had no effect on population density. But over the long run, rising car ownership seems to have had a sizeable effect on reducing population densities in those places.

    The conclusion they draw from this is the title of this post: cars have made cities less compact, rather than low population densities causing people to go out and buy more cars. This makes some sense to me because cities were doing just fine before we invented cars. But like all transportation innovations that allow us to move faster over longer distances, the car encouraged decentralization.

    There are, of course, all sorts of possible implications for a finding like this. But the authors specifically mention developing countries where car ownership may still be relatively low. This is something to be mindful of because if you put most people into cars, history strongly suggests that it will impact the kind of city that you end up building.

    Chart: Cars make cities less compact