Category: Mobility

• Vancouver is probably getting transport pricing

  Earlier this month, Vancouver City Council approved a plan that will have staff developing a “transport pricing” strategy for the city’s core. (Transport pricing is just another term for road pricing or congestion pricing.) The plan is for staff to go away and work on this and then report back to Council with a pricing strategy sometime in 2022. At that point Council will look to approve the plan and it will all get implemented by 2025. Or at least that’s the plan. I remain somewhat skeptical because Vancouver certainly isn’t the first Canadian city to look at pricing its roads and congestion. Toronto has tried and failed. And so if Vancouver does end up doing this, they’ll likely be the first city in the country.

  So why are they doing this, or least trying to do this? Well, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I’ve been a supporter of road pricing for many years. Lots of old posts over here. But in the case of Vancouver, their stated goals are really as follows: 1) They want to reduce congestion and encourage people to use other forms of mobility; 2) they want to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030; and 3) they want another revenue stream that can be used to fund things like transit and active transport. Put differently, it’s about pricing/taxing the things that we want less of and then using that money to pay for the things we want more of.

  Some of you might be wondering whether this is a good idea at a time when the centralizing pull of cities is being called into question. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that Vancouver thinks it needs at least five years to implement its transport pricing. We’ll be living through the roaring twenties by then. I am also a firm believer that cities are going to snap back significantly faster than most people think.

  2020.11.23

• The minimum parking problem for on-demand mobility

  

  There is data to suggest that on-demand (OD) mobility services — such as Uber — are increasing vehicle kilometers traveled (i.e. causing greater traffic congestion) by inducing people away from public transit and other forms of urban mobility. This is potentially even more of an issue right now with most urban transit agencies looking at massive budget shortfalls.

  But there’s potentially another way to look at this problem. A recent study led by Dániel Kondor of the MIT Senseable City Lab has looked at not only vehicle kilometers traveled but also something that the team calls the “minimum parking problem.” What is the minimum amount of parking that you need assuming a world with more on-demand mobility, and eventually autonomous vehicles?

  To try and answer this problem the researchers looked at the small city-state of Singapore. With a population of about 5.6 million people and somewhere around 1 million vehicles, Singapore actually has one of the lowest number of private vehicles per capita in the developed world. Even still, it has some 1.37 million parking spaces taking up valuable room.

  What the team found was that on-demand mobility could reduce parking infrastructure needs in Singapore by as much as 86%. This is the absolute minimum number, which would take the current estimate of 1.37 million spots down to about 189,000 — a significant reduction.

  However, the tradeoff is that it could increase vehicle kilometers traveled by about 24%. Without ample parking, their model assumes that these on-demand vehicles would need to “deadhead” between trips. That is, drive around aimlessly while they wait for their next passenger. Demand isn’t usually neat and tidy.

  However, it’s worth noting that the above percentage increase assumes that if people were instead driving themselves around that they always found a parking spot as soon as they arrived at their destination. This, as we all know, is not often the case, and so this increase is probably a worst case scenario.

  Nevertheless, the team did also find that a 57% reduction in parking could be achieved with only a modest 1.3% increase in vehicle kilometers traveled. This, to me, is meaningful because it says that you could, in theory, cut parking supply in at least half and not much would happen in the way of traffic congestion.

  It would, however, free up a bunch of space for things like bicycle lanes, green space, and other valuable urban amenities. Now, if on-demand vehicles are pulling people away from transit, then maybe we’re no better off. But if the alternative is people driving and parking everywhere they go, then it would seem that there are much better uses for that space.

  Photo by Jordi Moncasi on Unsplash

  2020.11.16

• The resilient city and road pricing

  Joe Berridge’s recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail is a good reminder — in the face of a whole lot of uncertainty — about the resiliency of our cities.

  Those previous decades saw a surge of people and jobs locating downtown, with consequent escalation in rents and prices of offices and housing. Why? Partly demographic, as the well-educated children of the baby boom reached adulthood, and partly lifestyle and work style. Young people go to big cities not just to work and live, but for sex, style, money and power. For ambition and anonymity. And for risk. All in the petri dish of downtown density. These drives have always been as powerful as their subsequent search for suburban security and community.

  The structure of the modern megalopolis is not an accident – the dramatic rise of tech employment, two-earner families, the decline of manufacturing, the later date of marriage, smaller households, lifestyle consumerism, teamwork cultures, serial re-education and training – none of these societal trends looks to be diminished by COVID-19. All of them seem to prefer high-density, high-interaction environments.

  For those of us in Toronto, it’s also important to remember just how quickly this city region was growing pre-COVID-19. That is unlikely to change on the other side of this.

  

  But Berridge does also point out some of the potential fallouts from this pandemic. The economics of urban transit, for example, could remain a problem for quite some time. This will strain public purses. (Car usage rebounded quickly, but transit ridership has not.)

  We are also likely to see increased traffic congestion as a result of people eschewing transit (and probably a bunch of other factors). Like Berridge, I am a supporter of road/congestion pricing, and have been writing about that on this blog for many years.

  The best things to tax/price are things that are generally viewed as bad and where demand is largely inelastic. That is, even if you increase the price, many or most people will probably still do it anyway. Think of things like smoking.

  Up until now, Toronto hasn’t had the moxie to make difficult (political) decisions like this one. Perhaps this pandemic will leave us no other choice.

  2020.10.04

• The car revolution is being powered by software

  

  Frederic Filloux publishes a regular newsletter called the Monday Note. It’s generally all about tech and new emerging business models. His latest post, called “Code, on wheels,” is about Tesla and the software revolution that is currently underway in the car industry. And it’s a good reminder of just how unique Tesla appears to be as a car company and how software is bound to infiltrate all aspects of our economy. Already you’re hearing people make a distinction around “pure” software companies. This is necessary because of how ubiquitous it has become.

  Here is a a longish excerpt from Filloux’s article:

  But the ultimate leap in value will be the creation of an application ecosystem. The limit will only be the imagination of app creators. As an example, airport operators are likely to develop apps to manage car traffic and passenger flows. Here is a use case: Your flight departing from San Jose Airport leaves in an hour. Your dual app system — one in your phone, the other in the car — checks the flight status, the gate, and the traffic. It notifies you when it’s time to leave. Once in the vicinity of the airport, the app guides you to the parking space nearest to the gate. An alternative and slightly more futuristic scenario involves you dropping your car in front of the terminal, then letting the autopilot send the car to the long-term parking lot a few miles away (this will soon become feasible as geofenced environments such as airports will be well-suited for Level 4 autonomous driving).

  Again, this implies major changes in the way car software is currently handled. These scenarios require the car and the phone apps working seamlessly, exchanging data in real-time with the airlines, the airport, the navigation system of the car, the parking infrastructure, and eventually, the autopilot. We are not there yet, but by that time, the dust will have settled: either carmakers will have developed their own OS — along with the SDKs to foster the development of third-party apps — and/or, tech giants will have taken-over, leveraging their current market positions in the phone sector to impose their own norms. I always thought that Apple had that in mind when it hired legions of engineers for its Titan project and filed applications for self-driving cars to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I doubt that they completely gave up on the idea of replicating what they achieved for the 500 billion smartphone market with the 3 trillion dollar car sector.

  There are many in the planning world who are quick to dismiss autonomous electric vehicles as being more of the same. They’re still cars, right? For better or for worse, the internal combustion engine was massively transformational to cities — just as previous advances in transportation were. But what comes next is still mostly unknown because, even if you assume that autonomy is a foregone conclusion, it’s unclear how this and an app ecosystem could change how “cars” function in our cities. What will be the spatial impacts?

  It is, however, clear to me that when things do start to really change, it will be because of software.

  Photo by Jannis Lucas on Unsplash

  2020.08.16

• The global effort to build more bike lanes

  I received an email this week from a senior real estate executive who was sharing the fact that, in response to COVID, he had decided to give up driving completely. He was now cycling everywhere — whether for work or for personal errands. And it was doing wonders for his health and his overall well-being.

  Indeed, this feels like some sort of golden era for urban cycling. Back in May I wrote about how Toronto City Council had just approved the largest ever one-year expansion of bike lanes. Some 40 km. When have we ever moved this quickly and without months (okay, years) of painful debate? Probably never.

  Of course, it’s not just Toronto. This is happening all over the world. Here are some of the numbers (taken from this recent Journal article):

  • Paris added 400 miles of pop-up bike lanes across the region — all of which didn’t exist before the pandemic – some of the streets being tracked have seen a doubling in usage
  • Oakland closed almost 10% of its streets to cars
  • Montreal is adding an additional 70 miles of pedestrian and cycle paths
  • Bogota is the midst of planning for 47 miles of temporary bike lanes
  • The UK has fast tracked over $315 million in capital spending for bike infrastructure — referring to this as a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity
  • New York’s bike share service (Citi Bike) saw year-over-year usage surge 67% in the first 10 days of March alone — before any shelter-in-place rules were even imposed

  There are obvious reasons for this rush to build out cycling infrastructure. We’re in the midst of a global health crisis and people are staying away from public transit in big numbers. But I think it’s also important to keep in mind that in many / most cases, there is really no other viable mobility solution. You cannot take all the people that used to ride the tube in London and plop them into cars. There isn’t enough space.

  So cities all around the world are doing the sensible thing and acting fast to make sure that it’s safer for people to move about on bikes. But as we all know, humans tend to have a bias toward the status quo. And so when this is all said and done, I suspect that many of these pop-ups will end up sticking around. And that will be a good thing for cities.

  2020.07.31

• The West Toronto Railpath

  

  blogTO recently published a piece about the West Toronto Railpath: “the city’s hidden urban trail next to the train tracks.” In this particular instance, the headline is actually pretty accurate. (If you know blogTO, you’ll know what I mean.) I think that there are a lot of Torontonians who don’t know this railpath exists. Build over top of a decommissioned rail line (but adjacent to an active one), the railpath is a 2.1 km trail that runs from the Junction in the north (basically adjacent to Junction House) to Dundas West & Sterling Road in the south. But there are plans to extend it further south to Queen West. Public meeting number two was held back in February of this year (presentation here) and construction of the extension is expected to start as early as next year. The City has to acquire some additional lands in order to make this all happen.

  Here’s a map from the City showing both the current West Toronto Railpath and the planned extension:

  

  What I like about this map is that it starts to show you just how multi-modal the city is becoming and how important these individual initiatives are for our broader mobility network. Here you can see how the WTR currently connects into the Bloor GO / Union Pearson Express station and how the extension will bring it within striking distance of the planned King-Liberty Village station. You can see how the railpath will interface with the Davenport Diamond Greenway that I wrote about last month (mustard color). And you can see the various pedestrian/cycle crossings that have already been built to better stitch the city together. Though hidden to some, these pathways, greenways, and crossings are critical to how many people commute and enjoy this great city. I have certainly been doing a lot of the latter this summer. Almost exclusively atop two wheels.

  2020.07.30

• Driving, walking, and taking transit during coronavirus

  

  The above chart from Bloomberg City Lab shows driving, walking, and transit mobility for 12 cities during this pandemic. The data source is Apple’s mobility index, which is based on travel queries within its app. So this isn’t going to capture how everyone is moving about, but presumably it is somewhat indicative. Although I couldn’t tell you the last time I used an app to tell me where to walk. Maybe that’s just me though.

  A few things are worth point out. As we have seen before on this blog, Seattleites (do people actually use this demonym?) stopped using transit at a faster rate than most other cities in the US. And according to the above chart, they have also been slower to return to it. This has me continuing to wonder, “why is Seattle such an outlier?” Generally though, these graphs do seem to suggest that people are shying away from transit.

  Taipei looks to have fared the best out of this subset of cities, which is consistent with what has been publicly reported about its handling of the pandemic. Taipei has turned out to be an exemplar city during all of this. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that it remembers SARS and knew what to do — the least of which was to simply take it seriously at the outset.

  Image: Bloomberg City Lab

  2020.06.18

• Guideway and Greenway

  

  Just northwest of the intersection of Lansdowne Avenue and Dupont Street here in Toronto, there is something known as the Davenport Diamond. It refers to the intersection of two rail lines. Going north-south is the Barrie GO corridor (regional rail service). And going east-west is a set of Canadian Pacific Railway tracks. The problem with this Diamond is that it is one of the busiest train intersections in North America and these two corridors meet at grade. So it is a problem for service levels on this corridor.

  To address this bottleneck, Metrolinx has been working on a project called the Davenport Diamond Guideway and Greenway. First and foremost, what it will do is elevate the Barrie GO corridor between Bloor Street in the south and Davenport Road in the north, allowing trains to pass over the CP tracks (rail over rail), as well as over streets like Wallace Avenue (rail over road). Metrolinx expects to have this guideway complete by spring 2023 and it will be a good thing for rail service levels across this region. Construction activity is already happening.

  But the other thing this guideway does is open up the ground (literally) for a new greenway. Metrolinx is calling this the public realm component of the project, and it expects to procure this work separately, as well as complete it only after the guideway is operational. The ETA for this is 2024. However, a design was completed for the greenway back in 2018. It was completed by gh3 — one of my favorite architecture firms in the city. And it is my understanding that this original design will be the foundation for the public realm design. Or at least, I hope it will.

  If you haven’t yet seen gh3’s design, you can check it out over here.

  Image: gh3

  2020.06.17

• Amazon might be buying Zoox

  This week the FT reported that Amazon is in “advanced talks” to acquire the self-driving startup Zoox. This would be Amazon’s first acquisition in the space, though it did lead a $530M funding round in Aurora in early 2019.

  Zoox last raised two years ago and was valued at $3.2 billion. Rumor has it that its valuation will be less than that today. Some of its investors, according to FT, include Breyer Capital and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board.

  The move seems reasonable. Amazon wants to build out its (driverless) logistics capabilities. It’s also in keeping with what we have been seeing from big tech. Companies that can are using this environment to be acquisitive, invest in the future and, hopefully, gain market share. It’s probably also inevitable that the self-driving space will see some consolidation going forward.

  If you go back to this post from earlier this year, Zoox and Aurora weren’t near the top in terms of R&D spending on autonomy. And it has become increasingly clear that this a giant problem/opportunity requiring giant funding capabilities. It’s going to take time.

  I recently heard Chamath Palihapitiya refer to Jeff Bezos as the greatest investor of our time — even more so than Warren Buffet. Why? Because he is consistently, and sometimes exclusively, investing in the future. Is this one of those moments?

  2020.05.27

• Uber to close 45 of its offices

  On Monday it was reported — by the Wall Street Journal, Tech Crunch, and others — that Uber will be laying off another 3,000 employees and closing 45 of its offices around the world. Here is a quote from TechCrunch:

  “I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect or stock price, or to please our Board or investors,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote to employees today in a memo, viewed by TechCrunch. “I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it. We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.”

  According to this SEC filing, the company expects to pay approximately $110 million to $140 million in severance and other termination benefits, and somewhere between $65 million to $80 million in costs related to closing its offices.

  All of this is, of course, being driven by a steep decline in ride bookings, which is about 70% of the company’s revenue. Ride bookings were down 80% in April from a year earlier. For Q1 2020, they were down about 5% compared to 2019.

  

  Uber Eats has seen a spike in demand with people staying at home. Bookings were up 52% in Q1 2020 from a year earlier. The problem is that, unlike its rides business, their food delivery business is far from profitable. That’s the point of the possible merger with Grubhub.

  The company has said that they are seeing some signs of a recovery in markets that have begun to reopen. But it’s too early to predict what that will really look like. The hole is pretty deep.

  Pre-COVID, ride hailing demand tended to surge on the weekends as people went out to restaurants, bars, and clubs. So presumably those activities will need to return for its revenue to return. But I also think we could see a spike because of people being nervous to take public transit.

  Either way, the company is making some really tough decisions right now. But it seems to be doing what it needs to do in order to get to the other side of this and become a self-sustaining and profitable business. Full disclosure: I own some $UBER.

  Chart: Uber Q1 2020 results

  2020.05.18