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

  • Not enough density next to transit

    Reece Martin is a foremost public transit critic based in Toronto. His YouTube channel, RM Transit, has over 284k subscribers and some 50 millions views. If you’re interested in public transit around the world, he is a great person to follow.

    He also writes a blog. And today, he published a post talking about the “5 places in Toronto that should have more density.” This, as we have talked about many times before, is essential. The way you get the most out of transit is to pair it with the right surrounding land uses. And here in Toronto, we have many instances of “not enough density next to transit.”

    For instance, the first place on his list is Bloor-Dundas West:

    The site already has streetcar serving on two routes, the subway, GO, and UP Express (which will be connected with the subway in the next few years — construction is underway), and lots more transit could show up in the future, from an extension of one of the streetcar routes to the Junction (with a transferway please), to the Ontario Line that will be primed for a second phase in this direction if development justifies it, to the potential for future Milton line train service. The site is arguably already the second-best served for transit in the country after Union, and could be made much better in short order.

    Hang on this last sentence for a second: the second-best transit node in the country. That’s an incredible asset! Now consider the area’s land use plan (red is mixed use and yellow is low-rise neighborhood in Toronto’s Official Plan):

    Other than the mixed-use triangle wedged between Dundas West and the rail corridor, the area looks pretty similar to much of Bloor Street in this city: mixed-use along the major streets and low-rise neighborhoods everywhere else.

    We know why this is the case; it is about maintaining the status quo. But it is a suboptimal way in which to try and create transit-oriented communities. We need more density, and we need to start thinking radially instead of linearly. So here’s what a 500m walking radius looks like around Bloor-Dundas West and its two closest subway station neighbors:

    The important thing to pay attention to in this diagram is all of the yellow that falls within each radius. This is land that ought to be zoned mixed-use, but that we have instead decided to make low-rise and single-use. If our objective is to create more walkable, sustainable, and vibrant transit-oriented communities, this is not the way.

  • Don’t lie about your transit schedule

    It is fairly well documented that communicating to transit riders how long they need to wait for the next train helps them feel like they’re actually waiting less. The problem, it would seem, is the unknown.

    This is akin to the pre-Uber days when you’d call for a taxi and then have no idea when it would actually show up. That used to feel like forever.

    But what about if you communicate a schedule to riders and then it turns out to be a total lie? Well this is probably worse, because eventually, people will catch on to this. Also, you’ve just maximized the unknown.

    Here is an interesting example of community activism. In 2021, Fabio Göttlicher — a software engineer in Chicago — started noticing that service levels on Chicago’s Transit Authority (CTA) seemed to be declining.

    So he did this:

    I wrote a program that runs 24 hours a day that keeps tracking the live trains as they come into stations.

    And then he discovered this:

    What I found, when I first started in December 2021, was that the CTA was running only about 55 to 60 percent of the trains their schedule said they should be running. I started publishing the data in local Facebook groups for transit enthusiasts, on Reddit and other social media. That’s how Commuters Take Action started.

    It’s hard to think of a more frustrating scenario for transit riders.

  • Messy intersections

    I am not a transportation engineer, but sometimes I like to, you know, pretend. And lately, I’ve been thinking about how to better design the Toronto intersection of Dundas, Dupont, Annette, and Old Weston (which I touched on briefly over here). It’s a weird 5-point intersection that is often cited as one of the most confusing in the city. And so there’s a lot that could be done.

    Here’s what it looks like today:

    The centerpiece is the Dundas-Dupont Traffic Island, which is actually a city-owned park. It’s not the most generous green space, but the real problem with this park is that it’s very much an island. There’s really only one pedestrian access point — its north end. For the most part, you need to be unlawful in your movements on and off it.

    This is a fairly common occurrence in cities. The island is, almost certainly, a remnant space. It was never explicitly designed; it is just what was left over after they figured out how to connect all of these streets and negotiate the intersection’s grade changes.

    The other signal, that these are remnant spaces, is the paint markings on the street. Their main job is to tell cars where to go. But they’re also unproductive spaces. Nobody is intended to actually occupy them. So what they really say is, “we have too much road and we didn’t know what to do; so we just painted them.”

    If you watch the below video of Claire Weisz (founder of WXY Studio) explaining the work that she has done in New York City, you’ll see remarkable similarities to what I’m talking about here. This sort of thing happens all the time, especially at messy intersections where multiple streets converge. The objective was to connect the streets and the rest became a byproduct.

    But when properly designed, these spaces actually become better for everyone: drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. And this Toronto intersection strikes me as a perfect candidate. So if my local Councillor Gord Perks is reading this post, I would ask him to do what he can within the city to encourage this kind of positive change.

    And not just here, but wherever there is a street that sucks.

  • Dublin wants to reduce car traffic in its city centre by about 41%

    These are the current (well, 2019) and targeted (2028) mode share splits for Dublin city centre (sourced from here):

    The biggest planned change is a ~41% reduction in cars, taxis & goods entering the city centre. More specifically though, the plan contemplates a reduction in the number of cars in the core. The number of taxis and goods being moved around are both expected to increase.

    To achieve this, the city is targeting drivers that pass through rather than stop in the city centre. Supposedly, about two out of every three drivers are currently doing this, and so the goal will be to redirect them.

    Though, to be clear, this is not a plan to stop people from driving into the city centre. It is rightly about reducing the amount of road space allocated to private vehicles, prioritizing other modes of transport, and creating more “traffic-free civic spaces” for Dubliners and visitors.

    Of course, this is what many cities around the world are trying to do. So perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this plan is that most Dubliners actually support it.

    According to The Irish Times, the plan received more than 3,500 public submissions, and 81% supported “reducing road space for private vehicles to facilitate a more efficient public transport system.” Further, 82% said they wanted more pedestrianized public spaces.

    There were, however, some concerns expressed. The carpark operators in the city centre are naturally worried about the impact to their businesses. This is expected and self-serving.

    Guinness (owned by Diageo) is also asking about how its delivery trucks will get to and from their brewery. This is obviously a crucial consideration. But I’m confident in saying that, whatever gets implemented, I’m sure that nobody is going to mess with the operations of St. James’s Gate Brewery.

    In fact, I’d be surprised if this weren’t written into the Constitution of Ireland somewhere.

  • The effect of front-end vehicle height on pedestrian death probability

    We have spoken a lot about pedestrian fatalities over the years (here, here, and here are a few posts), and, if there is a general rule of thumb, it is that pedestrians are safer in dense urban environments where there are a lot of other people walking around.

    But another important factor might be average vehicle size. Here is a recent study by Justin Tyndall that combined US pedestrian crash data with car sizes to come up with the effect of front-end vehicle height on pedestrian death probability. This is an important metric because larger/higher front-ends are more likely to fatally hit someone in their chest and/or head.

    What was ultimately found was that a 10 cm increase in front-end height — which is really not a lot — causes a 22% increase in pedestrian fatality risk! Meaning that something as simple as reducing front-end heights could reduce pedestrian fatalities. By his estimation, a 1.25 m height cap would reduce US pedestrian deaths by about 509 people each year.

    This is pretty interesting, especially considering that average car sizes seem to keep going up.

  • Wuhan is right now a driverless car capital

    Remember Wuhan? Well, it turns out that it is emerging as an important hub for driverless vehicles. Right now it is home to the largest fleet in the world:

    In Wuhan, 500 robotaxis, mostly run by Baidu, China’s rival to Google, recorded more than 730,000 ride-hailing trips last year. That compares with combined orders of more than 700,000 last year in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to Waymo, the self-driving car developer of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo told the Financial Times that it had “a couple of hundred cars” in each of the three fully autonomous zones.

    One of the things that is allegedly helping Chinese companies is that they have access to more data. The networks of cameras and other infrastructure that make Chinese cities the most surveilled in the world are, coincidentally, also good for training machine learning models.

    This has some industry experts speculating that China could reach an autonomous vehicle “tipping point” sometime around 2027. Meaning, the technologies will be significantly safer than human drivers (at least 10x) and ready for mass adoption.

    I don’t know if this is the right timeline. There have been many forecasts made over the years. But I do know that competition is good for progress and that having a rival can be an important motivator. And right now, this is yet another example of the US vs. China.

  • Do not park

    This is my first time seeing a device like this.

    Also, it’s solar powered.

  • Turquoise for autonomy

    One of the realities that we will have to face in, oh I don’t know, 5 or so years, is that there will be a mixture of different cars on the road. Some will operate with drivers. And some will operate with no drivers. Assuming that the cars with no drivers do well at their job, I would imagine that this will become the default. But in the interim, it’ll probably be useful to know which is which. And that’s why Mercedes-Benz (and probably others) has been working to establish a new internationally-accepted signal for computer-driven cars.

    The decision so far: turquoise lights.

    The company has just received permits from the states of California and Nevada for its Drive Pilot system, and as part of this, turquoise lights were earmarked for this exact purpose. Supposedly turquoise was chosen because it’s distinct and because there’s nothing else on the road that uses it. But I think the real reason is that it looks cool and kind of cyberpunk. So I hope this does become the standard way that we all visualize our shift toward autonomy. I can already imagine the long-exposure photography that will follow of our roads.

    Images: Mercedes Benz via The Drive

  • Nearly 1 out of every 10 cars sold is now electric

    I’ve said this before, but the car I currently have will certainly be the last internal combustion engine vehicle that I own. I truthfully even felt a bit weird buying it 6 years ago, but at the time, there weren’t that many options other than a Tesla. And I didn’t want a Tesla.

    Today, there are lots of EV options, and the numbers are starting to show that. When the final figures come in, it is estimated that the US will have sold 15.5 million new cars last year. And of these, about 1.44 million units are expected to have been electric.

    This means that we are just under 1 out of every 10 new cars sold in the US. The trend line is also working in the right direction. 1.44 million new EV units is roughly the total number of EVs sold between 2016 and 2021 in the US. 

    So things are accelerating. And presumably there are other people like me waiting on the sidelines. I am deliberately roughed in for an EV charging station in my new parking spot and, if/when it comes time to purchase a new car, that’s exactly what will get installed.

    (I added “if” because, depending on how mobility evolves over the next 5-10 years, there’s a chance I may no longer want to own a car.)

  • What might happen in 2024

    Yesterday we looked in the rear-view mirror. Today we’re looking forward:

    • The market consensus right now is that this cycle of interest rate increases has come to an end, and that we should see rates start to come down next year. Having confidence that rates won’t go any higher in the near future is what markets need in order to start making more decisions. So this is, of course, positive. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should expect a return to ultra-low rates. Rates today are still low when viewed historically.
    • Lower rates are good for levered assets such as real estate, but I don’t think that our industry has fully felt and processed the impacts of higher rates. Unfortunately, I think that things will get worse (in 2024) before they get better (maybe toward the end of 2024 or perhaps in 2025). This is when a “risk-on” approach will return in commercial real estate. A year ago today, I thought 2023 would be the year for this, but as I said yesterday, I was overly optimistic in terms of my timing.
    • On the residential resale side, I think we will see greater optimism sooner, certainly for the most in-demand cities and areas. There is pent up demand waiting on the sidelines and, once we can get past the current bid-ask spreads and deadlock, I believe we’ll return to a more balanced market in 2024. To be clear, I’m not expecting bidding wars and the like. And because of our housing affordability crisis, I also think the Bank of Canada will be more resistant to lowering rates compared to other central banks. This will help the Canadian dollar.
    • If you’re a buyer of real estate, I generally believe that 2024 will turn out to be a pivotal year for you. Roughly speaking, you win acquisitions in one of two ways: either (1) you pay the most or (2) you believe in something that most other people in the market don’t. This second approach is harder to achieve in bull markets. But in slower markets, the door is open and history has taught us that it can be the foundation in which great fortunes are made.
    • As I mentioned yesterday, I agree with the prognostications that hard costs will soften further next year (perhaps even more than 5% on average). Obviously every market is different. But here in Toronto, I just don’t see us returning to the level of construction starts that we have seen over the last number of years.
    • Since 2021, I have used my hyper scientific Jimmy the Greek Reopening Index to keep tabs on office utilization and the overall return to office. And based on this, 2023 was a positive year. Initially, souvlaki consumption appeared dramatically lower on days like Monday. But I noticed discernible increases as the year went on. However, if you look at actual data, such as what we have from swipe cards, the great return to office seems to have stalled out at around 50%. I don’t think this will hold, though. I continue to believe that of the people who work in offices, most will spend > 50% of each week there. And we will see that in 2024.
    • 2023 was the year of AI. But Fred Wilson makes an excellent point, here. AI is 40+ years in the making. Last year only became the year of AI because a consumer-facing app — ChatGPT — was revealed that captured everyone’s attention. Crypto will eventually have this moment, but it will likely need to marinate a bit longer. Instead, I think 2024 will be the year of augmented reality (AR) and a further blurring of our offline and online worlds. Think digital art, fashion, and other collectibles (such as NFTs).
    • Right now, autonomous vehicles feel like they’re in the trough of disillusionment (within the hype cycle). There were moments last year where it felt like we were finally moving beyond this phase. But then some very suboptimal things happened. I think AVs are our reality in the next 5+ years, which means that for next year we likely want to be focused on the inputs: vision/LIDAR, battery tech, etc.
    • Zooming out, we should be thinking about the above two trends in the context of a broader shift toward greater automation. I think it will feel more insidious than immediate (certainly in 2024), but the longer-term impacts are going to be profound for our society. The so-called gig economy is likely to be impacted first. Eventually the overall economy will create new jobs, but we are still going to need to manage this transition toward more automation.
    • TikTok Shop is where to look for the future of shopping. I think the platform will continue to see strong adoption and ultimately prove to be a dominant e-commerce platform throughout 2024. Amazon, Meta, and others will see this, and try their best to catch up and copy it.
    • At the time of writing this post, the total crypto market capitalization is about $1.74 trillion. This is down from nearly $3 trillion at the peak of the market in 2021. The recent gains suggest that the so-called “crypto winter” might be over, and so combined with lower interest rates and more real-world use cases, I think that 2024 will be another strong year for crypto. Total crypto market cap at the end of the year will exceed its 2021 peak.

    And there you have it. My current thoughts for this upcoming year. I should note that I’m not an economist, analyst, or an expert on souvlaki demand for that matter. But I enjoy writing this post as an annual discipline. It forces me to think critically about the topics that interest me. And in the paraphrased words of Howard Lindzon, it gives me an archive that I can go back to and either cringe at or think to myself, “hey, I could have been a somebody!”

    And with that, a big thanks to everyone who has read this daily blog over the last year. This year marked its 10th anniversary. I wish you much success and happiness in 2024. Happy new year!