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.
The Dutch now believe that the number is 230cm. This is an increase from a previous recommendation of 200cm. The thinking behind this number is roughly as follows. Apparently there are Dutch laws stipulating that bikes can’t be wider than 75cm. So this is the starting point.
But since it’s impossible to always ride in a perfectly straight line, there seems to be a generally accepted rule that, at an absolute minimum, cyclists need about 100cm of width to themselves.
If you now double this so that two people can ride side-by-side, you’re at 200cm. This is an important design criteria because the Dutch also seem to believe that (1) cycling is a social activity and (2) a child should be able to ride beside their parent. (Love this!)
Finally, add in a bit of buffer so there’s room to pass slower cyclists and/or nobody feels like they’re going to crash into oncoming cyclists, and you get to 230cm as the ideal width of a single bike lane.
I’m not sure I had given this much thought before, so I look forward to scrutinizing (and possibly measuring) every bike lane I ride in going forward.
For next year’s budget (2024), the City of Toronto is projecting a $1.5 – $1.7 billion budget shortfall. And over the next 10 years, this shortfall is expected to grow to nearly $47 billion if changes aren’t made. This is according to a recent report prepared by Ernst & Young and Strategy Corp. So right now, all of this is being looked at and debated by Council.
Where are we going to get this money?
One persistent debate is whether the city actually has a revenue problem, or whether it’s simply an expense/spending problem. I can’t say that I’ve scrutinized the city’s expenses at any length, so I’m not going to get into that level of detail today. For this post, I’d like to focus on two specific things. The first is property taxes.
Here is a figure, from the report, showing residential property tax rates across southern Ontario:
What you will see is that Toronto has the lowest rate of the 35 municipalities that they looked at. Now obviously there are some nuances to consider. The average home price in Toronto is higher than it is in, say, Sault St. Marie. Toronto also has a large commercial property tax base. But even still, historically speaking, Toronto has tended to increase its residential property taxes at or below the rate of inflation.
This is a problem. And it is the exact same problem that we have talked about on this blog in regards to residential rent controls. If you own an apartment building where the rents are capped and your expenses are, therefore, growing faster than your revenue, you are (1) highly incentivized not to invest in the apartment (you can’t afford to) and (2) eventually going to hit a financial wall.
Sound familiar? As far as I can tell, that is, at least partially, what is happening here.
Secondly, one of the first things that I did when I opened the report was run a search for “road tolls” and “congestion charges”. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is something I feel strongly about. Here’s what I found:
In 2017, when the City considered implementation of tolls for the Gardiner and the DVP, staff estimated that a $2-per-trip toll would generate $5.6 billion in 10 years. The province has refused several requests to consider these options, with the Minister of Transportation rejecting any discussion of uploading or tolling as recently as December 2022.
This is also a problem. One of the general rules with taxes is that you should ideally tax the things you want less of. Hmm. So why not tax traffic congestion? There is no question that it works. There’s lots of evidence from all around the world. We just lack the political will to actually do it. Instead, we pay lip service with solutions that don’t work.
At the same time, if we were to actually implement road pricing, I don’t believe that a flat toll is the way to go. $2 also seems low. The best practice is dynamic road pricing that fluctuates based on actual congestion levels. Meaning, if you’re driving at 5am, expect a low rate. And if you’re driving at 5pm, expect a high rate.
Virtually overnight, we know this would do at least three things: (1) it would reduce/eliminate traffic congestion (congestion levels would become a function of pricing); (2) it would reduce overall carbon emissions in the city; and (3) it would take a meaningful chunk out of this $47 billion budget shortfall.
In case I haven’t been clear enough: I love cities. I vividly remember being a kid and being excited to come downtown. My mom has told me that my eyes used to light up — every, single, time. Even today, when I’m away from Toronto and I return home, I’m excited to see the skyline. I miss it.
This afternoon I got that same feeling on our return to Paris, even though it is not home. We spent the last two days in Normandy, specifically Étretat and Rouen, and as beautiful and as wonderful as these places are, I was genuinely excited to come back to the capital.
My other revelation is that driving in Paris sucks.
I would much rather walk, cycle, or take the metro. That is what this city is designed for. Still, I’m happy that we rented a car for Normandy and that I learned — after being honked at — how to appropriately conduct myself in the infamous Arc de Triomphe roundabout.
Unlike every other roundabout in the world, you do not yield to cars already in the circle; you yield to cars entering the circle. Once you understand that, it’s significantly easier. Though, supposedly, car accidents that happen within the circle are automatically every driver’s fault and every insurer pays.
I guess that says something about its orderliness.
It’s been raining all morning, but apparently there is an ocean hidden in the above picture. We also got in after dark and so all I really saw was what I could see on the drive from the airport.
Whenever I am reminded that the vast majority of built form in North America is car-oriented in nature, I can’t help but think of how sticky all of this is going to be.
Witold Rybczynski put it accurately when he said, “urbanism and architecture observe different time lines.” Buildings may take forever to build, but relative to urban form, they actually change pretty quickly.
New materials and styles emerge, and so do new buildings. But the streets that surround them change so slowly, that for all intents and purposes, they mostly don’t change.
What that means is that, for better or for worse, most of what we see is likely to persist. No wonder there is an arms race going on with autonomous vehicles.
Oftentimes when I think about Los Angeles, I think about the fact that you generally have to drive everywhere. And since I have a personal preference for dense and walkable cities, this thought helps me feel slightly less envious about their perfect weather.
Los Angeles is probably the original car city. Here is an excerpt from this excellent post by Brian Potter, where he summarizes a 1987 book by Scott Bottles called, “Los Angeles and the Automobile”:
Los Angeles was especially quick to adopt the car. By 1920 Los Angeles had the highest per-capita rate of car ownership in the US, four times more automobiles per capita than the US average, and eight times more than the much-denser Chicago. In 1920, 9 times as many people entered downtown LA via streetcar as via automobile. By 1924, that had nearly equaled.
And interestingly enough, people started using them, almost immediately, to create Uber-like services:
A popular early use of the car for public transit was the jitney. Car owners would pick up passengers (often waiting at streetcar stops) and drive them to their destination for the same price as a streetcar ride (5 cents). Car owners would often simply put their destination in their windshields, and pick up anyone along the way who was headed in the same direction. Because jitney travel was much faster than streetcars, and wasn’t limited to the fixed streetcar routes, jitneys often had better service than streetcars.
Jitney travel first appeared in Los Angeles in 1914, and by November of that year was being used for thousands of trips per day. The jitney quickly spread to other cities. By early 1915, an estimated 62,000 jitneys operated around the country in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Birmingham. As jitney travel became more popular, electric rail companies found that they were losing significant ridership
What this again underscores is just how disruptive the car was — right from the outset. It was quickly seen as being more convenient, especially in a city like Los Angeles, which wasn’t as dense as its counterparts on the east coast.
Sadly, and as Potter suggests in his post, it is not clear that the headwinds facing public transit have changed all that much since the first jitneys started appearing on the streets of Los Angeles a century ago.
Toronto’s elevated Gardiner Expressway is a topic that pops up periodically on this blog. We have talked about taking down a portion, realigning a portion, adding a congestion charge, lighting it like they have done in Shanghai, and of course we have talked about the good work that The Bentway team is doing.
Their most recent project is something called Standing Grounds. It’s a collaboration with New York-based Tei Carpenter (Agency–Agency, NYC) and Toronto-based architect Reza Nik (SHEEEP, Toronto), and I think it’s really clever.
If you look closely at the underside of the Gardiner Expressway, you’ll see that there are existing downspouts in place that take rainwater, snowmelt, and whatever else from the highway above, down to the ground. What Standing Grounds is going to do (by next month) is take this existing infrastructure and add natural filtration chambers that can remediate this excess water.
I learned today that plants like milkweed, agastache, and yarrow are actually able to absorb road salts and heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and hydrocarbons. So instead of this dirty water flowing from the highway and into the ground, it will soon be filtered by a seemingly simple garden system that looks like this:
This is an obviously positive thing for the city and I love that it is leveraging infrastructure that already exists. As I said: really clever.
The first phase of Montreal’s new Réseau express métropolitain (or REM) just opened it up. It is a 17 km light-rail line that includes five stations running from Brossard in the south (A1 above) to Gare Centrale in downtown Montreal. Eventually this network — which is distinct from but connected to the city’s existing metro network operated by STM — will span 67 kilometers and have a total of 26 stations. To put this into perspective, Montreal’s current metro totals 69.2 kms. So this is a near doubling.
As with most big city building projects, Montreal’s REM is being and will continue to be criticized. Back in 2016, the project had an estimated total project cost of $5.9 billion. By 2021, this number had increased to $6.9 billion. Today, who knows what the number will be. But it will be more. The reality is that everything went up, by a lot, over the last five years. During the pandemic, we were seeing 30-40% cost increases on some of our construction line items.
Under the pact, the Caisse’s infrastructure arm is assuming $3.5-billion of the project’s $6.9-billion construction cost while Quebec is committing $1.28-billion and the Canada Infrastructure Bank is providing a $1.28-billion loan. The balance consists of a $295-million payment from Hydro-Québec for the line’s electrification, while the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain, the transit authority for the Montreal region, is pledging $512-million.
Provincial and local governments will provide continuing operating subsidies for the REM to make sure the Caisse earns its required return on the project, currently pegged at 8 to 9 per cent. The pension fund manager will get 72 cents for each passenger-kilometre travelled on the light rail system. Without such a subsidy, fares would climb to a level few passengers could afford.
It’ll be interesting to see how this approach stands the test of time. As I understand it, CDPQ wants to continue building and operating transit in other cities around the world. I don’t know any of the specifics other than what I have read online. But from the outside, things seem to be working. The first phase of the REM broke ground in April 2018, and the opening ceremony was held this month (July 2023). That’s basically warp speed in transit timelines.
So apparently Lyft is the largest bikeshare operator in North America. They operate around 68,000 bikes and scooters, which equaled some 52 million rides last year. Ridership also continues to grow. Since 2020, ridership has grown in cities like New York (+56%), Chicago (+79%), Boston (82%), and Denver (+170%).
However, this part of Lyft’s business was in the news this week because the company announced that they are entertaining proposals to sell it, as well as “strategic partnerships.” The company has said that it remains committed to offering bikes through the Lyft app, but clearly it is trying to shore up its balance sheet.
This raises some interesting questions. Can bikeshare be a profitable and sustainable for-profit business? Or do we now need to be thinking of it as an important public service that is deserving of subsidies — similar to how public transit and cars/roads work in most cities? My own view is that these networks are here to stay regardless of how profitable or unprofitable they might be.
For additional stats on Lyft’s bikeshare business, click here. One of the figures that I found interesting, but not surprising, was that 71% of riders use bikeshare for “fun.” This is by far the most popular use case. The next most popular use is “errands” at 39%.
On most days, I walk to the office. That is going to be changing later this summer, but what I’m about to say will still apply.
Because I walk more often than I drive, whenever I have to go somewhere that necessitates a car and that obligates me to leave during the evening rush, the first thing I usually think to myself is “shit, it’s going to really suck getting out of downtown.”
I have very little patience when it comes to sitting in traffic. So when I’m faced with this kind of situation, my mind immediately goes to: “okay Brandon, what are your other options here?”
And this is exactly what happened this past Friday. I had a dinner up in Vaughan after work and I opted to take the subway to VMC station (the northern terminus of one of Toronto’s lines).
It was actually my first time riding this new line extension and it was cool to see the area around the station. It’s not yet a 15-minute community, but I believe it can get there with some narrow streets and the right kind of ground floors.
The entire trip took about 45 minutes, and I can tell you that on more than one occasion I thought to myself, “this is way better than sitting in traffic.”
What is the case for having parking minimums? (i.e. Mandating a certain number of parking spaces in new developments.) I guess the argument is that if you don’t require developers to build it, they won’t build enough. And then people will not have parking and so they will be forced to park on the street somewhere. This might annoy the incumbent residents, who will in turn complain, and so it is best and safest to just to build a lot of parking.
This is pretty much the only reason that I can think of for why a city might want to maintain parking minimums. Because, what’s the worst thing that could happen if you didn’t build enough parking? In the best case scenario, the developer builds fewer parking spaces and people are fine with it. This is ideal because it means people are getting around in other ways: walking, cycling, taking transit, and/or using car share. So it is the most sustainable outcome!
A bad scenario would be that the developer builds too few parking spaces, nobody will rent the spaces, and then goes bankrupt. This would be very bad for the developer; however, it would be a lot less of a concern for the city. The developer is the one who screwed up. Too bad for them. So when I see new transit-adjacent developments — like this one here in Burnaby, BC with 14 levels of below-grade parking — one can’t help but think: WTF!
To be clear, this is not a criticism of the developer. I don’t do that sort of thing on this blog. This is a criticism of parking minimums. They are so last decade. And I’m even being generous with this timeline.
