On Monday of this past long weekend, I went for a quick bike ride over to the Beaches, up to Little India, and then back down to the St. Lawrence Market. 

The ride along Lake Shore and through the Beaches is one of my favorites. Minus a few awkward twists and turns as you leave the East Bayfront, it’s generally smooth sailing. It feels a bit like a bike highway.

It took me about 24 minutes to get to the beach, which means I was traveling on average just over 20 km/h. If you lived in the Beaches and worked downtown, that would be a perfectly reasonable commute in my mind.

And it’s for reasons like this that Munich is looking to invest in a huge network of bike highways. They’re calling it a Radschnellverbindungen – which I might start ambitiously calling some of the bike paths in Toronto – and the idea is to connect the city with all of the suburbs.

Below is a map of the routes they’re looking at. The purple lines are “suitable routes” and the blue lines are corridors they’ve looked at it. If I’m wrong in my translation, blame Google.

The NH Deutscher Kaiser Hotel building in Munich looks like this:

It’s a fairly conventional tower on top of a podium.

However, photographer Victor Enrich decided to reimagine what this tower and podium could look like. In fact, he did it 88 times. Here’s the video. And here’s one example:

The realism of each is incredible. It’s also a fascinating—albeit outlandish—study of what could be.

For the sake of our global brand, Toronto taxis need to have a consistent brand - the same car, the same colour. I’ve thought about this before and written about it somewhere, but it’s worth repeating.

I was driving around downtown on Saturday night and I started to compare the ratio of cabs to non-cabs on the road. As is typical for any weekend night, most of the cars were cabs. And yet they’re a complete hodgepodge of different car types and colours.

The cab companies, of course, like it this way. They want to be differentiated. But from a practical standpoint, does this even matter? Sure, I might call a specific company to pick me up somewhere, but when I’m hailing a cab on the street I go for the first available car. I couldn’t care less what company it is. 

The result of this heterogeneity though is that we’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to brand our city. New York has its yellow cabs, London has its black cabs and all of Germany has its beige Mercedes Benzes. In our psyche, those cars symbolize those cities.

Just like companies, cities today compete with one another for talent and capital. It’s been said many times before that the vast majority of Millenials now choose where they want to live (which city) before they even start looking for a job. Toronto needs to be on the top of that last.

Taxi branding may seem like a small detail, but it’s not. As a comparison, take for example the