With Mirik Milan (Night Mayor of Amsterdam) speaking at the upcoming NXT City Symposium here in Toronto, I figured it was time to revisit the topic of night mayors. If you’re new to this topic and/or the blog, you can get yourself up to speed here (scroll down).

Firstly, this idea is clearly spreading and it just crossed the pond. Last month on August 24, 2017, New York City Council voted to create the “Office of Nightlife.” It’s a small start. The office will have an annual budget of $300,000. But that’s okay.

As far as I know, NYC is now the first major North American city with government humans focused on leveraging the benefits of the nightlife industry.

For the record, my post “Why Toronto needs a night mayor” was published in March 2016. It was obvious that the idea was already spreading throughout Europe and I was hoping that this city (Toronto) take notice and decide to lead within North America. New York City decided to do that instead.

Secondly, CityLab published an article today called how to be a good night mayor. It is about what NYC can learn from the European cities who are already experimenting with this kind of office. Perhaps my favorite is the recommendation to “reflect your own city’s DNA.”

Of course, having a night mayor is one thing. Making it highly effective is another. In that regard, it is still early days for North American night mayors, and night mayors in general. Who will truly lead?

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

I’m taking next week off so that I can respond to emails from various places in Ontario and Quebec instead of from my desk. The out of office messages really fly at this time of year, so it’s usually a pretty good time to try for a recharge.

Because of that, this post feels appropriate. 

Sahil Chinoy of the Washington Post recently looked at anonymous cell phone and vehicle data (from Here Technologies) to see how far you could drive in one hour if you were trying to escape the downtown of various U.S. cities on a Friday afternoon in the summer.

This exercise was done for 3 departure times on July 28, 2017: 4pm, 7pm and 10pm. The mappings all leverage 3 years of historical speed data.

Here is a first set of maps showing a few cities in the northeast and in the mid-atlantic. Every city is shown at the same scale so that they can be easily compared.

And here is a second set of maps showing a few, more car-oriented, cities.

Not surprisingly, older transit-oriented cities like New York don’t do well in this contest. No matter what time you leave, it’s hard to make it past 30 miles. Whereas in the case of Vegas, it doesn’t really matter what time you leave. You should be able to clear 50 miles.

That’s the other interesting thing to note about these maps – the spread between distances at the various times.

I’m sharing these because I’m a sucker for diagrams, but I don’t think they tell the whole story. The modal splits and the population and employment densities are all very different across these cities. New York’s core competency is in moving lots of people in trains, not in cars.

Although, perhaps the ironic thing about these diagrams is that a tighter drive radius might actually say something about how efficiently land is being used.

Jackson, Wyoming is one of my favorite places on the planet. (Here is a ski/snowboard video that my friends and I made a few years ago in Jackson.)

Earlier this year, Eagle Point Hotel Partners and the Brooklyn-based design firm Studio Tack completed a renovation of the Anvil Motel in Jackson – it’s now the 49-room Anvil Hotel. 

Apparently reclaimed motels are the new hospitality trend.

What I appreciate about their approach, is the emphasis on creating something that feels local and contextual. Here are a couple of snippets from Surface Magazine:

The designers wanted to avoid a rustic feel, or what Ruben Caldwell, one of Studio Tack’s four partners and an avid backcountry skier, calls “Mountain Modern,” referring to architecture, common in places like Vail, Colorado, and Lake Tahoe, California, that excessively uses reclaimed wood and Cor-Ten steel. “We knew we didn’t want to steer anywhere near that,” says Chou, a long-time snowboarder who more recently got into skiing. “It takes a bit of familiarity with ski towns to know what you don’t want to do.”

The vibrancy of Jackson’s local culture impressed the design team—and Caldwell so much so that he moved there full-time last year. “As a design team,” Caldwell says, “we’re hyper-aware of the need for projects to be deeply embedded into the local scene.”

It’s easier to copy and paste. But the results are always better when you take a bit of time to understand a place. 

Image: Anvil Hotel