UberPOOL launched in Toronto last week. It was tested in Toronto last summer and it’s been available in other cities for awhile, but now it’s officially here.
If you’re not yet familiar with UberPOOL, it basically allows you to share your ride with other people who are headed in the same direction. I’ve heard some people on Twitter complain about route inefficiencies, but I’ve had only positive experiences with it so far.
The disadvantage of this system is that it’s a bit slower. You’re stopping to pick up other people on the way. But the advantages of this system are twofold. First, it’s cheaper, which means it’s already starting to eat into my transit usage. And second, you get to meet new people everywhere you go.
This second piece is really interesting to me, because I place a lot of emphasis on getting to know as many people as I can. That’s one of the reasons I blog every day and one of the reasons I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I get exposed to people that I might otherwise not meet. And I believe there’s huge value in that. I want to sit down and have a coffee with everyone. (Time doesn’t always allow that to happen.)
Because since the beginning of cities, personal connections is one of the things that has made urban life so valuable. Here’s an excerpt from a CityLab article published back in 2013:
“If you look at the interaction patterns of cities,” Pan says, “You will see that they grow super-linearly with population with the same growth rate as productivity, as innovation, as crime, as HIV, as STDs.”
All of those facets of urban life have appeared until now to share a somewhat mysterious mathematical relationship. But this research suggests that this particular super-linear growth rate is directly tied to how dense cities enable us to connect to each other. As cities grow, our connections to each other grow by an exponential factor. And those connections are the root of productivity.
“What really happens when you move to a big city is you get to know a lot of different people, although they are not necessarily your ‘friends,’” Pan says. “These are the people who bring different ideas, bring different opportunities, and meetings with other great people that may help you.”
Clearly there can also be some negative externalities associated with urban life – such as crime and disease. But it’s also clear that for a many people, the benefits far outweigh the potential negatives. Big cities tend to make us more productive. And as we’ve discussed here before, they can also bring us happiness in ways not associated with economic success.
If you’ve used UberPOOL before, I would be curious to hear about your experiences in the comment section below.
https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html
Earlier this week I watched the above TED talk called, The happy secret to better work. It’s only 12 minutes long.
In it, Shawn Achor argues that we’ve got it all wrong and backwards when it comes to our happiness. We constantly set (moving) goals and then tell ourselves that once we achieve those goals we’ll be happy.
We tell ourselves that once we get that degree, buy that new home, or secure that new promotion, that we’ll be happier. And I’m definitely guilty of that sometimes. I think many goal oriented people are.
But his argument is that if happiness sits outside of those moving targets, we’ll never be as happy as we could be. Happiness needs to sit within those goals. In other words, we need to focus on being happy today, not tomorrow.
But the other powerful thing about this approach is that greater happiness has been shown to improve productivity. So if you simply flip this equation, you’ll probably be not only happier but more successful.
At the end of last year, somebody told me that they were really enjoying my blog because of how positive I always seem to be about the future of cities and the world.
And that was honestly one of the nicest things to hear from a reader, because I truly believe that optimism, not pessimism, is what moves the world forward.
The Globe and Mail published an article yesterday morning called, “Why a lower loonie is (mostly) good for Canada." It talks about the recent decline of the Canadian dollar from parity last May to roughly USD $0.92 today. But that the drop is essentially because of a rising US dollar.
Irrespective of what’s causing the devaluation though, the article takes the tone that it’s generally good for the country:
“On net, this could be seen as a good thing because it’s making Canadian goods and services more competitive,” said Michael Devereux, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics.
But this viewpoint always gets me concerned.
Canadian goods and services shouldn’t be competitive because they’re cheaper; they should be competitive because they’re the best damn good and services in the world. And so my fear with statements, like the one above, is that it almost makes us believe that a weak dollar is a prerequisite for competitiveness. It’s not.
In fact, research done by Professor Walid Hejazi at the Rotman School has shown that a weak Canadian dollar actually lowers productivity levels and creates a disincentive for innovation. Why bother to innovate when you can always get your goods and services to market at a lower cost than your competitors?
Thankfully, the outgoing Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada (and upcoming Dean of the Rotman School), Tiff Macklem, has acknowledged this perspective. In a talk at Queen’s University last January, he said:
"What should Canadian businesses do? First, don’t count on a weaker Canadian dollar. Hoping for a weaker Canadian dollar is not a business plan. A sustainable export strategy cannot rely on expectations of a more favourable exchange rate, since Canada is likely to remain an attractive investment destination."
That sounds like good advice to me.