During the recent election here in Toronto, mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat raised the idea of this city region, maybe, becoming its own province. It wasn’t the first time this idea has been floated, but it once again didn’t stick.
Earlier this week, Richard Florida spoke at the Urban Land Institute’s Toronto symposium and he brought up a similar issue: Toronto is a ‘city state’ and needs to start acting like it. Here is an excerpt from a recent Star article about his talk:
He also noted that in terms of total economic output, the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] — he included the Golden Horseshoe — is responsible for about “$700 billion” (U.S) in economic output.
“Which means our … region is equivalent to that of Sweden. So we are a city state, a mega region.”
He later added: “we are a powerful global city with lots of assets to build on,” he said.
But he went on to say that despite all of these successes there’s a “sense that something is amiss, something is wrong.”
I have long supported the notion that city regions need to see and think of themselves as one united and contiguous economic landscape. In our case, it is not about, for instance, Hamilton vs. Toronto. This is about our entire region vs. New York or Singapore (a city-state) or the Pearl River Delta megalopolis.
The headlines coming out of Amazon’s recent announcement are clear: In Superstar Cities, the Rich Get Richer, and They Get Amazon. This is winner-take-all urbanism where you need to be a “superstar” in order to compete.
There are a number of affordable housing plans being thrown around in Toronto right now given that we have a municipal election coming up this fall.
From what I have read, the plans are largely centered around surplus and/or available public land and possibly some subsidies.
These subsidies are very important because the money has to come from somewhere. This is often overlooked.
In light of these debates, I thought I would share a short Bloomberg video that my friend Evgeny shared with me this morning all the way from Tokyo.
The video is about how Singapore fixed its housing problem. If you can’t see it embedded below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cjPgNBNeLU?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
It strikes me as being very Singaporean.
There’s a significant amount of downward pressure on parking supply in most major cities. Part of this has to do with the push toward more sustainable forms of transport, which is, of course, a good thing. But it also has to do with rising construction costs, the fear of obsolescence in the wake of autonomous vehicles, and probably many other factors.
Developers, ourselves included, have responded by being cautious about the amount of parking being provided and by considering alternative future uses for the parking that is being built. I think it is also obvious that we will continue to see more, rather than less, parking stackers and other more efficient parking solutions.
So far the cost of parking in dense urban centers has continued to rise. A new parking spot in the core of Toronto priced at $100,000 would not surprise me. And Hong Kong recently set a record for what is allegedly the most expensive parking spot in the world: USD 765,000 or CAD 1 million.
But what is going to happen going forward?
Researchers at the Singapore - MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and MIT Senseable City Lab, along with Allianz, have recently tried to quantify what the impact of autonomous vehicles will mean on required parking, and on traffic, in Singapore. The study is called Unparking.
Today, they estimate the total number of parking spots in Singapore to be around 1,370,000. This is based on minimum parking requirements from the Housing Development Board and on the idea that home-work commuting consumes two parking spots: one at home and one at the office.
They model four different scenarios, but the last one is based on fully autonomous vehicles and on shared parking spaces. Holding current mobility demands and traffic volumes constant, the demand for parking in this scenario drops by 70%.
It is possible to reduce the number of parking spaces even further to 85%, but this has a negative impact on traffic congestion in their model. Fewer parking spaces means the autonomous vehicles have to drive around more picking people up.
I also don’t know if there was any consideration given to induced demand as a result of the more affordable autonomous vehicles. Demand for transportation services is generally thought to be fairly elastic.
Whatever the case may be, numbers are made to be questioned. And Singapore is a unique city-state. But ¼ the amount of parking does not seem that far fetched to me.
Photo by Tobias Jussen on Unsplash