The Azorean adventure is over. But it wouldn't be a trip to Europe without some sort of post about street dimensions.

So here's a primary retail street in downtown Ponta Delgada — 6.7m from building face to building face, or about the size of a standard two-way drive aisle in Toronto.

And here's the narrowest street/lane that I came across on the island. I couldn't find a street name, but it did have utility meters on it, and it was about the size of a residential building corridor.

We also stumbled upon quite the street party in this same area. There's a lot happening in this photo.

I did also manage to find a memory card reader for my camera at a Continente (supermarket) along the way. So make sure you're following Globizen's Instagram page.

Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow.

A few months ago when I wrote about “Toronto’s great streets” I mentioned that Queens Quay West - while magnificent – has had its share of issues. Cyclists and pedestrians often find themselves battling for space. And drivers are consistently driving in the wrong places.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the turning radii (among other things) are a bit atypical and unusual compared to the rest of the city. And so if you’re at all in mental autopilot, it can be fairly easy to make a wrong turn. You really have to be paying attention.

Below is a screenshot from Google Street View showing the foot of Lower Spadina, looking east on Queens Quay West. If you’re making a left turn from the former onto the latter, you need to end up on the left (north) of the streetcar tracks (even though the tracks themselves might be directing you elsewhere).

There’s lots of signage telling you not to drive onto the tracks, but that hasn’t really been working. So the tracks were recently painted in bright red. You can see what that looks like here. Some people are still getting mixed up, but it’s certainly more noticeable.

What I am wondering today is whether all of this signage and paint should be considered a symptom of poor design. In other words: Should good design require few instructions? Or, is this simply a normal part of iterative city building?

What do you think?

I discovered a company yesterday called CARMERA, which just raised a $20 million Series B funding round. They call themselves a “real-time, street-level intelligence platform” and their flagship product, called Autonomous Map, provides HD maps and real-time navigation data to autonomous vehicles. That’s the way AVs work. They need maps like CARMERA’s to function. Here is an overview of what is supposedly the largest AV taxi service in the world. It is a partnership between CARMERA and Voyage.

One of the interesting things about this product is that it is cleverly powered through another one of their products: a free fleet monitoring tool for commercial operators. So fleet managers use this service to keep track of their actual human drivers and, at the same time, CARMERA uses the vehicles to collect the data it needs for its Autonomous Map. They call it “pro-sourcing” the data (a play on crowdsourcing).

It is perhaps a good example of “single user utility.” The product you’re making often has to be valuable to a single user before scale is reached. In this case, Autonomous Map would be a hard sell without a critical mass of pro-sourced data. It solves the perennial chicken-and-egg problem when creating new marketplaces.

Finally, I think many of you will be interested to know that CARMERA has also announced a partnership with the New York City Department of Transportation. As part of this, the company will be handing over the data they have on pedestrian density analytics and real-time construction detection events. Part of their mission is to “automate cities” and better street analytics will certainly help to open up a new world of city building possibilities.

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash