Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Tesla's new Cybertruck was the talk of the town last week. Its design is polarizing and both windows broke during the unveiling (Elon's reaction was amazing). At first I couldn't tell if this wasn't some sort of spoof on Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator. Everything seemed to fit, including the design of the car, the chosen brand typography, and Elon's outfit.
But within the first 24 hours and with no paid advertising, Tesla received 146,000 pre-orders for the truck (though, all it takes is a USD 150 fully refundable deposit to secure a place in line). So while a lot of you may consider this to be one the ugliest vehicles around, there are others who think this entire move is genius.
The design was jarring when I first saw it. It looked like a comical representation of what we thought vehicles in the future were going to look like. But I have to admit that the design is growing on me. And I agree that for Tesla to win any sort of marketshare in the pick-up category, it needed to do something radical. Brand loyalty to Ford's F-Series pick up truck is simply too strong.
Marques Brownlee has a good video explaining this take (and why he ordered a Tesla Cybertruck):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX1xG0a4TVo
But if successful, I also wonder to what extent the Tesla Cybertruck will eat into the sales of existing pick-up truck models versus capture new buyers that historically wouldn't have bought this kind of vehicle. In other words, we are seeing tech people and successful YouTubers, like Marques, pre-order this truck. But I bet that very few of them currently drive an F-150.
Image: Tesla
Earlier this year, the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) published this report on the impacts of ride hailing services in the City of Toronto.
And then today, the Ryerson City Building Institute leveraged it to opine on how "on-demand tech" might improve transit going forward. That's how I discovered it.
What is clear from the report is that ride-hailing services -- which they refer to as Private Transportation Companies (PTC) -- are driven by two dominant use cases: 1) going out at night and 2) commuting to and from work.
Friday and Saturday nights are by far the busiest periods for PTC travel, with the peak usually happening around midnight on Sunday morning. About 13,100 trips per hour, mostly concentrated in the core.
The Shed in Hudson Yards has an exhibition on right now called Manual Override. It features the work of five artists. One of those artists is Lynn Hershman Leeson, who is known for exploring the relationship between humans and technology (naturally, she lives in the Bay Area). Her piece at the exhibition is called Shadow Stalker.
The way Shadow Stalker works is that you enter your email address -- a single data point. The installation then pulls up all of the publicly accessible information associated with your email address. Things like your name, age, address, phone numbers, where you were last seen, and more.
She refers to this information as your "digital shadow." It is all of the personal information that is publicly accessible because of the internet. And it is the kind of the information that is already used for things like "predictive policing." Software that predicts where crime is likely to occur.
I am fairly public as a result of this blog. Already this year I have written over 75,000 words. So I can only imagine what the internet knows about me. Probably a lot. But of course, I am volunteering a lot of this information. What does the internet know about us that we didn't explicitly tell it?
If you're interested in learning more about Shadow Stalker, here's a video.
Tesla's new Cybertruck was the talk of the town last week. Its design is polarizing and both windows broke during the unveiling (Elon's reaction was amazing). At first I couldn't tell if this wasn't some sort of spoof on Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator. Everything seemed to fit, including the design of the car, the chosen brand typography, and Elon's outfit.
But within the first 24 hours and with no paid advertising, Tesla received 146,000 pre-orders for the truck (though, all it takes is a USD 150 fully refundable deposit to secure a place in line). So while a lot of you may consider this to be one the ugliest vehicles around, there are others who think this entire move is genius.
The design was jarring when I first saw it. It looked like a comical representation of what we thought vehicles in the future were going to look like. But I have to admit that the design is growing on me. And I agree that for Tesla to win any sort of marketshare in the pick-up category, it needed to do something radical. Brand loyalty to Ford's F-Series pick up truck is simply too strong.
Marques Brownlee has a good video explaining this take (and why he ordered a Tesla Cybertruck):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX1xG0a4TVo
But if successful, I also wonder to what extent the Tesla Cybertruck will eat into the sales of existing pick-up truck models versus capture new buyers that historically wouldn't have bought this kind of vehicle. In other words, we are seeing tech people and successful YouTubers, like Marques, pre-order this truck. But I bet that very few of them currently drive an F-150.
Image: Tesla
Earlier this year, the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) published this report on the impacts of ride hailing services in the City of Toronto.
And then today, the Ryerson City Building Institute leveraged it to opine on how "on-demand tech" might improve transit going forward. That's how I discovered it.
What is clear from the report is that ride-hailing services -- which they refer to as Private Transportation Companies (PTC) -- are driven by two dominant use cases: 1) going out at night and 2) commuting to and from work.
Friday and Saturday nights are by far the busiest periods for PTC travel, with the peak usually happening around midnight on Sunday morning. About 13,100 trips per hour, mostly concentrated in the core.
The Shed in Hudson Yards has an exhibition on right now called Manual Override. It features the work of five artists. One of those artists is Lynn Hershman Leeson, who is known for exploring the relationship between humans and technology (naturally, she lives in the Bay Area). Her piece at the exhibition is called Shadow Stalker.
The way Shadow Stalker works is that you enter your email address -- a single data point. The installation then pulls up all of the publicly accessible information associated with your email address. Things like your name, age, address, phone numbers, where you were last seen, and more.
She refers to this information as your "digital shadow." It is all of the personal information that is publicly accessible because of the internet. And it is the kind of the information that is already used for things like "predictive policing." Software that predicts where crime is likely to occur.
I am fairly public as a result of this blog. Already this year I have written over 75,000 words. So I can only imagine what the internet knows about me. Probably a lot. But of course, I am volunteering a lot of this information. What does the internet know about us that we didn't explicitly tell it?
If you're interested in learning more about Shadow Stalker, here's a video.
Overall, it is estimated that Toronto does about 176,000 daily PTC trips (as of March 2019). That places it behind New York and Chicago in terms of the size of the market. But Toronto also didn't complete its first PTC until 2014. Here's a comparison chart:
Another diagram that I found interesting was the proportion of shared ride trips by neighborhood. It shows that much of the inner suburbs are hailing shared rides -- sometimes as high as 45% of all trips. This is interesting because it is people effectively gaming the system.
Because the population densities are lower in the suburbs than in the core, you're a lot less likely to get paired with other riders when you select that option. So what tends to happen is that you end up getting a private ride for the price of shared ride. I know I've played the odds before.
If you'd like to download a full copy of the report, click here.
Overall, it is estimated that Toronto does about 176,000 daily PTC trips (as of March 2019). That places it behind New York and Chicago in terms of the size of the market. But Toronto also didn't complete its first PTC until 2014. Here's a comparison chart:
Another diagram that I found interesting was the proportion of shared ride trips by neighborhood. It shows that much of the inner suburbs are hailing shared rides -- sometimes as high as 45% of all trips. This is interesting because it is people effectively gaming the system.
Because the population densities are lower in the suburbs than in the core, you're a lot less likely to get paired with other riders when you select that option. So what tends to happen is that you end up getting a private ride for the price of shared ride. I know I've played the odds before.
If you'd like to download a full copy of the report, click here.
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