Tonight I saw one of Toronto’s new streetcars cruising down King Street. They’re still in test mode and the first batch won’t go into operation until this August, but every now and then you’ll see one circulating around the city. This was the first one I’d seen in person.
If you’re a transit geek or urbanist, you’re probably excited about the arrival of these new streetcars. But I know that there are a lot of people who aren’t. They hate streetcars and they think of them as basically rolling stop signs on our congested downtown streets. And since these new streetcars are even longer than our existing ones, they’re worried they’ll just make the situation worse.
Personally, I think that streetcars mixed into traffic is generally pretty inefficient. But I know that surface light rail has the potential, when executed properly, to be a cost-effective and sustainable way of efficiently moving lots of people around a city. When I lived in Dublin I took the Luas every day. It was great.
So I’m curious to hear from you. What do you think of Toronto’s new streetcars? Let me know in the comment section below.
I’m reading a great book right now called Tech and the City. I’m only 31% of the way through it (according to my Kindle app), but already it’s been an interesting read. It’s about the making and rise of New York City as a technology and startup hub – which, is fairly recent phenomenon. There aren’t too many cases where New York plays second or third city, but tech is one of those instances. Silicon Valley dominates.
The book talks about the deliberate efforts that were made, by the Bloomberg administration as well by many others, to diversify New York’s economy away from financial services and towards technology, startups, and entrepreneurship. It gives you all the backstory about the rise of Silicon Alley in the 90s, its subsequent crash in the dot com era, and all the players involved. And yes the reference to Sex and the City is both on purpose and explicit throughout the book.
But at a time where cities all around the world are trying to replicate the success of Silicon Valley, the takeaways from this book are perhaps universally applicable. It certainly got me wondering if, here in Toronto, we’re doing enough to prepare our city to dominate in the 21st century.
Image: Stephen Wilkes
A few weeks ago I had coffee with a friend of mine who is a partner at a Toronto-based enterprise software company called Polyform Labs. Their products are geared towards the commercial real estate industry and, since I’m a big proponent of introducing more technology into the real estate space, I thought I would share a little bit about them with you all today.
The first of their 4 main products is called Lingo, which is a machine learning tool that helps companies quickly review legal documents and contracts. In the case of commercial real estate firms, the most obvious use case is leases. These documents are often hundreds of pages long and, if you have a big portfolio of properties, I’m sure you can imagine how quickly these pages add up.
What’s neat about Lingo is that you basically upload a lease and then the tool interprets and summarizes all of the clauses for you. It then tells you where you’re potentially exposed and where your risk factors are. And if by chance it gets it wrong, you can correct it and the system will actually get smarter – hence the machine learning part.
I’m not going to go through their entire product line, but I did also want to mention one more called Aura. They call it a “location-aware loyalty engine”. And you may have heard of similar products out there in the marketplace. What it does is use the MAC address on mobile phones (which is a unique, but anonymous, identifier) to track how people and crowds move through spaces.
The most common use case I’ve come across is within shopping malls and retail spaces. It’s used to determine which stores have the most foot traffic, which departments and aisles draw the most people, how long people stay in each store, where they buy, and so on. So even if you didn’t already know about this technology, you may have already been giving up your location data. There are lots of mall landlords using it.
And it’s producing some interesting data. For example, as soon as somebody buys one thing in a mall, their propensity to buy something else grows exponentially. This is what the data tells us and I can certainly relate to it from my own experience. So as a mall landlord and tenant, you are obviously trying to figure out ways to encourage people to make that first purchase.
The other use case that (obviously) came to my mind was with respect to city planning and urban design. How could we harvest anonymous location data to improve the way we design both our private and public spaces? Imagine if we had this data for subway stations, public parks, public plazas, and so on. I bet we would discover all kinds of ways to improve the experience within our cities. I’d like to see the location data for Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto on a sunny summer day.
But I digress.
If you’d like learn to more about Polyform Labs and their real estate products, click here.
Image: WPC