Tonight I finally got the opportunity to visit the Stockyards retail center at the corner of St. Clair West and Weston Road in Toronto. It’s a 550,000 square foot complex that was only recently completed. The major anchor tenant is Target and it just so happens to be the first new construction Target in Canada.

What’s interesting about the Stockyards development is that it’s a reinvention of the suburban big box store format that we all know so well. You know, the big store surrounded by a sea of parking. And from my past experience working on projects similar to this one, I can tell you that the Stockyards project is generally loved by planners at the city.

So what’s the big deal?

Let’s first look at how it would work for a traditional big box store development. Assume you’re a developer and you’re trying to secure a 150,000 square foot big box store tenant for your site.

Historically, in order for that tenant to even consider signing with you, you’d need to be able to offer her a single level format. In other words, her 150,000 square feet needs to be all on one level. Multiple levels are more expensive to build and they add another layer of complexity when it comes to shopping carts, back of house loading, and so on.

On top of this, she’s going to have onerous parking requirements. It wouldn’t be unheard of for her to ask–or demand–for 3.5 parking stalls per 1,000 square feet of rentable area. If you do the math in this example (150,000 / 1,000 x 3.5), you get 525 parking spots. This number usually exceeds any of the parking requirements that your local municipality might have. And historically, it has always been surface parking. So forget about building a parking garage and don’t even waste a second thinking about underground parking. That’s way too expensive.

Finally, the tenant will want her building oriented in such a way that the entrance is directly in front of the largest possible number of parking stalls. Usually this means that the front of the building is facing inward, away from the street, and the rear of the building is facing outward towards the rest of the city. If you could provide all of this and the demographics in your catchment radius were favorable for her business, you’d be in a pretty good position to sign a deal.

The problem with this format is that most cities don’t want it anymore. It goes against everything that most progressive cities are trying to promote in terms of walkable and transit-oriented communities. Large surface parking lots don’t make for great cities and neither do introverted buildings. At the same time, land values are getting to a point where developers need to use their land more intensively. Big surface parking lots just aren’t the highest and best use.

So how then do you make big box retailing work?

That’s where the Stockyards comes in. What they’ve done is put smaller retailers along the perimeter of the site with direct access from the sidewalk; they’ve buried the parking in the middle of the site (and built structured parking); and they’ve moved the anchor and larger tenants (Target, Winners, etc.) to the second floor. I don’t think that all big box stores would go for this, but Target is known to be one of the more progressive in this regard.

So functionally, if you’re taking transit and walking along the street, you have shops engaging you and you’re not looking at the loading area of some big box store. And if you happen to be driving–as many people do to big box stores–you can either drive in and park on the ground floor (and then take an escalator up) or you can drive up the second floor parking area and walk right into the store as you normally would. What they’ve basically done is adapted big box stores to a more urban context. 

Now, I can see why many at the city like this development and I certainly think it’s a step in the right direction in terms of getting both developers and tenants to think more urban. But I wouldn’t say that we’ve nailed the formula here. When I was there the space felt empty and I had trouble orienting myself after I parked. But it’s certainly a major improvement compared to the big box stores across the street.

If you’ve had a chance to visit the Stockyards, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

Some of you might know that I’ve recently started using a mobile app called Strava. It’s a platform that allows you to track your runs and bike rides, as well as those of your friends. It tells you your speed, elevation changes, and it also maps your trips–among many other things. Here’s what my 50 km ‘Ride for Heart’ looks like from last Sunday.

But what’s even more interesting is how cities are starting to use the data this app collects:

For $20,000 a year, transportation planners and others can access Strava Metro, which provides an unprecedented look at where and how people are biking. It can tell them where they speed up and slow down, for example, or where they might stay in the street or ride on a crosswalk. That information can reveal where bike lanes or traffic calming measures would be useful, and if those already installed are effective.

It’s a perfect example of how “tech” is infiltrating so many other sectors. Mobile technology and networks are generating huge amounts of data and it’s happening at an increasing rate. We’re gaining insights into the way people live that simply wasn’t possible before. Some of this information will inevitably be misused, but a lot of it will be used to improve the way we live our lives.

I know that the City of Toronto also has its own proprietary cycling app and is hoping to collect similar sorts of data from it. But intuitively, I don’t think they’ll be able to compete with the scale of a platform like Strava. Though I certainly applaud the initiative.

The information age is an exciting time.

Image: Strava via Wired

I’m a big believer in public transportation. I generally believe that the only way to build a big, efficient, and sustainable city is on the backbone of a good transit system. But at the same time, I’m open to fresh ideas. And I’m concerned with the inability of most cities to actually build transit in a way that meaningfully responds to demand.

So what are the alternatives?

The first thought that comes to mind is the delivery system itself. Some cities, such as Hong Kong, have successfully combined transit delivery with real estate development as a way to improve the economics behind building transit. And I think that makes a lot of sense.

But my other thought is that maybe the solution to urban mobility is something completely new. Maybe Google is on to something with their driverless cars. Is that the future? Many would disagree.

We’ve established that cars don’t work all that well for getting people around in big congested cities. So what difference would it make whether or not the cars have a driver or not? Well, I was thinking about this last night and there are some meaningful differences.

A network of driverless cars would give us perfect information about all to the cars on the road. Similar to to how Google’s Waze navigation app feeds off user input (both active and passive), we’d know the exact number of cars on the road and the precise point in which additional cars would cause a drop in efficiency (i.e. a reduction in vehicle speeds).

At the same time, it could enable a powerful sharing economy. In a recent study done by MIT’s Senseable City Lab, it was found that roughly 80% of New York cab rides could be shared. That is, 80% of the time there’s somebody else who’s also traveling from roughly the same point A to the same point B.

So here’s what I’m thinking.

You use Google’s driverless car technology and the perfect information you get from the networked vehicles to create a fluid and ever-evolving transit network. What I’m imagining is that the driverless vehicles don’t operate based on a model of individual mobility; they instead operate on a principle of batched mobility.

Let’s say for example that there are critical mass of people who want to leave Liberty Village between 8:00am - 8:30am to travel to the Financial District. What they would do is enter this itinerary and then a “station” would get formed somewhere nearby. Users would get notified of the station’s location, which would be determined based on proximity to the highest concentration of “riders.”

The driverless cars would then get notified and would begin assembling the appropriate number of vehicles at the selected station location. As is the case with conventional forms of public transportation, most people would need to walk to the station. But never that far.

In essence, it would function as a cross between private and public transportation. You would get the economies of scale generated by public transit, with some of the individual conveniences of private transportation.

How does that sound?