Category: Urbanism

• Delivery robots have moved to the street

  At some point, I’m sure that most of you have seen one of those cute little sidewalk robots roaming around your city, probably on their way to deliver someone’s smash burger and fries.

  Still, they remain a rare feature in most cities. Here in Toronto, city council unfortunately voted to ban them back in 2021.

  But things are a little different over in China, where autonomous delivery vehicles are starting to operate at real scale across both the last-mile and mid-mile segments.

  Meituan reported that it had completed over 5.5 million outdoor delivery orders by the end of 2025, while Neolix recently surpassed 30,000 active vehicles with plans for significant growth. The company just announced a new $400 million raise.

  What’s unique about the Chinese landscape is that, in addition to cute little sidewalk robots, we’re also talking about high-capacity cargo vehicles.

  And to accommodate these vehicles, cities like Shenzhen and Beijing have created regulatory sandboxes where they are allowed to mix with public traffic.

  Interestingly enough, these delivery vehicles also seem to be creating a nighttime economy, where they roam around cities unfettered by traffic and human sleep requirements.

  Now, I don’t have firsthand experience with any of these Chinese delivery vehicles, but I do think the right approach is to create sandboxes and figure things out rather than outright ban them.

  2026.10.20

• Why new homes will not kill the vibe in Bloor West Village

  

  I learned about this development proposal over the weekend through a Toronto Star article that I couldn’t read because it was behind a paywall. Oh well, here’s the Twitter post and the headline: “Once built, the 60-unit tower will be the only one on the strip. Locals say it will kill the area’s vibe.”

  The original proposal was a 16-storey mixed-use building at 2273-2279 Bloor Street West in Bloor West Village, but through negotiations with the City, it was reduced to 14 residential floors plus a mechanical penthouse wrapped with indoor and outdoor amenity spaces. The height is just under 50 metres, and the resulting FSI for the site is 9.2. What you see above is the revised massing (via UrbanToronto).

  So, will it kill the area’s vibe?

  One way to look at the proposal is that it’ll be the “only one.” But the other way to look at it is that we’ve historically underbuilt along one of our major subway lines and that it’s a positive indicator that we’re now seeing proposals like this being brought forward. This is good. It’s a fine-grained urban proposal with 50% two- and three-bedroom suites and zero parking.

  The question we should be asking ourselves is: how do we encourage more of this? The future of Toronto lies not in the two- to three-storey buildings you see depicted above, but in a mix of denser buildings that will unlock additional homes in the city and allow Toronto to wean itself off its dependency on the car. People are what create the vibe.

  2026.10.19

• The geometric impossibility of the car-centric metropolis

  

  The Katy Freeway in Houston has 26 lanes at its widest, and after a $2.8 billion expansion between 2003 and 2008, commute times reportedly increased by 30-50%.

  Highway 401 in Toronto has 22 lanes at its widest and is ranked as the busiest highway in North America with an average of ~500,000 vehicles per day. It does not flow freely at most times throughout the day.

  Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires is one of the widest surface avenues in the world, but traffic congestion didn’t improve until lanes were converted into a bus rapid transit line.

  Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai ranges from 12-16 lanes and acts as the main high-capacity spine for what is a linear, car-dependent global city. It too is known for its traffic congestion.

  The common thread among all of these examples is that, irrespective of the width and number of lanes, none of these cities have solved the problem of traffic congestion. I challenge you to think of a counterexample. And that is because it is impossible to build a large, economically vibrant global city centered primarily around private automobiles without suffering severe traffic congestion.

  The car is the most spatially inefficient mode of transport for cities, and this doesn’t change with tunnels or with autonomous vehicles (at least sufficiently to make this statement wrong). The fundamental issue is one of space: too many cars for a finite amount of road capacity.

  People who live in car-dependent communities are reluctant to accept this reality, but the only proven solution to congestion is to reorient away from the car toward more efficient modes of transport, namely mass transit. And one of the most effective ways to make this switch is to price roads and congestion.

  This is not to say that individual cars don’t have a place in global cities; they of course do. It is to say that it’s impossible to rely on them as the primary means of mobility without there being negative consequences.

  It’s also worth pointing out that one of the core features of cities is agglomeration economies, which is to say that the spatial concentration of activities leads to cost savings, productivity gains, and greater innovation. Cars demand the exact opposite: spatial dispersion.

  Which would you rather optimize for?

  2026.10.18

• Toronto’s bike lane pendulum

  This week, the Province of Ontario started work on its plan to remove about 19 kilometres of bike lanes in Toronto on major streets such as Bloor Street, Yonge Street, and others. The plan is to restore motor vehicle lanes, push bike lanes to secondary streets, and “keep drivers moving.” However, work did not start without protest. Hundreds of cyclists have been protesting this week, and a handful of arrests have been made.

  The thing about bike lanes in Toronto, and other places, is that they tend to follow a political pendulum. We have a history of building bike lanes, and then paying lots of money to rip them out. It’s of course wasteful, but bike lanes are divisive and they can make for good politics. Recent polls suggest that the majority of Torontonians support removing them on major streets. And I can understand why. We’re all frustrated with traffic congestion!

  But here’s what I would say in response to what’s happening this week:

  • The city should be making the decision, not the province.
  • A street like Bloor serves as an important east-west artery in our cycling network. Toronto’s grid does not have a secondary street equivalent.
  • Toronto needs more major streets like Bloor. It needs a bold 21st-century masterplan.
  • It is true that some sections, such as in Etobicoke, do have lower cycling ridership, but every lane needs to be evaluated in terms of the broader network.
  • Built form dictates behaviour.
  • Successful cities must be multi-modal.

  Traffic congestion is no doubt a major problem in Toronto, but we’re nipping around the edges and unwilling to make big, bold changes. The keys to solving traffic congestion are appropriate land-use policies, road pricing, and investment in non-car forms of urban mobility. Pretending otherwise is just fooling ourselves. To solve congestion, Toronto needs to reduce automobile dependency.

  2026.10.15

• Is cycling an inferior economic good?

  Across most global cities, higher household income tends to correlate directly with higher rates of car ownership, solo car commuting, and vehicle miles travelled. So, one could argue, as many do, that cycling is what economists call an inferior good, meaning that as incomes increase, demand for cycling decreases.

  But this isn’t perfectly true. Data from the US — an obviously car-dominated place — has shown that bicycle demand is actually U-shaped. A 2013 community survey showed that the poorest quartile of Americans accounted for 39% of bicycle commuting, whereas the wealthiest quartile accounted for 20%. It was the people in the middle who biked the least.

  In the case of the poorest quartile, it is out of necessity; for the wealthiest quartile, it is a choice, often for health, environmental, and overall efficiency reasons. Cycling saves time and money.

  It could also be the case that the wealthy are able to live closer to work in more walkable communities, and so biking becomes a more tenable option. Irrespective of the reason, it casts doubt on the argument that cycling is truly an inferior good.

  I actually think that the more fundamental cause is our built environment. If you design a place for cars, then of course, as people make more money, they’re going to choose the more convenient option and drive more. It’s what you’ve been optimizing for.

  On the other hand, if you design for transit or cycling, then you start to break this relationship with income.

  Consider that in some of the wealthiest arrondissements in Paris, private vehicle commuting is less than 10%; that in Manhattan, the majority of households do not own a car despite having incomes that far exceed the US national average; and that in Copenhagen, high-income earners in the city centre cycle at the exact same rate as low-income earners.

  Wealthy people will always optimize for convenience. In a car-centric city, that means driving. But this doesn’t mean that cycling is an inferior good; it just means we’re building inferior cities.

  2026.10.13

• The context behind the viral Edmonton multiplex site

  I’ve had a few people respond to my recent post about the multiplex battle underway in Edmonton, and so I now have a bit more information. The address of the house in the photo is 10014 147 Street NW. Here’s a post-construction photo from the street:

  

  Here’s a street view image showing the two flanking multiplexes under construction:

  

  Here’s how close the house is to the LRT station currently under construction at Stony Plain Road & 149 Street (this is the Valley Line West extension):

  

  Here’s the route map:

  

  And finally, here’s the station’s location in relation to downtown:

  

  Customarily, this is exactly what you want to do on top of and around new transit investments. You want to build density. Transit investment and land-use policy, as I like to harp on here, are integral to one another. And if you do everything correctly, you won’t have to worry about parking minimums.

  Happy Thanksgiving weekend, everyone.

  2026.10.11

• How cities change their minds

  Toronto, like all great cities, is in constant change and transition. I did a search through my blog archive this morning (okay, AI did) and I found it telling to see the things I was writing about and advocating for in the early days, some 10 years ago.

  We used to talk about eradicating parking minimums, and it was a novelty whenever a new project was built with zero spaces. But now we don’t talk about that. Parking requirements? What are those? We let the market determine how much might be needed, if any at all.

  We also used to talk a lot about laneway housing — a lot. For decades, daring architects and urbanists were navigating labyrinthian land-use approvals to build the odd one for themselves. Oftentimes they were only permitted if a pre-existing coach house was already on the site. But as a rule, laneway houses were bad and not permitted.

  Critics were concerned that they would erode the fabric of our low-rise communities and overrun them with renters. I remember people telling me this to my face at committee meetings, and reading comments from folks who believed that laneways were unsavoury places, and so surely only questionable people would want to live in one.

  Fast forward to today, and laneway and garden suites are standard practice across Toronto. They are no longer novel. They’re just part of the housing supply that Toronto now builds. In fact, in many new housing projects, they are the most desirable suite on the property.

  Shifting scales, I also remember the challenges that the team initially faced in getting One Delisle approved at the intersection of Yonge & St. Clair. At 155m, it was the tallest development approval at the time, and it’s currently the tallest constructed building in the submarket.

  One of the criticisms was that it was not in keeping with the scale of the office buildings constructed at and around the intersection between the 1960s and the early 1980s. But is that where the line should be drawn? Let’s not forget that before its post-war development boom, Yonge & St. Clair was a predominantly low-rise area. Surely this jump in scale provoked similar concerns.

  The planning deal that was struck over the last development cycle was that low-rise neighbourhoods would go largely untouched and that density would be concentrated around transit stations and in specific nodes. These nodes were the housing supply outlets. The inverse would have been to redevelop our low-rise neighbourhoods.

  Today, the only comments I hear about One Delisle’s height are that it’s not tall enough given its beautiful architecture. Opinions clearly evolve, and sometimes the things we’re unsure about aren’t so bad after all. In fact, sometimes they can become a defining characteristic of a place.

  2026.10.10

• The viral housing photo that triggered provincial overreach in Alberta

  

  Here’s a polarizing photo of the backyard of a house in Edmonton flanked by two multiplexes under construction. For additional drama, it was also taken with an ultra-wide lens, which is evident from the stretched-out walkway in the foreground. But even still, it is indeed a photo of a single-family house between two larger multi-unit buildings.

  When I first saw the photo, via this tweet, I actually read it all wrong. What I thought was the concern — underutilized residential land — was not the concern. The concern was too much housing. More specifically, too much infill rental housing.

  So much so that one of the next tweets I saw was the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, using this exact photo to say that the province would be coming over top of Edmonton to overturn its multiplex permissions and return the city to the “density and height rules that were in place before 2024” along with “common-sense minimum parking requirements.”

  This, in my opinion, is provincial overreach (which sadly happens here in Toronto too) and a shortsighted approach to city-building. Now, I don’t know the address of this house (I tried to find it), nor would I be familiar with the area, but I do know that cities all across North America are taking an important and critical look at their low-rise neighbourhoods.

  We know that many of them are unaffordable, car-oriented, and actively losing population. To turn back the clock and return to parking minimums is to restrict housing supply and signal that Edmonton is not yet prepared to be an urban leader in the 21st century. Alberta likes to tout its “free-market” brand, but of course this move is anything but.

  2026.10.09

• The irony of neighbourhood stability

  From a planning perspective, Toronto’s low-rise Neighbourhoods are considered to be “physically stable” areas, meaning that any change must be gradual and sensitive to the existing scale. In practice, however, we know that these areas can be anything but stable once you look deeper.

  A recent Globe and Mail analysis of census data for both Toronto and Vancouver once again reveals what we already know: Canadians are living longer, having fewer children, and consuming more square footage per person. The result is a declining population base in many — and in some cases most — parts of our already built-up areas.

  The Globe compared figures from the 1971 and 2021 censuses for both Toronto and Vancouver, examining the population of “dissemination areas” – each one an area of a few blocks, typically home to about 500 people.

  In the Vancouver region, 21 per cent of those areas declined in population over those 50 years, losing 76,424 people in total. Many other areas failed to keep up with the quick growth of the region.

  In the Toronto region, the pattern is much more stark: Almost three-quarters of those established areas had declined by 2021, shedding a total of 540,789 people.

  Here lies the irony: policies designed for stability led to losses equal to the size of a small city. And it’s one of the reasons why there’s such a groundswell of interest in intensifying existing neighbourhoods. It’s a way to correct for a demographic shift that has hollowed out neighbourhoods, closed schools, and left existing infrastructure underutilized.

  Maybe we’ll even get them back to what they once were.

  2026.10.08

• The great Parisian bike boom

  Okay, so this dataset isn’t the most recent, but it’s interesting nonetheless. At the end of 2023, Le Monde reported that Paris had seen a doubling of cycling traffic compared to the year before. For a typical week and based on 128 sensor locations across the city, this is what that increase looked like between October 2022 and 2023:

  

  But the data gets even more interesting when you compare it to vehicular traffic. Here’s vehicular traffic vs. cycling traffic for three principal boulevards in the city, namely l’avenue de Flandre, le boulevard Voltaire and le boulevard Magenta:

  

  These three boulevards were chosen because they all have bi-directional lanes for both cars and bikes, meaning they roughly privilege both forms of mobility equally. And what you are seeing in the above chart is that bike traffic exceeds car traffic by fairly large margins during peak weekday periods.

  This is a mobility accomplishment that benefits both cyclists and drivers.

  ---

  Charts via Le Monde

  2026.10.02