The fact that we still refer to things as pre- and post-COVID shows just how impactful this period of time was in our lives. What initially seemed like house arrest for only a few weeks ended up having a lasting impact. One of those impacts appears to be happiness. In a recent post by Aziz Sunderji, who is the author of Home Economics (you should subscribe), he shared this chart:
The fact that we still refer to things as pre- and post-COVID shows just how impactful this period of time was in our lives. What initially seemed like house arrest for only a few weeks ended up having a lasting impact. One of those impacts appears to be happiness. In a recent post by Aziz Sunderji, who is the author of Home Economics (you should subscribe), he shared this chart:
The data is taken from the General Social Survey. What it shows is the shift in the "very happy" group of Americans, and the ten demographic groups that experienced the biggest declines in reported happiness. Overall, the share of Americans reporting to be "very happy" has dropped from 29% before COVID (2016-18) to 22% in our post-COVID world (2022-24).
The biggest decline is among those who make the most money and were previously quite happy. Top earners went from 49% reporting they were "very happy" to 30%. On the other end of the spectrum, the unhappiest people moved the least. If you were unhappy before, chances are you have a similar level of unhappiness today. All of this is problematic.
This is an important societal problem to solve, and I'm not going to come close to doing that in today's pithy blog post. But I did want to point out two things (the latter of which is the key takeaway in Aziz's post).
First, I think it's important to note that at the top of this chart are those with "excellent health." The older I get, the more I have come to realize that the greatest luxury in life is our health. If you don't have your health, nothing else matters. This probably seems obvious, but it remains a real challenge in our increasingly sedentary world.
Second, Aziz notes that the groups that held up the best in terms of happiness all shared one trait: social connection. Interacting with other humans and your friends is good for your mental health!
Of course, the problem is that we are designing our cities and our economies in the opposite direction. Call it "sedentary isolation." AI is a powerful multiplier that allows us to do and produce more while we sit at our desks. And autonomous vehicles are in the process of making long, painful commutes more enjoyable. Now you have more time to sit and stare at a screen while a car drives you!
This is not to say that I'm against these new technologies. I'm not. But driving or not, I don't want to sit in an AV for hours each day. There are real individual and collective costs to social isolation and car-dependent land-use patterns. Let's not forget the simple merits of living in a walkable neighbourhood and socializing with friends, in person.
Cover photo by Ryan Searle on Unsplash
Chart from Aziz Sunderji, "The Great Happiness Compression," Home Economics.
At the end of this month, the last tenants will vacate the Tour Montparnasse in Paris to make way for its renovation. Nouvelle AOM, a collective of architects formed to respond to the project's international design competition, first won the commission back in 2017. And initially, the plan was to complete the renovation in time for the Paris Olympics in 2024.
But that time came and went, as it does, and now construction is starting this year. Nouvelle AOM, which includes Franklin Azzi Architecture, ChartierDalix Architectes, and Hardel Le Bihan Architectes, is in charge of the tower. And Renzo Piano Building Workshop is in charge of redesigning the commercial podium at the tower's base.
We've spoken about the Tour Montparnasse many times over the years on the blog (here, here, and here). Parisians customarily hate it, and after visiting it in 2023, I can confirm that it's desperately in need of a renovation, and that the ground plane experience is abysmal at best. It is of that era where grandiose "slab-based planning" was going to elevate us beyond the pathologies of fine-grained urbanism.
Here's a Google image from atop the site's enormous podium:
What's interesting about the design from Renzo Piano is that it will reuse a lot of the structure that's already in place. The plan is to carefully open up the site, stitch it back together with the surrounding urban context, and then build up from there. Importantly, at the centre of the project will be a large, planted piazza that is intended to become a new civic space for the community.
The project renovations are expected to last until "at least 2030." So, we have several years until we'll know if it's an urban and financial success. But my prediction is that this project will positively transform how Parisians think about the Tour Montparnasse, and maybe how they think about tall buildings.
The tower itself will, of course, need to be beautiful. It's a highly visible object. There's only a trifecta of buildings and structures inside Paris proper that exceed 150 meters in height: the Eiffel Tower, Tour Montparnasse, and the Tour Triangle (Herzog & de Meuron), which is currently under construction and expected to finish this year. In this case, architecture is not irrelevant.
But it is the ground plane experience that will ultimately revitalize the area and demonstrate that tall buildings can be good urban neighbours, even in a sea of Haussmannian mid-rise buildings. I've said before that the reconfiguration of the podium is arguably the project's most crucial design move.
Get it right and you'll see what happens.
Cover photo by Luxigon via Nouvelle AOM
Aerial and street view photos from Google
Model photos from Renzo Piano Building Workshop
"The problem with buses," writes transportation planner Nithin Vejendla in Work in Progress, "is that they are slow." The same thing could also be said about other surface transit routes like Toronto's streetcars, including some of our new lines. Now, there are lots of ways to speed up surface routes. Dedicated lanes and signal priority are two obvious ones. But an even simpler one is to just get rid of some stops!
North American cities tend to be plagued by too many transit stops. I think we do it because more stops sounds better than fewer stops. It creates the illusion of servicing more people. But too many stops can make routes painfully slow, by increasing dwell times. According to Nithin, buses in the US spend about 20% of their time just stopping and then starting again. Obviously the more stops you have, the worse this downtime gets.
Here's the average spacing between bus stops for various US cities taken from the above article:
If I convert some of these numbers into the system of measurement used by the rest of the planet, you'll find the following average stop spacings:
172 m in Philadelphia
205 m in Chicago
210 m in San Francisco
240 m in New York
260 m in Miami
350 m in Seattle
425 m in Las Vegas
European cities tend to have wider stop spacing, somewhere closer to 300–450 m. And as a further point of comparison, AI tells me that the current average streetcar stop spacing in Toronto is about 250 m, but that the official target for both streetcars and local buses is between 300–400 m. This is better. 400 m is a 5-minute walk. And if you're on the transit corridor, it means you'll never have to walk more than 200 m, or 2-3 minutes, to the next stop.
Consolidating stops has been shown not to have a meaningful impact on coverage area, but the benefits are significant. To give just one example, Los Angeles saw its operating speeds increase by 29% and its ridership grow by 33% on the Wilshire/Whittier Metro Rapid corridor by doing exactly this. So, if you're looking for a way to speed up your surface routes, one starting point would be to just do less.
The data is taken from the General Social Survey. What it shows is the shift in the "very happy" group of Americans, and the ten demographic groups that experienced the biggest declines in reported happiness. Overall, the share of Americans reporting to be "very happy" has dropped from 29% before COVID (2016-18) to 22% in our post-COVID world (2022-24).
The biggest decline is among those who make the most money and were previously quite happy. Top earners went from 49% reporting they were "very happy" to 30%. On the other end of the spectrum, the unhappiest people moved the least. If you were unhappy before, chances are you have a similar level of unhappiness today. All of this is problematic.
This is an important societal problem to solve, and I'm not going to come close to doing that in today's pithy blog post. But I did want to point out two things (the latter of which is the key takeaway in Aziz's post).
First, I think it's important to note that at the top of this chart are those with "excellent health." The older I get, the more I have come to realize that the greatest luxury in life is our health. If you don't have your health, nothing else matters. This probably seems obvious, but it remains a real challenge in our increasingly sedentary world.
Second, Aziz notes that the groups that held up the best in terms of happiness all shared one trait: social connection. Interacting with other humans and your friends is good for your mental health!
Of course, the problem is that we are designing our cities and our economies in the opposite direction. Call it "sedentary isolation." AI is a powerful multiplier that allows us to do and produce more while we sit at our desks. And autonomous vehicles are in the process of making long, painful commutes more enjoyable. Now you have more time to sit and stare at a screen while a car drives you!
This is not to say that I'm against these new technologies. I'm not. But driving or not, I don't want to sit in an AV for hours each day. There are real individual and collective costs to social isolation and car-dependent land-use patterns. Let's not forget the simple merits of living in a walkable neighbourhood and socializing with friends, in person.
Cover photo by Ryan Searle on Unsplash
Chart from Aziz Sunderji, "The Great Happiness Compression," Home Economics.
At the end of this month, the last tenants will vacate the Tour Montparnasse in Paris to make way for its renovation. Nouvelle AOM, a collective of architects formed to respond to the project's international design competition, first won the commission back in 2017. And initially, the plan was to complete the renovation in time for the Paris Olympics in 2024.
But that time came and went, as it does, and now construction is starting this year. Nouvelle AOM, which includes Franklin Azzi Architecture, ChartierDalix Architectes, and Hardel Le Bihan Architectes, is in charge of the tower. And Renzo Piano Building Workshop is in charge of redesigning the commercial podium at the tower's base.
We've spoken about the Tour Montparnasse many times over the years on the blog (here, here, and here). Parisians customarily hate it, and after visiting it in 2023, I can confirm that it's desperately in need of a renovation, and that the ground plane experience is abysmal at best. It is of that era where grandiose "slab-based planning" was going to elevate us beyond the pathologies of fine-grained urbanism.
Here's a Google image from atop the site's enormous podium:
What's interesting about the design from Renzo Piano is that it will reuse a lot of the structure that's already in place. The plan is to carefully open up the site, stitch it back together with the surrounding urban context, and then build up from there. Importantly, at the centre of the project will be a large, planted piazza that is intended to become a new civic space for the community.
The project renovations are expected to last until "at least 2030." So, we have several years until we'll know if it's an urban and financial success. But my prediction is that this project will positively transform how Parisians think about the Tour Montparnasse, and maybe how they think about tall buildings.
The tower itself will, of course, need to be beautiful. It's a highly visible object. There's only a trifecta of buildings and structures inside Paris proper that exceed 150 meters in height: the Eiffel Tower, Tour Montparnasse, and the Tour Triangle (Herzog & de Meuron), which is currently under construction and expected to finish this year. In this case, architecture is not irrelevant.
But it is the ground plane experience that will ultimately revitalize the area and demonstrate that tall buildings can be good urban neighbours, even in a sea of Haussmannian mid-rise buildings. I've said before that the reconfiguration of the podium is arguably the project's most crucial design move.
Get it right and you'll see what happens.
Cover photo by Luxigon via Nouvelle AOM
Aerial and street view photos from Google
Model photos from Renzo Piano Building Workshop
"The problem with buses," writes transportation planner Nithin Vejendla in Work in Progress, "is that they are slow." The same thing could also be said about other surface transit routes like Toronto's streetcars, including some of our new lines. Now, there are lots of ways to speed up surface routes. Dedicated lanes and signal priority are two obvious ones. But an even simpler one is to just get rid of some stops!
North American cities tend to be plagued by too many transit stops. I think we do it because more stops sounds better than fewer stops. It creates the illusion of servicing more people. But too many stops can make routes painfully slow, by increasing dwell times. According to Nithin, buses in the US spend about 20% of their time just stopping and then starting again. Obviously the more stops you have, the worse this downtime gets.
Here's the average spacing between bus stops for various US cities taken from the above article:
If I convert some of these numbers into the system of measurement used by the rest of the planet, you'll find the following average stop spacings:
172 m in Philadelphia
205 m in Chicago
210 m in San Francisco
240 m in New York
260 m in Miami
350 m in Seattle
425 m in Las Vegas
European cities tend to have wider stop spacing, somewhere closer to 300–450 m. And as a further point of comparison, AI tells me that the current average streetcar stop spacing in Toronto is about 250 m, but that the official target for both streetcars and local buses is between 300–400 m. This is better. 400 m is a 5-minute walk. And if you're on the transit corridor, it means you'll never have to walk more than 200 m, or 2-3 minutes, to the next stop.
Consolidating stops has been shown not to have a meaningful impact on coverage area, but the benefits are significant. To give just one example, Los Angeles saw its operating speeds increase by 29% and its ridership grow by 33% on the Wilshire/Whittier Metro Rapid corridor by doing exactly this. So, if you're looking for a way to speed up your surface routes, one starting point would be to just do less.
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