We have spoken many times before about the fact that Japan is built around rail-oriented urbanism. But if you have the time right now, I'm going to suggest that you read this longish article by Matthew Bornholt & Benedict Springbett called "Why Japan has such good railways," because nowhere else in the developed world uses rail for passenger kilometres more than Japan, and they explain why.
One common hypothesis, which is mentioned in the article, is that it's largely cultural. The Japanese are rule-abiding collectivists who are more willing to take public transit compared to us selfish and individualistic North Americans. But this doesn't seem right. In fact, one could argue that the Japanese solution is actually more free-market oriented.
The Japanese rail model seems to work so well because (1) most of the network is private, (2) liberal land-use policies have allowed Japan's urban centres to develop enough density to properly support the use of rail, and (3) the rail operators make money in a bunch of other ways beyond rail. They're typically also in the business of real estate.
Here's a quote from the article by the president of the Tokyu Group that I absolutely love:
I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company. In Europe for instance, railway companies simply connect cities through their terminals. That is a pretty normal way of operating in this industry, whereas what we do is completely different: we create cities and then, as a utility facility, we add the stations and the railways to connect them one with another.
This is a fundamentally different model that allows rail companies to capture some of the value that they inherently create. To use the example of Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown line, it's the difference between saying, "I'm going to build a rail line and then, presumably, other stuff will happen," and, "I'm going to develop this midtown corridor and then I'm going to run rail underneath it to maximize value creation."
If Japan can do it, so can we. Ironically, a big part of it means easing land-use controls and allowing transit-oriented development to simply be what it wants to be — dense and proximate to rail.
Cover photo by Mylène Larnaud on Unsplash
Charts from Work in Progress
The City of Toronto just released its 2025 Cycling Year in Review report. You can download it here. At the highest level, Toronto is now considered to be the 7th most bike-friendly city in North America, according to the Copenhagenize Index. Our snowier sibling, Montréal, is number one on the continent. And globally, we're ranked 55th.
Neither of these positions is particularly impressive given our scale and prominence as a global city, but progress is being made. In 2025, City Council approved 33 km of new bikeways, installed 14.11 km, and upgraded 9.02 km. Our infrastructure continues to get better.
What I find particularly noteworthy and telling, though, is the adoption of the city's bike share network. 2025 was another record year, with 7.8 million rides, representing a 13% increase from 2024. We're still not at the level of Montréal, which recorded 13 million rides in 2024, but adoption is growing quickly.
We have gone from around 665,000 rides in 2015 to nearly 8 million in the span of a decade. That's a compounded annual growth rate of approximately 28%! Once again, we are reminded that if you build it, and make it easy and safe, more people will ride bicycles.
Miami is a popular place these days for a whole host of reasons, namely that it's sunny and warm, it doesn't have state income taxes, and the broader market doesn't seem to think that climate risk will pose an insurmountable challenge in the foreseeable future.
But beneath the surface, there are shifts taking place. HOA fees and insurance premiums are rising (some people have a different view of climate risk), and the city is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the middle class.
Between July 2024 and July 2025, Miami-Dade County lost an estimated 10,115 residents. This was the third-largest absolute population drop of all US counties last year, though it should be noted that this can be largely explained by changing immigration policies and a meaningful decrease in international migration.
There are still plenty of people moving to the city; they just tend to skew richer. According to data from 2023, the average inbound salary was $178,000, and the average outbound salary was $89,000. The net result (via the Miami Herald):
Higher earners are moving here, lower-wage workers are leaving and the population as a whole has started to shrink. That's not good for a community's long-term economic health.
Wealth is a good thing. But is it now too much of a good thing? At the very least, it demonstrates the fragility of finding the elusive equilibrium between being a successful city and remaining affordable and accessible to the middle class.
To paraphrase Jane Jacobs, "The more successful a city is, the more it is under pressure to be something else."
Cover photo by Sarah Thorenz on Unsplash