This past Monday, approximately 44,770 attendees descended on the SkyDome, I mean Rogers Centre, in downtown Toronto to watch Game 7 of the ALCS between the Blue Jays and the Mariners. I was lucky enough to be one of them. And with one swing of George Springer's bat, we did it.
The Blue Jays became only the fourth team in the history of Major League Baseball to come back and win a best-of-seven series after losing the first two games at home. (Baseball is full of fun little stats.)
This is what makes October baseball so exciting. It's slow and suspenseful, but then all of a sudden — boom — you completely lose your voice because you're screaming so hard. I still don't have mine back at the time of writing this post.
What a game. What a moment for Toronto.
Now let's switch gears and think about all of this from an urban mobility standpoint. Forty-five thousand is a lot of people. How do you efficiently move this many people to and from a stadium? One option is you could build a ton of parking.
Here, for example, is Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles:
But this is a suboptimal approach, which is why a year ago the LA Times had to write: "Going to Dodger Stadium for the World Series? Five ways to avoid parking and traffic headaches." In it, they suggest the following: Take the bus, take the Dodger Stadium Express Bus, take an Uber, ride your bike, or walk 30 minutes to the nearest metro station (Chinatown).
On Monday, we took the Union Pearson Express from Bloor to Union. The train was absolutely packed, but we got on the first one and we were door-to-door in a little over 30 minutes. After the game, it was pandemonium. People were swinging from light poles, lighting off smoke bombs, and the lineup to get back on the UP Express looked like this:
But here's where I need to give a lot of credit to whoever was responsible for keeping things together on Monday night. They had stanchions lined up to accommodate the crowds flooding out of the Rogers Centre, they had staff walking up and down the lines so people could tap on ahead of time, and they had more trains operating. The result was that we waited maybe 10 or so minutes before getting on one.
Nobody got out of downtown this quickly unless you were on a train or you biked. My friends who had to take Ubers home were stuck for hours. In fact, one driver said, "We're not moving for a while. You're better off going into that bar right now and I'll come back for you later."
Sometimes when I write about trains and public transport, people comment that I'm living in the past and that it's an outdated technology. Look, I'm all for new tech. Bring on the autonomous vehicles and let's get the global financial system onto the Ethereum blockchain already. But when it comes to urban mobility, trains work. They're highly efficient at moving the greatest number of people.
And you really see that in action when there are sudden demand shocks, like what happened on Monday night when the Blue Jays punched their card to the World Series for the first time since 1993. Go Jays!
Last week, Uber announced something called "digital tasks." These are simple, quick tasks that drivers can do when they are not driving — things like recording a voice note in a person's mother tongue, submitting a document in a different language, or uploading images of everyday items (such as a menu or storefront).
This is Uber expanding its data-labeling and AI-training business, and they are positioning it as a "new way to earn" for drivers. But another way to think about this move is that it's a way for Uber to start to repurpose its workforce in preparation for a world where human drivers are far less essential to the business. That feels like the case to me.
On a related note, Waymo also announced last week that it will start operating its autonomous ride-hailing service in London, beginning in 2026. This is another first for the company: the first commercial operation outside of the US. Though they are also driving vehicles around Tokyo in preparation for eventually launching there.
Things continue to happen. As a casual observer of this market, Waymo feels like it is out front, which often makes me wonder about Tesla's sky-high valuation. Does the market really believe their Robotaxis have more potential?
In theory, this could be true. Their decentralized model — where individuals own the vehicles and plug them into their ride-hailing network — could allow them to scale quickly. But this is less proven — they're still in the pilot/validation phase. They also seem to chronically overpromise.
Regardless, I would really like to see Waymo launch in Toronto in the near future. As I understand it, regulatory barriers are the problem. I hope whoever is in charge is working on fixing this.
If I can extract one overarching takeaway, it's maybe this one: We need to be big and bold (have a compelling vision!), while at the same time getting out of the way of small-scale urban innovation. Joe Berridge, for example, felt strongly that Toronto is not taking full advantage of its waterfront. We've been too focused on bike lanes and parks, rather than on creating noteworthy global draws and aggressively marketing ourselves externally. Toronto needs its Sydney moment — something like a globally significant Opera House that attracts people from all around the world. I don't disagree. Cities need to do things that are remarkable.
At the same time, we spent a lot of time talking about the micro scale. Some of the most loved urban environments from around the world have the simplest built form: fine-grained and humble buildings fronting onto human-scaled streets — streets like Ossington in Toronto and seemingly every street in Paris. But that was then. This kind of built environment is mostly incongruent with how we plan and develop new communities today. We develop big, we impose top-down planning, and we no longer have the same inherent flexibility that our older building stock had.
Take, for instance, Toronto's East Bayfront, which is where this conference is taking place. It's a recently developed community with many or most of the hallmarks that constitute good urban design today: handsome architecture (including mass-timber buildings), pedestrian-friendly streets, well-designed public realms, and more. And yet, the area is largely void of any urban vibrancy. Other than the boardwalk along the water and a handful of restaurant patios, there's very little public life. Many of the buildings are also connected by bridges, which is not in and of itself a problem, but it further removes life from the street.
Here are a few photos of the area that I took while leaving the panel:
The buildings are ugly, or at least nondescript. None of the tenants are following a consistent signage standard. There are no sidewalks. And there's an overhead rail line bisecting the street. And yet, it's vibrant. It's a successful urban street. Most older cities have areas akin to this, but it's a real challenge to create it from scratch in new developments (see above). I'm very interested in this challenge and, as we have talked about many times before on the blog, I think part of the answer lies in allowing flexibility and ground-up change. It's impossible to predict what an area could become and, for that reason, top-down planning will never get it exactly right.
Thinking about it this way, urban design isn't dead; it just maybe needs a refocusing. And what I propose is approaching it along the lines of Jeff Bezos' old management adage: You want to be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details.
