Here are some interesting charts from a16z showing that, despite its dominance today, tech still represents a smaller percentage of the US stock market than railroads did at the turn of the 20th century. One parallel you could draw from this is that "tech" as we know it today, may not be so dominant a hundred years from now.

But railroads continue to play a critical function in the modern economy. They are still the most cost-effective way to move heavy goods over long distances. A single freight train can carry the load of several hundred semi-trucks.

The more interesting parallel might be the one that a16z raises in its post: railroads both led to further economic growth and rewired the way businesses and organizations were structured.

Railroads were a new kind of business requiring massive scale and coordination, which led to new ways of thinking about "management." Perhaps not surprisingly, it was around this time (1881) that the world's first collegiate business school was formed at the University of Pennsylvania.

The parallel to AI today, as argued by Jack Dorsey and maybe others, is that it's going to similarly rewire how businesses are organized and what middle management does:

"Instead of absorb and route information, maintain alignment, pre-compute decisions, etc.—the kind of coordination that management typically is responsible for—in an AI business, humans move to the edges, to focus their judgment on customer contact and human interactions."

At least, this is the hypothesis.

But if it does prove to be true, let's consider what we often discuss on this blog, which is: what will it mean for our cities and built environment? Well, what I find interesting about the above quote is that it suggests AI will push humans further toward the things that we are uniquely suited to do: interacting with other humans and building meaningful relationships.

And if that is, in fact, what happens, then there's no more efficient place to be than in dense urban cities. Looking someone in the eyes, shaking their hand, and slurping ramen noodles together at a busy bar counter is not something that AI will be able to do for us.

Cover photo by Mike Beaumont on Unsplash

Charts from a16z

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.

Cover photo by Jason Ng on Unsplash