Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Urbanism

  • Social friction

    Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect based in New York City. He is the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) and the author of two books.

    His first book, published in 2013, was A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America. And as the title suggests, it was about the virtues of dense urban agglomerations. You know, the kind of cities that I like and have good bike lanes.

    His second book, which just came out, is called The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy. In this one, he talks about the role of architecture and urbanism in fighting both climate change and social division.

    Below is an excerpt from a recent interview in Bloomberg where he discusses the book’s theme of “social friction.” This snippet is also a timely follow-up to yesterday’s post about autonomous vehicles:

    Cars are problematic when it comes to connective design. It doesn’t matter if they’re electric because the problem with a car is it’s a divider. It’s a metal bubble and it keeps you from interacting with your neighbors. So the virtues of mass transit, public parks and well-designed buildings in cities are not just that they are good for the climate. They are also good for this sense of social coherence. If we’re going to live up to our promise as a country — a multicultural democracy — we need to have spaces that both reflect and perpetuate that.

    I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds like it’s in the wheelhouse of this blog. If you’d like to, here’s a link.

  • Tesla vs. Waymo

    One of the reasons why I’m interested in the autonomous vehicle space is that I know our built environment is sticky. And because we’ve designed so much of it around the car, it’s hard to imagine this dependance going away anytime soon.

    In fact, there’s a very real possibility that autonomy leads to further decentralization. That is typically what happens when we make it easier and cheaper for people to travel longer distances. They sprawl. So we ought to start preparing ourselves for the positive and negative externalities.

    I’m not a deep expert on autonomous vehicles, but as an interested observer, Waymo appears ahead of Tesla in delivering this future. Waymo has been offering fully driverless rides since 2020 and Tesla is still at L2 autonomy, which means a driver needs to be present in the vehicle.

    I hear from lots of people that their Full Self Driving (FSD) software is pretty good, but according to some studies, it can require human intervention as often as every 13 miles. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Tesla won’t be first to “solve autonomy,” but their Cybercab isn’t here yet.

    If you’re interested in this topic, here is an article by Timothy Lee summarizing a discussion that he recently had with the co-CEO of Waymo, Dmitri Dolgov. Some of it is a little technical, but it does offer a comparison between Tesla and Waymo.

    That is, how their approaches differ and what the future might look like.

  • The longest cable car line in the world is in Mexico City

    Mexico City is all kinds of big. It is the largest metropolitan area in North America, the largest Spanish-speaking city, and broadly one of the largest megacities in the world. Because of this, it can be, you know, hard to move around.

    I remember visiting the city for the first time when I was in elementary school, and it standing out to me that everyone had one day of the week when they were simply not allowed to drive their car. It was/is a form of load balancing. Imagine that. (I don’t know if this is still the case, or if it’s even more stringent today.)

    I also remember visiting the city later on, when I was in grad school, and it standing out to me that their metro had women-only cars. This was and continues to be an attempt to try and minimize the amount of sexual harassment that takes place on transit. Again, it can be hard to move around Mexico City.

    The city’s latest solution is one that has found success in other Latin American cities, such as Medellin, and that is: cable cars. Relative to subway or light rail, they’re inexpensive. They’re also good at navigating steep terrain, and their stations can be inserted into dense urban areas. This includes working-class neighborhoods who might otherwise have very limited mobility options.

    For reasons like these, Mexico City has spent the last three years building three new cable car lines, the most recent of which opened just last month. The city now has the longest cable car line in the world. But more importantly, it has a new transit add-on that is moving up to 80,000 people per day.

    This isn’t as much as rail. But that’s okay. The point of these lines is to bring more people closer in so that they can then connect to more services and other mobility options. And to do it quickly. Three new lines in three years is impressive. And from the sounds of it, it has transformed many people’s lives for the better.

    Here are maps of the 3 lines, zoomed out a bit so that you can see how they fit into the city’s broader urban context:

  • I’d actually like a Tesla bicycle

    I watched Tesla’s We, Robot event last night. As many of you know, Elon and his team showcased a Cybercab, Robovan, and a humanoid robot that dances funny, all of which will be available in the market for purchase at some unknowable date in the future. What was obvious is that Elon himself has no clear idea of when this will be.

    What I will say, though, is that the designs look cool. The Cybercab looks like a Porsche and a Cybertruck had a love child, and the Robovan looks like an Art Deco rendition of what the future is supposed to be like. I first wondered why they’d create a robotaxi with only two seats. But thinking about it now, most Uber rides probably only have 1-2 passengers.

    Despite these pretty designs, the overwhelming reaction to the event seems to be one of disappointment. We’ve heard what was said before. Public transportation is bad (I disagree). Autonomy will free up your time and remove unnecessary parking spaces from our cities (allowing for more public space). And soon you’ll be able to put your under-utilized car to work and earn extra cash.

    Cool, but when?

    Waymo and Uber are not, as far as I know, hosting similarly flashy events. But as far as I can tell, they’re making meaningful progress in advancing toward full autonomy. As of June of this year, Waymo had already logged over 22 million rider-only miles. And in September, they announced a partnership that would bring AVs to Austin and Atlanta by way of the Uber app.

    At this point in the hype cycle, I don’t think anyone is interested in hearing promises about what the future of autonomy will be like, especially without any firm dates. They want to know: Are we there yet? So I think it’s no surprise that people, including investors, weren’t all that pumped up by the event.

    On a more important note, Tesla had bicycles with brightly illuminated wheels circulating around their event set (at Warner Bros.) to presumably demonstrate that their Cybercabs can successfully navigate around moving objects (when brightly illuminated). If you missed them, look at the 29 second mark in the below video:

    I can’t be the only one who thought: “What are those? Now, that’s what I want!” So I’ve asked Elon when they’ll be available and when I can buy one. I’ll keep you all posted on his response.

  • Dupont Street to become a complete street

    The City of Toronto is proposing to turn Dupont Street — between Dundas Street West and Davenport Road — into a “complete street.”

    Here’s the area in question:

    It’s 4.7 kilometers long.

    And here’s how the city thinks about complete streets:

    “Complete streets” are streets that are designed to be safe for all users: people who walk, bicycle, take transit or drive, and people of varying ages and levels of ability. They also consider other uses like sidewalk cafés, street furniture, street trees, utilities, and stormwater management.

    Right now, the city is in the public consultation phase. If you’d like to provide your feedback, you can do that here. You have until October 30th. The online tool is also pretty neat. You can drop comments on specific areas of the street. And already the map has been totally filled up.

    This is an important and busy artery in midtown. I use it all the time as a pedestrian, cyclist, and driver. It’s not the best street, though. Yesterday it took me 45 minutes to drive from one end of it to the other. Along with better street design, this part of the city could use better transit.

    I’m looking forward to seeing how Dupont ultimately gets designed.

  • Density is good

    Here is an interesting chart (source) showing housing starts in Canada, by type, between 2000 and 2023:

    As recent as 2000, single-family houses accounted for 61% of total starts and multi-family housing accounted for 39%. This flipped somewhere around the financial crisis and, last year in 2023, the percentages were 23% and 77%, respectively. This is a meaningful inversion which has helped our cities become more vibrant and more conducive to non-car modes of transport.

    But in this recent article about Canadian housing, Donald Wright more or less argues: so what? We’ve been densifying our cities for all these years, but it hasn’t helped our affordability problem. Supply must not be the answer to our housing crisis.

    I’m not exactly sure what he believes to be the solution, but I don’t think this problem is as simple as “we’ve built some housing, we made our cities denser, and yet housing is still expensive — more supply must not be the answer. Let’s move on.”

    Among many other things, it’s important to understand what kind of density we’ve been building. Because up until very recently, we’ve basically taken the position that single-family neighborhoods should never be touched, and that density should only go in very specific areas — and only after a lengthy and expensive rezoning process has been completed.

    We’ve designed new housing to be expensive.

    But attitudes are changing all across North America. We are now starting to do two very important things: (1) we are opening up more of our cities to intensification and (2) we are now allowing more multi-family housing on an as-of-right basis. Meaning, no lengthy rezoning exercises and no risk of community opposition.

    These are two fundamental changes that should alter the kind of density that gets built. And in my view, it’s going to be a positive thing for Canadian cities.

  • Pedestrian plaza or parking lot?

    It is maybe comforting to know that even Europe wrestles with the decision of whether a grand urban space should be used for pedestrians, or turned into a parking lot. Take, for example, the Grand-Place in Brussels (pictured above).

    Today, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most important tourist destinations in the city. Perhaps its most famous. But during the 1960s, in what Wikipedia calls a “low period of appreciation,” it was a parking lot.

    This lasted until 1972, when a bunch of people from the community got together and lobbied for it to, you know, not be a parking lot. Not surprisingly, local shop owners were worried, at the time, that this would hurt their businesses. This is often the concern.

    Here in Toronto, where we continue to debate the pedestrianization of Kensington Market, we have surveys showing that 94% of visitors to the area support pedestrian-only zones, but that this number drops to 55% when you narrow to people who live/work/own stuff in the area.

    But if your goal is to sell more things to people, then there’s something to be said about listening to what your visitors want. In the case of Grand-Place, pedestrianizing the square made it far more popular as a tourist destination. And I think the same would be true of Kensington Market.

    For some photos of iconic public spaces in Europe being used as parking lots, check out this Politico article.

    Image: Wikipedia Creative Commons

  • Leslie Lookout Park

    This morning I rode out to Toronto’s new Leslie Lookout Park, which opened two weeks ago. I came down Cherry Street, crossing the new north bridge, and then I went all along Commissioners Street, crossing its new bridge.

    It’s great to see the Port Lands area continue to develop. Every time I’m down there, it feels more and more real — like an extension of the city. Now we just need to start developing within the blocks.

    If you find yourself at Leslie Lookout, make sure you locate Claude Cormier’s heart up in the tower. Claude’s firm CCxA was the landscape architect behind the project; but sadly, he passed away last year.

    Exactly 1 year before the opening of this park.

  • Toronto’s highway 407 is doing what it is supposed to do

    In Google’s guide to its maps, there is a section on live traffic congestion, and in it, this image is used:

    It is a map of the Toronto region, and not surprisingly, it is showing traffic congestion on the 401 highway. But what’s interesting about this image is that there’s no traffic at all on the 407 express toll route. (This is the green highway running generally parallel and north of the 401, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Toronto.)

    This is, of course, accurate. A 2019 study by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis called the Economic Impacts of Highway 407 found that, at the time, an average of 413,000 drivers were using the 407 highway each weekday. And of these trips, more than 85% of vehicles were travelling at or above 100 km/h. This translates into a traffic congestion index of almost zero.

    During this same time, the highway 401 through Toronto showed that about 85% of vehicles were travelling below 50 km/h. Meaning, lots of congestion. This also had a significant impact on collision and fatality rates. On the 407, both were about half of what they were on the 401. (I couldn’t find any more decent data, but if you have it, please share it in the comments.)

    The reason for these differences is simple: the 407 charges for congestion. Here are the current per kilometer weekday rates for light vehicles travelling westbound:

    Naturally, there are people who think the 407 is too expensive and that it shouldn’t have been privatized. But the reality is that it works; really well in fact. And this is the only method that has been proven to reliably combat congestion. We can go ahead and spend a gazillion dollars building a new tunnel under the 401, and double the number of lanes (it’s already 18 lanes at its widest point), but we already know that it won’t solve our congestion problem.

    Either we price roads and congestion, or we don’t. But if we don’t, then we need to be brutally honest with ourselves about the economic trade off that we are making: free/underpriced roads = traffic congestion, and accurately priced roads and congestion = less traffic. The choice is ours. But know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

  • The Bentway Islands

    As many of you know, Toronto has a highly successful public space underneath the Gardiner Expressway called The Bentway. I have ice skated in this space during the winter and I have listened to hard techno in this space during the summer. It has become a public space anchor in the city. Ilana Altman and the team are doing great work. And this week, they just announced that Field Operations (New York) and Brook McIlroy (Toronto) have been hired to design a major expansion. Called The Bentway Islands, this next phase consists of three “islands,” totalling 11,500 m2 (~125,000 ft2).

    Here’s a map:

    And here’s what the spaces look like today:

    Both of these firms do fantastic work, and so I’m excited to see what they come up with. (Field Operations is the firm behind New York’s High Line.) But if I can offer two unsolicited (yet related) suggestions, they would be: 1) Let’s incorporate more commercial uses and 2) let’s aim for these three parcels to not actually feel like urban islands. Generally speaking, the spaces underneath highways aren’t the most desirable. They also tend to be surrounded by inhospitable urban environments. Stitching them in and creating continuity in the fabric of the city (existing example, here) is the best way to make the highway above more or less disappear.