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.
Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the Partnership for New York City launched a new vertical accelerator dedicated to public transit. The mission is to make the city a global leader in this space.
Applications are open until November 30, 2018 and they are looking for early and growth stage companies that address one or both of the following challenges:
How can we better predict subway incident impacts and serve customers?
How can we make buses faster and more efficient?
Selected companies will go through an 8-week accelerator and, at the end of it, the most promising companies will partner with the MTA on a 12-month pilot. So it is an opportunity to potentially test your product(s) on the largest transit authority in the US.
This is impressive: Shenzhen recently finished converting its entire bus fleet to electric vehicles. That’s 16,359 buses and around 8,000 charging stations according to Electrek.
It is estimated that this all-electric fleet saves 345,000 tons of fuel per year and reduces carbon emissions by 1.35 million tons.
Shenzhen is now working on doing the same to its 12,518 taxis. Already 62.5% of them are electric-powered and the goal is 100% by 2020.
If you’ve been reading Architect This City since last winter, you might know that every year I go on one big snowboard trip with a group of guys I went to grad school with at Penn. Last year we went to Jackson Hole and Vail, and this year the plan is to go to Banff and Revelstoke.
We start planning it by the fall and so already we’ve been trying to sort out the details for this winter’s trip. But as we finalize the plans, one thing I’ve noticed is how I’ve automatically been trying to minimize the amount of driving that we’ll need to do. In fact, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to rent a car at all.
Now, small mountain towns aren’t usually the best for public transit, but there are often ways to get around that. When we were in Jackson, we took the public bus to get to the mountain every day, as did most people who lived or stayed in town.
This winter, the plan is to fly into Calgary and stay in Banff for the first leg of the trip. So I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s a train that can get us from Calgary to Banff and which hotels offer shuttle buses to the mountains. Because I’d rather not drive, and I know many of my friends feel the same way. It’s an added cost and it gets in the way of après ski.
What’s interesting about this, is that not only do I try and minimize the amount of driving I do here in Toronto, but I do it when I travel as well. And if you’ve been following the macro trends, you might know that many other people feel the same way. That’s why total Vehicle Miles Traveled in the US has been in falling since about the mid-2000s:
People are falling out of love with driving, and many believe that this shift is permanent. Here’s a recent report from the US PIRG Education Fund talking about just that:
I also think this shift is permanent – until maybe the nature of driving changes and cars start driving themselves. But at that point, it won’t be called driving anymore and there will probably be many other changes. So on this rainy Wednesday morning, my big bold prediction is that future generations will no longer drive.
Last weekend a friend of mine sent me an article from The Economist talking about why trams, streetcars, and light rail are a waste of money. The argument is basically that steetcars are expensive, less efficient, and that – despite North America’s renewed interest in them – we should instead be spending our scarce public dollars on more buses.
…but cash spent on streetcars displaces spending on other, more cost-effective forms of public transport like buses, which offer cheaper and more-efficient service but are considerably less sexy. The capital cost per mile of a streetcar is between $30m and $75m, while a rapid bus service costs anywhere between $3m and $30m, according to the American Public Transportation Association.
Now, there’s no question that buse routes are initially cheaper to implement. You don’t have track to build. But I don’t agree that the cost structure is quite that simple if you consider the number of people you need to move in your city. I struggle to see buses as a more efficient service.
The big difference between modern light rail and buses is capacity. Toronto’s new streetcars will move about 3 times as many people as your typical bus. So you’d need to triple the number of buses and triple the number of drivers – adding to your labor costs – if you want to have a chance at moving the same number of people.
Streetcars are also electric, which means they run on a renewable energy source. We’re in the process of making this switch with private transport, so why go backwards when it comes to public transport? You can certainly run electric buses as well, but then you’re building overhead power lines and bringing up your initial costs.
I think the challenge is that when people think of light rail, they think of slow lumbering streetcars. I agree that many of these lines are inefficient and I’ve written about it. But there are a number of ways to implement light rail. And when done well it can efficiently move a lot of people for costs that are far less than a subway.
According to Salvador Dalí and Margaret Thatcher I’m a loser and a failure. I came across these quotes on Tumblr (via goingurban) this morning:
“A man of forty who still rides the metro is a loser.” -Salvador Dalí
“A man who, beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” -Margaret Thatcher
Now as much as I like dislike buses (and prefer the train varietal), I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m a believer in mass transit.
If anything, I think these quotes show how much the world has changed, although perhaps only in certain geographies. Depending on where you live (I’m thinking Los Angeles or, maybe, Oklahoma City), it probably still sucks not to have a car.
