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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Tag: cycling

  • Casey Neistat needs to make a YouTube video about cycling in High Park

    I love High Park. It’s the second largest green space in the City of Toronto and right beside the Junction neighborhood. But there are some problems. Despite having a subway line on its northern boundary, we’ve gotten the built form along its edges all wrong.

    There’s very little functioning retail. The densities and heights are not nearly high enough. The streets aren’t great walking streets. And we’ve even gone and created undignified bus stops like this one here.

    On top of all this, we’re now doing this silly thing where police are ticketing cyclists for riding around the park with too much vigor and enthusiasm. I’m sure somebody called to complain and this is all reactionary politics, but an even bigger reaction has now been set off.

    For those of you who haven’t been following or aren’t from Toronto, hundreds of cyclists took to the streets this week to peacefully protest what has been going on in High Park.

    The Globe & Mail then followed it up with this important piece calling for an end to cars inside the park. The boundaries currently house about 5 km of roads and almost 600 parking spots.

    Given all this, I figured now is probably a good time to revive one of Casey Neistat’s original YouTube videos called “bike lanes.” The story is that he gets a ticket for not riding in a bike lane. And so he films a video of himself only riding in bike lanes — even if there are obstacles in his way.

    It’s an awesome video with nearly 30 million views. And I’m sure that many of you have felt like doing exactly what he does when faced with this same situation. I know I have.

  • Paris vs. New York bike lanes

    It’s one thing to have bike lanes. And it’s another thing to have really generous bike lanes. The above video by Streetfilms does a good job of comparing Paris to New York City, and showing just how far Paris has come in terms of cycling infrastructure. Some of you might remember that in the fall of last year, Paris announced plans to become a “100% cycling city.” This was a follow-on to their plan vélo 2015-2020, which saw a doubling of the city’s bike lanes. The current plan, which covers 2021-2026, includes 130 km of new bike lanes and 52 km of pandemic lanes that have been (or will be) made permanent. But again, it’s one thing to have a lot of bike lanes. And it’s another thing to have a lot of wide bike lanes that look like the ones in this video.

  • What Seattle learned from its electric scooter pilot program

    Electric scooters are an unsanctioned form of mobility here in Toronto, mostly because people think they’re dangerous, but also because I think people are worried about them cluttering up our sidewalks.

    The problem with this position is that electric scooters are also a lot of fun to ride and people seem to find them useful. The last time I rode one was in Paris and it seemed perfectly safe to me, though it may have been because there were two of us on it and we were kind of overloading the thing.

    In any event, lots of cities either have them or are piloting them. Seattle just finished year one of its pilot program and here’s what they learned:

    • From September 2020 to October 2021, Seattle saw 1.4 million trips taken by over 260,000 riders
    • Electric scooter ridership greatly exceeded that of public bicycles, with 300,000 scooter trips taken in September alone, compared to about 35,000 bike trips
    • 54% of surveyed scooter riders said that they would have taken a taxi or driven their personal vehicle had a scooter not been available
    • 21% of riders said that they used it to connect to public transit (helping to solve that pesky last-mile problem)
    • 17 collisions involving a scooter and a car were reported during the pilot year (though, for what it’s worth, some/many of the incidents involved a scooter that was privately owned and not part of the actual pilot program)

    As much as I love riding a bike, it’s a bit more of a commitment compared to riding an e-scooter, which is why I think the numbers look the way that they do here. Not everybody wants to bring a change of clothes and shower at the office.

    So I think it’s really too bad that Toronto just shut these down before exploring ways to make them both safe and useful.

  • Paris announces plan for “100% cycling city”

    Paris just announced plans to become a “100% cycling city.” A follow-up to plan vélo 2015-2020, which saw a doubling of the city’s bike lanes, plan vélo 2021-2026 includes 130 km of new bike lanes and 52 km of pandemic bike lanes that will now be made permanent.

    In addition to cycling lanes, the plans include new bike parking, new transit integrations, and a bunch of other things that are meant to strengthen the overall ecosystem in the city. The total budget for this second plan is about €100 million, which will bring the total cycling investment over the last 10-11 years to about €250 million. This is a serious commitment to cycling.

    It’s also a good example of one of the things that we have been talking about on this blog. This pandemic forced us to rethink how we allocate urban space — everything from outdoor restaurant patios to bike lanes. And as we can see here, many of the positive changes are not surprisingly starting to stick.

  • What tribe are you part of?

    This satirical piece in the Beaverton about “biking everywhere” is hilarious because it touches on so many cycling stereotypes:

    “It’s a great way to get around while also staying in shape,” said McFarlen as he biked through a red light. “From tattoo shops to my job at VICE to even the best Banh Mi in the city – I just hop on my bike and I’m there. Why does anyone drive ever? Gross!”

    But the other thing it does is speak to the trade-off between location and transportation costs. Brian McFarlen, the fictional protagonist from the article, is able to bike everywhere (low cost) because he allegedly lives in a central neighborhood (high cost):

    McFarlen, whose parents paid for him to go to film school and has no mortgage, kids, or debt, condemns people who drive in the city. “I hate cars – we should just get rid of all roads and replace them with bike lanes. Isn’t everyone able to live downtown and spend hours of their day biking around the city hitting up all the best micro breweries?”

    I think it’s natural for us humans to form tribes with others that are similar to ourselves. We have two wheels and you all have four wheels. We live in the city and you all don’t. All of these things make us different.

    But there’s certainly something to be said for having a bit of empathy for those outside of our particular tribes.

  • Minimalist smart biking device

    I just came across this smart biking device on Kickstarter. It is the next generation of their original SmartHalo, which did very well and is now sold in Apple Stores. The company is based in Montréal.

    Here’s how it works:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smarthalo/smarthalo-2-make-your-bike-smarter

    I know that a lot of you are cyclists, so I figured some of you might appreciate this. It looks pretty awesome. Delivery of SmartHalo 2 is expected by December 2019.

    Their Kickstarter campaign ended on July 2. The project got funded with about CAD 1.7 million from over 10,000 backers. But you can still pre-order a device, here.

  • Downward pressure on parking supply

    There’s a significant amount of downward pressure on parking supply in most major cities. Part of this has to do with the push toward more sustainable forms of transport, which is, of course, a good thing. But it also has to do with rising construction costs, the fear of obsolescence in the wake of autonomous vehicles, and probably many other factors.

    Developers, ourselves included, have responded by being cautious about the amount of parking being provided and by considering alternative future uses for the parking that is being built. I think it is also obvious that we will continue to see more, rather than less, parking stackers and other more efficient parking solutions.

    So far the cost of parking in dense urban centers has continued to rise. A new parking spot in the core of Toronto priced at $100,000 would not surprise me. And Hong Kong recently set a record for what is allegedly the most expensive parking spot in the world: USD 765,000 or CAD 1 million.

    But what is going to happen going forward?

    Researchers at the Singapore – MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and MIT Senseable City Lab, along with Allianz, have recently tried to quantify what the impact of autonomous vehicles will mean on required parking, and on traffic, in Singapore. The study is called Unparking.

    Today, they estimate the total number of parking spots in Singapore to be around 1,370,000. This is based on minimum parking requirements from the Housing Development Board and on the idea that home-work commuting consumes two parking spots: one at home and one at the office.

    They model four different scenarios, but the last one is based on fully autonomous vehicles and on shared parking spaces. Holding current mobility demands and traffic volumes constant, the demand for parking in this scenario drops by 70%.

    It is possible to reduce the number of parking spaces even further to 85%, but this has a negative impact on traffic congestion in their model. Fewer parking spaces means the autonomous vehicles have to drive around more picking people up. 

    I also don’t know if there was any consideration given to induced demand as a result of the more affordable autonomous vehicles. Demand for transportation services is generally thought to be fairly elastic.

    Whatever the case may be, numbers are made to be questioned. And Singapore is a unique city-state. But ¼ the amount of parking does not seem that far fetched to me.

    Photo by Tobias Jussen on Unsplash

  • Car-dependent spatial structure

    Earlier this week a 58 year old woman named Dalia was struck and killed by a car near the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. This tragedy has everyone talking about and questioning how to make our roads safer, though the answers are not difficult to find. Here is an excerpt from a piece that Richard Florida penned following the incident called, Toronto’s Deadly Car Crisis:

    Today, more Torontonians die from being hit by cars than from being killed by guns. In 2016, nearly 2,000 pedestrians and 1,000 cyclists in the city were hit by cars. Of these, 43 resulted in fatalities. On average, a pedestrian in Toronto is hit every four or five hours, and a cyclist every eight or nine. This means that Toronto’s rate of pedestrian deaths was 1.6 per 100,000 people in 2016 — worse than in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., Portland, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo. It has risen to 1.7 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017 and is on track to rise still further to 1.8 deaths per 100,000 this year. And, children and the elderly face the greatest risk of being struck and killed by a car. The problem is only getting worse. Across Canada, pedestrian fatalities increased by more than 10 percent between 2010 and 2016; at time when they decreased by more than 25 percent in European countries like Norway, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

    The broader issue is what he refers to as Toronto’s “car-dependent spatial structure.” And it is detrimental to not only our public safety, as we saw this week, but also to our ability to grow as a global city. The Greater Toronto Area is projected to reach 10 million people by 2041. I agree with Florida that, for a number of important reasons, we are going to need to commit ourselves to a new model for growth.

  • Meet Replica

    Sidewalk Labs is currently building out a platform called Replica that will support them in their development plans here in Toronto. Replica is: 

    “a user-friendly modeling tool that uses anonymized mobile location data to give planning agencies a comprehensive portrait of how, when, and why people travel in urban areas.”

    Here is a preview of the Replica dashboard showing a section of Main Street in Kansas City. I hope the animated GIF shows up for you.

    The platform uses a combination of mobile location data (~5% of the population) and on-the-ground checks, typical stuff like manual traffic counts and transit boardings.

    The goal is to understand in real-time who is using a street, as well as how (driving? cycling?) and why (going to work?).

    Their introductory blog post obviously stresses the importance of personal privacy, but I am curious how they determine where people are going.

    I suppose if they pair journeys with destinations (and the durations at those destinations) they can make reasonable assumptions around the why.

    I think the benefits to all of this are clear. But does any or all of this worry you from a privacy standpoint?

  • Adelaide cycle tracks

    Earlier this week I was on Adelaide Street (Toronto) for a morning meeting. This is further north than my typical routine.

    For those of you not familiar with Toronto, Adelaide is a one-way street with separated bikes lanes. These “cycle tracks” were installed as part of a pilot project that launched back in summer 2014. As I’m sure you can imagine, they were highly controversial at the time. Many heated debates.

    But if you stand on Adelaide Street during the morning rush, as I did earlier this week, I think you would be amazed to see just how widely used these lanes actually are. Here’s a video of Adelaide (just east of Spadina) in action. It is by Gil Meslin and was filmed sometime between 840 and 855am on a weekday.

    However, I will say that I was far more impressed by the volume of bikes I saw in person. I wish I took a picture. They easily outnumbered the cars when I was there, which speaks to the latent demand for this sort of infrastructure. I can’t imagine a faster way to get across downtown in the morning.

    So if you haven’t already, check out Adelaide (or Richmond Street, which is also part of the cycle tracks program).