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: mobility

  • Why Waymo’s arrival in Toronto is our chance to price the roads

    Today, Waymo announced that it has started training its vehicles on the streets of Toronto, with the goal of welcoming riders in 2028. This is exciting. I wish the timeline were shorter, but whatever, I’ll take it.

    “Expanding into Canada marks an important milestone in Waymo’s global journey,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Toronto is one of the world’s great cities — innovative, diverse, and forward-looking. We’re proud to bring the Waymo Driver to Canada’s largest city and to partner with the vibrant business, arts and cultural communities that share our commitment to safer streets and more accessible mobility.”

    But I also agree with Matt Spoke of Toronto Standard that this is a perfect opportunity to start talking seriously about congestion pricing. As we all know, road pricing is generally unpopular until it’s implemented and people see the benefits. To date, this obstacle has blocked Toronto from taking serious action around traffic congestion.

    Autonomous vehicles are different. I think it would be politically pretty easy to levy congestion charges strictly on autonomous vehicles. Most people aren’t going to care about “the machines.” And it would be the proactive thing to do.

    Based on the safety data we have on AVs, none of us should be driving cars anymore. This means it’s only a matter of time before AVs become the majority of vehicles on the road. I will bet you that my daughter will never drive her own car (unless she becomes an old-school motorcar enthusiast).

    Implement road pricing for AVs today and nobody will notice. But in 10 years, it will be viewed as positively clairvoyant.

  • Toronto’s bike lane pendulum

    This week, the Province of Ontario started work on its plan to remove about 19 kilometres of bike lanes in Toronto on major streets such as Bloor Street, Yonge Street, and others. The plan is to restore motor vehicle lanes, push bike lanes to secondary streets, and “keep drivers moving.” However, work did not start without protest. Hundreds of cyclists have been protesting this week, and a handful of arrests have been made.

    The thing about bike lanes in Toronto, and other places, is that they tend to follow a political pendulum. We have a history of building bike lanes, and then paying lots of money to rip them out. It’s of course wasteful, but bike lanes are divisive and they can make for good politics. Recent polls suggest that the majority of Torontonians support removing them on major streets. And I can understand why. We’re all frustrated with traffic congestion!

    But here’s what I would say in response to what’s happening this week:

    • The city should be making the decision, not the province.
    • A street like Bloor serves as an important east-west artery in our cycling network. Toronto’s grid does not have a secondary street equivalent.
    • Toronto needs more major streets like Bloor. It needs a bold 21st-century masterplan.
    • It is true that some sections, such as in Etobicoke, do have lower cycling ridership, but every lane needs to be evaluated in terms of the broader network.
    • Built form dictates behaviour.
    • Successful cities must be multi-modal.

    Traffic congestion is no doubt a major problem in Toronto, but we’re nipping around the edges and unwilling to make big, bold changes. The keys to solving traffic congestion are appropriate land-use policies, road pricing, and investment in non-car forms of urban mobility. Pretending otherwise is just fooling ourselves. To solve congestion, Toronto needs to reduce automobile dependency.

  • Is cycling an inferior economic good?

    Across most global cities, higher household income tends to correlate directly with higher rates of car ownership, solo car commuting, and vehicle miles travelled. So, one could argue, as many do, that cycling is what economists call an inferior good, meaning that as incomes increase, demand for cycling decreases.

    But this isn’t perfectly true. Data from the US — an obviously car-dominated place — has shown that bicycle demand is actually U-shaped. A 2013 community survey showed that the poorest quartile of Americans accounted for 39% of bicycle commuting, whereas the wealthiest quartile accounted for 20%. It was the people in the middle who biked the least.

    In the case of the poorest quartile, it is out of necessity; for the wealthiest quartile, it is a choice, often for health, environmental, and overall efficiency reasons. Cycling saves time and money.

    It could also be the case that the wealthy are able to live closer to work in more walkable communities, and so biking becomes a more tenable option. Irrespective of the reason, it casts doubt on the argument that cycling is truly an inferior good.

    I actually think that the more fundamental cause is our built environment. If you design a place for cars, then of course, as people make more money, they’re going to choose the more convenient option and drive more. It’s what you’ve been optimizing for.

    On the other hand, if you design for transit or cycling, then you start to break this relationship with income.

    Consider that in some of the wealthiest arrondissements in Paris, private vehicle commuting is less than 10%; that in Manhattan, the majority of households do not own a car despite having incomes that far exceed the US national average; and that in Copenhagen, high-income earners in the city centre cycle at the exact same rate as low-income earners.

    Wealthy people will always optimize for convenience. In a car-centric city, that means driving. But this doesn’t mean that cycling is an inferior good; it just means we’re building inferior cities.

  • The great Parisian bike boom

    Okay, so this dataset isn’t the most recent, but it’s interesting nonetheless. At the end of 2023, Le Monde reported that Paris had seen a doubling of cycling traffic compared to the year before. For a typical week and based on 128 sensor locations across the city, this is what that increase looked like between October 2022 and 2023:

    But the data gets even more interesting when you compare it to vehicular traffic. Here’s vehicular traffic vs. cycling traffic for three principal boulevards in the city, namely l’avenue de Flandre, le boulevard Voltaire and le boulevard Magenta:

    These three boulevards were chosen because they all have bi-directional lanes for both cars and bikes, meaning they roughly privilege both forms of mobility equally. And what you are seeing in the above chart is that bike traffic exceeds car traffic by fairly large margins during peak weekday periods.

    This is a mobility accomplishment that benefits both cyclists and drivers.

    Charts via Le Monde

  • How built form drives Toronto’s modal splits

    If you’re a cyclist in Toronto, you probably know that Shaw Street is a damn good street for biking. The city first redesigned the one-way street in 2013, adding a bike lane in each direction (one of which is a contra-flow bike lane). Then in 2020, they made it so that the one-way direction for cars alternated every few blocks. This stopped drivers from using it as a high-speed shortcut. The result was an immediate increase in cycling.

    Here’s some data from Observing the City for the intersection of Bloor and Shaw:

    As of June 2025, the modal split at this intersection during peak hours was 34% bikes, 21% pedestrians, 1% trucks, and 44% cars. At times, there has been a 310% increase in cycling trips since the redesign. It goes to show you that the right street design (or the wrong one) will induce demand. If you look at the intersection counts for the entire city, you’ll see just how profoundly built form impacts behaviour. Cycling is broadly an Old Toronto thing.

  • Inside the post-pandemic AI investment boom reshaping San Francisco

    San Francisco’s Q2 2026 economic report is perhaps an idealized summary of how the post-pandemic, AI investment boom is transforming our cities.

    Housing Supply Crisis: Residential apartment rents grew 14% from March to July, and single-family house prices are now growing at double-digit annual rates. And yet, the city continues to see a structural decline in housing permits, below pre-pandemic levels.

    Segmented Commercial Market: The city’s office vacancy rate declined 3.7% over the past year, but the overall vacancy rate is still greater than 30%. Weekly office attendance also remains below 50% of pre-pandemic levels.

    Urban Rebound: Average highway speeds are dropping, suggesting more user demand. MUNI Metro (local) ridership is also increasing rapidly, reaching over 70% of pre-pandemic levels. But downtown BART station exits (regional rail) are below 50% of 2019 levels, reinforcing the fact that though the city is active, but people simply aren’t commuting in nearly the same way.

    Ultimately, the surge in housing prices proves that the “urban doom loop” narrative was fundamentally wrong (remember that?). San Francisco remains an intensely desirable place to live and work. But they’ve got to get moving on building more housing.

  • How built form (not more lanes) solves traffic congestion

    I snapped this photo while we were in Paris a few weeks ago. We were walking down the street in the 7th and I noticed this mother (I’m presuming) picking up her daughter from the library. The daughter (I’m also presuming) got on the back of the bike and then they took off down the street. She also happened to be wearing a beret, which only added to the whole experience.

    When I posted this photo on Twitter, I got some of the comments I would expect. Some people called the mother (we’re all presuming) irresponsible for not wearing a helmet and for not forcing her passenger to wear one as well. Okay, maybe the child is of the age where one is technically required. But another way to look at it might be that it’s a testament to how safe they feel on the roads of Paris.

    My implied point was that this could have been a minivan ride. The solution to traffic congestion is not optimizing around the car; it is getting people out of them. Paris proper has about 2 million people compared to Toronto’s 3 million. But the footprint of the former is about one-sixth the land area, making it, on average, about 4 times more dense. And yet, Paris feels counterintuitively less congested, and easier to get around.

    The answer, and solution for all cities looking to get people moving, lies in its built form, its rail network, and what you see pictured above.

  • From YYZ to CDG to central Paris with a 3-month-old

    We arrived in Paris this morning and Vivienne’s first flight was a 10/10. She slept most of the way in our arms. The bassinet looked like some sort of elaborate torture device (see below), but she did also sleep in it for a bit. The problem is that they make you take her out whenever the seat belt sign is on, and so we ended up just keeping her in our arms to make sure she stayed asleep. So she slept well; we did not. Thankfully, Toronto to Paris is a super easy flight. It was around 6 hours today.

    When we arrived at CDG, we stopped at Monop’ for some juices and a snack, and then went straight to the RER B train. Tip: Never fuss with the ticket kiosks. Open Apple Wallet. Add the Île-de-France travel card to it, and then choose the airport pass for €14. The express train took about 30 minutes to get to Gare du Nord. We then did one transfer and one stop on the RER E line, paused in the station to feed Vivienne and admire its vaulted ceilings, and then walked to our hotel. I think we were under an hour inclusive of the meal break.

    I’ve said this many times before, but I very much enjoy the feeling of getting off a plane and not having to drive. In terms of our experience with a travel stroller, none of the trains we took had level boarding, so I would just grab the front of the stroller and we’d lift. But every station we were in had elevators. Not all of them were in order, but we could always find one to use. In some cases, we just managed on the escalators.

    Full disclosure: We failed at our plan of only checking one 85L bag. We ended up checking one of our 36L carry-on rollers as well. We’ve never travelled with so much stuff before. But I will say that the Patagonia 30L MLC carry-on backpack is incredible. It miraculously fits a lot of stuff and it keeps everything organized and accessible. I don’t do bag reviews on this blog, but I almost want to now.

    It turns out that travelling with a 3-month-old is harder than not travelling with a 3-month-old. It requires full-on logistics management, especially in a big, dense city like Paris where we’re accustomed to only walking, biking, and taking transit. Vivienne is already giving us a different appreciation for the city and we’re excited to let her do that. One of the things she suggested is a picnic in the park. That sounds great, and a perfect way to enjoy late-summer Paris.

  • Mapping 70,000 trains across Europe

    I just came across a fascinating visualization of rail in Europe. You can also visualize other places like the US, but as you know, there isn’t much to see there in the way of trains. What is shown in the above screenshot is Germany, the Benelux, Switzerland, and France. I paused the visualization at 7:20 AM and there were 5,293 trains running, with the vast majority of them (4,360) being regional rail.

    Here’s what stood out:

    • France operates a monocentric hub-and-spoke network with Paris as the clear central hub. Trips almost always route through Paris, which reflects France’s historically centralized economy. In contrast, Germany operates a decentralized mesh network with more point-to-point travel and no single dominant city.
    • Regional rail is the workhorse. When I paused the visualization, over 82% of the trains in operation were regional rail. High-speed rail is sexy, but it clearly needs to be supported by a dense regional grid that brings people to and from major high-speed routes.
    • Smaller countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have such a dense network of intercity rail that they almost read as continuous urban regions.

    If you love trains, as I do, you’ll want to take a look.

  • Why uploading Toronto’s highways to the province won’t fix traffic congestion

    In 2023, the City of Toronto announced a deal that would “upload” the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway from the city to the province. This was a big deal because these highways were previously the city’s largest state-of-good-repair liabilities, and so, before this deal, the city was, you know, trying to figure out how to pay for them.

    One option was road pricing (or expressway tolls). And in 2016, this became a real possibility with City Council overwhelmingly endorsing the plan, before it got rejected by the province. It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I was in support of it and writing about it at the time.

    In 2016, Toronto estimated that 40% of all trips on these two expressways were by non-residents, and yet they were being funded by Toronto taxpayers. When I said this on Twitter, many of you got upset and argued that people coming in from the suburbs are a boon for the city. No doubt. But the reality is that this was an inequitable funding structure.

    Let’s look at the 2022 Transportation Tomorrow Survey results, which I wrote about here.

    The mode share for all trips to downtown Toronto (from within the city) was 75% non-car, with transit making up the largest share at 40.4%. And the mode share for home-based work trips to downtown Toronto (people who leave home in Toronto to go to work downtown and then come home) was about 80% non-car! In this case, transit made up nearly 50% of the trips.

    The effective result is that the people who tended to drive the least to work were paying for the highways with their tax dollars, and the people driving into downtown were not. This is in no way intended to be an attack on the latter camp. The simple reality is that driving into downtown and buying a chicken souvlaki pita from Jimmy the Greek at lunch isn’t enough to offset the road usage costs.

    The uploading of the highways to the province (which is still advancing but has already relieved Toronto of its financial obligations) is a more equitable solution. It shifts the cost burden to Ontario taxpayers, reflecting that people from all over the region use these highways and that Toronto is part of a broader economic agglomeration.

    But this only solved the jurisdictional problem. We still have worsening congestion and an inefficient funding model. The problem with using broad-based taxation to obfuscate infrastructure costs is that direct usage then goes unpriced, and that leads to what is known as a “tragedy of the commons.”

    We all tend to act in our own short-term self-interest, and the result is that road demand constantly outstrips the available supply. There’s zero marginal cost to actual usage, whether you drive 100 kilometres each day or bike to work. The most effective way to manage traffic congestion is to remove the hidden subsidy for driving and price the costs and negative externalities.