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.

Subscribe

Tag: mobility

  • Just give me the fastest option

    I had a dinner in the suburbs this evening. And so in the afternoon today, I opened up Google Maps to figure out how I was going to get there.

    I didn’t have my car with me — because I hate driving into the office — so in my mind, I was either going to take transit or take an Uber.

    These are the time estimates that Google gave me:

    It was going to take me over 4 hours to walk there. Over an hour to drive there. And 47 minutes to take the train there. Interestingly enough, cycling was also going to be faster than driving.

    As soon as I saw this, I shut down the app and decided I would take the train. All I was interested in was the absolute fastest option. And for me at that moment, it was the train.

    I recognize that this isn’t always the case. Sometimes driving is much faster than taking transit. It depends on a number of factors.

    But as a general rule, when it comes to big and dense cities, you really can’t beat trains and bikes for moving the greatest number of people, as quickly as possible.

  • Cycling to the office

    Right now my typical morning commute consists of a 15 minute walk and a quick stop off for a coffee. I must admit that I’m spoiled. But next year I’ll be moving to the Junction and so that means I’m going to need to make some minor adjustments to my routine.

    I fully expect that on warm summer nights I’ll probably still walk home on occasion. But broadly speaking, my loose plan is a combination of cycling, e-scootering, and taking the Union Pearson Express train.

    Then this evening I was out for drinks with one of our partners and two of the guys were talking about how they cycle to work each morning and compete on Strava to make sure everything gets properly logged. One of them actually lives near the Junction and his regular route is down through High Park and then across along the lake.

    Naturally I got inspired and decided — after two beers — that I too should join this competition. So I have now obligated myself to cycling to the office starting next year. That said, I could probably use a new bike, and I’m hoping that some of you will have recommendations.

    My criteria is as follows: it should look impossibly cool, it should work for a daily commute, and it should be at least somewhat suitable for tight-fitting clothes and long rides through the French countryside (even though I currently have no concrete plans of doing such a thing).

    Any thoughts?

  • Sticking close to home — two-thirds of young Americans live near where they grew up

    Here in Canada, there is often a belief that Americans tend to be more mobile than Canadians. Don’t like the cold weather? Just move south. Taxes too high? Just move south. Housing too expensive? Just move south.

    But just how mobile is mobile? A new study by the US Census Bureau and Harvard University found that by age 26, more than 2/3 of young adults in the US actually just live where they grew up, with 80% living within 100 miles, and 90% living within 500 miles.

    Migration distances were also found to be impacted by both race and parental income (though these two things likely exhibit a relationship on their own). If you are a young white or Asian adult, the “radius of economic opportunity” tends to grow and you’re more likely to live further away from where you grew up.

    The most popular destinations overall are New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Denver (in this order). And while New York and Los Angeles remain at the top regardless of who you are, San Antonio and Phoenix are top destinations for Hispanics, and San Francisco is a top destination for Asians.

    Regardless, home appears to be a pretty sticky place.

    But what about Canadians? Are we less mobile? Looking at net domestic migration rates, Canada saw 254,143 interprovincial migrants between 2018-2019, whereas the US saw just over a million between 2020-2021. So on a per capita basis, Canada’s rate is actually higher.

    Statistics Canada also estimated earlier this year that as of July 1, 2016, somewhere around 4 million Canadians were living abroad — or about 11% of citizens. This is a much higher percentage compared to Americans.

    Of those living abroad, roughly half are believed to have received their citizenship through descent, meaning they were born abroad to Canadian parents. About 1/3 are Canadian citizens by birth. And about 15% are naturalized citizens.

    So it turns out that Canadians are in fact pretty mobile. We also seem to like going further afield.

  • 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.

  • Toronto’s downtown streets broke over the weekend

    Canada Day weekend was a lot of fun in Toronto. This city was alive and it felt like people had come far and wide to visit downtown. But it was a good reminder that even if all of our cars were electric and even if they were all able to drive themselves, we would still have this problem:

    I was in an Uber on Saturday afternoon heading over to the west side of downtown and we had no choice but to declare bankruptcy and hop out in the middle of Bay Street. We thought about waiting for the Ontario Line to be ready, but that seemed a bit far out.

    So we rented bikes instead and rode along the waterfront, which was a considerably better experience. But then we couldn’t find any docks with available slots, so we had to ride up into Liberty Village, drop our bikes off there, and then walk back down to Ontario Place.

    Of course, this was still the better option. I’m fairly certain that we’d still be in that Uber had we stuck it out. And maybe not finding a bike dock is just part of life in the big city on a beautiful long weekend in the summer.

    Still, it was frustrating. So I’ll use this opportunity to once again ask our city leaders to reconsider their ban on dockless electric scooters. Toronto clearly needs all the mobility support it can get.

  • NYC 25×25

    There are over 8 million people living in New York City. And if you were to look at the modal split for these people — that is, how they get to work and how they get around — you’ll see that other than Staten Island, the majority of New York City does not rely on cars.

    They walk, bike, take transit, and probably use other things like electric scooters. And in Manhattan, the number of people who drive is particularly low.

    So if you were tasked with coming up with an equitable way to allocate street space, one logical way to do it would be to allocate based on usage. If 5% of people are driving and 95% of people are doing things that require walking, maybe these are the numbers to use.

    The problem, of course, is that cars take up a lot more space than humans and so the math gets a little more nuanced than just a straight 5/95 split.

    And if you look at how most cities have decided to allocate space, this problem is reflected. In the case of New York City, about 75% of its street space is used for cars and the balance is for people to walk around and do stuff (see below chart from The Guardian).

    Because of this mismatch, New York has just launched a new proposal called NYC 25×25.

    The proposal is pretty simple. It is to take 25% of the space that is currently allocated to cars and convert it into space for walking, plazas, green spaces, bus lanes, and dedicated cycle paths (see above chart once more). And the plan is to get it all done by 2025, which seems entirely doable.

    It’s hard to think of a better North American candidate for a shift like this than New York City. It is a city that is already heavily reliant on transit and other forms of mobility. But of course, we shouldn’t stop here.

  • Toronto breaks ground on new Ontario Line

    This past weekend it was announced that ground has been broken (i.e. construction has started) on the new Ontario subway line that will connect Exhibition / Ontario Place to the Science Centre by way of the light purple line labeled “C” on the above map. (The other image is a rendering of the proposed Exhibition station.)

    This transit line has gone through many permutations over the years and was previously called the Downtown Relief Line (but that was seen as too downtown-centric); the Yonge Relief Line (still too specific); the Relief Line (not Ontario-specific enough, I guess); and probably a bunch of other names corresponding to various lines on a map.

    So it is exceedingly easy to be cynical when you hear of an announcement like this. Is it really happening? Are we actually building new and much-needed transit? And as you might imagine, if you read through the chatter on Twitter, you will find an overabundance of this sort of cynicism, along with what appears to be a general dissatisfaction with the current state of everything.

    But in my simple view, I reckon that it is far better to be starting construction on an important new transit line than not starting construction on an important new transit line. So this is exciting! Let’s go! If you’d like to learn more, I also tweeted out the initial renderings for the 14 stations that are planned for the Ontario Line.

    Images: Province of Ontario

  • The enduring allure of private vehicles

    Uber’s recent investor day presentation (link here) is interesting if you’re an investor or thinking about becoming an investor, but it’s also interesting from an urbanism standpoint. Part of the promise of Uber was that it was going to help lure people away from owning cars. Looking at the data though (see below), ridesharing penetration is still pretty low in even Uber’s largest markets: 3.9% for the US and 3.3% for Canada. Brazil is a leader here, which you might think is because of a lower cost per mile, but Australia isn’t far behind.

    At the end of the day, the vast majority of mobility trips are still being done through personal vehicles. This is certainly the case in the US with 6.6 billion weekly trips in personal vehicles versus 191 million on public transit and 22.6 million with UberX (all 2019 data). And for those taking Ubers, about 90% of riders are using some form of UberX — that being a solo, on-demand, point-to-point trip with a 4-door car. So sharing a car with strangers and using different/multiple modes of transport hasn’t really caught on here.

  • Slime mold may be better than us at transportation planning

    So slime mold, which is a fungus-like single-celled organism, has a tendency to build highly optimized networks across its food sources. In other words, if you scattered a bunch of food on a surface and then dropped in some slime mold, it would naturally create an interconnected web of linked veins across this surface. And this web would be based on the shortest and most efficient paths of travel between the various food sources.

    I am mentioning this odd factoid because ten years ago researchers in Tokyo used this naturally occurring phenomenon for the purposes of trying to improve transportation planning. What they did was map out greater Tokyo. They then placed oat flakes (i.e. food) in spots that correspond to the various cities and urban centers that surround the city. Alongside this, they blocked off the areas where transportation networks do not typically run, such as through mountains and into the water. They then dropped in some slime mold, wet the surface, and watched it grow.

    What they found was that the resulting network was remarkably similar to Tokyo’s actual rail network. The slime mold had found the most efficient routes, eliminated redundancies, and generally discovered the optimal way in which to connect its food sources. And if you think about it, this is basically what transit networks are supposed to do. They should connect clusters of people in the most efficient way possible.

    It has been a decade since this slime mold transportation discovery was first publicized, and it would seem that it hasn’t really caught on as an invaluable planning tool. So I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that we should take out a map of every major city in the world, plot its population centers, drop down some oat flakes, and then let slime mold tell us all the ways in which we are screwing up and over-politicizing our transportation planning efforts.

    Thank you to Angus Knowles for making me aware of this study. Angus writes an occasional newsletter about cities and housing, over here.

    Image: LiveScience

  • The 10 commandments of micromobility

    This is a great 30 minute talk by Horace Dediu that is structured around his 10 commandments of micromobility. If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here. What I think that many of you will appreciate about the talk is that he focuses on smaller interventions. Think bike lanes over big hyperloop moonshoots. In his words, we’re going to get to where we want to go not through hyperbole, but through humility. And micromobility is all about humility.

    I’m also a big fan of his last commandment. It is titled: cities always win. Yup.