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.
Last week was CES in Las Vegas. Some or many of you were probably there. One of the things that was announced at the show was a project by Bjarke Ingels Group for Toyota called the Woven City. Situated at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, the development sits on a 70 hectare site and will eventually house some 2,000 people.
The objective is for it to act as a living laboratory for a number of new city building initiatives, ranging from autonomy and mobility as a service to multi-generational living and hydrogen-powered infrastructure. Woven City is intended to house not only residents, but also researchers who can test out and learn from these new ideas.
Below is a short video from Dezeen. It’s entirely visual. No words. There’s also an official website, but not much is up there yet. Hopefully there will be more soon. Construction is set to start next year (2021) and it’ll be BIG’s first project in Japan.
Elon Musk recently posted this Twitter survey asking if we, the people, would like “super safe, Earthquake-proof tunnels under [our] cities to solve traffic.” It was leading in that the “no” response was, “No, I like traffic.” And it was initially vague in that it wasn’t clear how these tunnels would be used. Though, most of us could probably guess. Elon later added in the thread that these road tunnels would be for zero emission vehicles only and they would be limited to EVs (from all auto companies, not just Tesla). Finally, Elon stated that these tunnels are not intended to replace other solutions, such as light rail, rather to supplement them.
At the time of writing this post, nearly 1.5 million people had responded to the survey and about 67% of them said “definitely” to Earthquake-proof tunnels. Elon’s reaction: “Stop whining, subway Stalinists, the people have spoken.” Notwithstanding the majority, this is a divisive topic and the reactions are mixed. City planner Brent Toderian responded by saying that this “solution” would merely result in more cars, more driving, and more emissions. Steve Jurvetson, on the other hand, argued that this would be the cheapest way to add lanes and prepare for the inevitable EV-only future. (Steve sits on Tesla’s board and recently launched a venture fund that, among other things, invests in sustainable mobility.)
The crux of this divide is a view about how cities should work. And it often becomes like dogma. Is it optimal for us to all be driving around in individual vehicles — EV or not? Will autonomous vehicles actually help solve the traffic problem? Or is building on the backbone of mass transit the only way to properly design a big and efficient city? Whether it’s lip service or not, Elon seems to acknowledge that both cars and transit are important, and that both can work together to supplement each other.
What is clear to me is that cities, at the scale of say Tokyo, wouldn’t function nearly as efficiently if it weren’t for their extensive fixed rail networks. At the same time, there are many cities (or portions of cities) that do not have the prerequisite population and employment densities to support this same level of transit investment. And that has created a strong pull away from transit (and active transport such as cycling) toward private vehicles. Sprawling cities signal to people that they should probably be driving. This is one of the reasons why land use should never be separated from mobility discussions.
How autonomous vehicles change all of this remains to be seen. Though I do think it will make cars less private and more public transit-like. Studies show that most of us are pretty good at coming up with incremental improvements to the things we already know and understand. i.e. This is how I would make this car better. But we’re far worse at coming up with and predicting tectonic shifts in the landscape. And autonomy is probably one of those shifts. But as long as our built form remains heterogeneous, I am inclined to believe that a mixture of mobility solutions will be needed. Maybe that means car tunnels. Or maybe it doesn’t.
Last week, SHARE NOW — which was previously known as Car2Go — announced that it will be exiting the North American market entirely come February 29, 2020, and that it will also cease operations in London, Brussels, and Florence. A couple of reasons were cited, including the “volatile state of the global mobility landscape,” but that really translates into low adoption:
Further, despite our best efforts and investments in Brussels, London and Florence over the years, we are unable to continue operations in a manner that’s sustainable for our business due to low adoption rates.
Moving forward, SHARE NOW will focus on the remaining 18 European cities. We, along with our shareholders, believe these markets show the clearest potential for profitable growth and mobility innovation.
There was a period of time when I used to use Car2Go here in Toronto. My network did as well. But that quickly stopped with the rise of Uber and Lyft. I mean, why bother finding a Car2Go and then parking it, when there’s a much lower friction option? I would imagine that’s how most people feel. (Maybe there’s a care share advantage for longer trips.)
At the same time, companies such as Uber and Lyft have, as you know, not performed well as public companies. The market is nervous about their path to profitability. In my view, they’re largely an undifferentiated offering right now, and it’s pretty easy to switch across them. So yeah, I guess the global mobility landscape is pretty volatile.
For all of us who are involved in the building of cities, it is important to remember that cities emerge and thrive as a result of economic purpose. Take, for example, Sao Paulo. Once one of the poorest of Portuguese colonies, it is today the largest city in the southern hemisphere and one of the largest and most diverse urban agglomerations in the world.
How did all of this happen? It was probably because of coffee.
Brazil is the largest producer of coffee in the world. And it has owned this title for some 150 years. The best areas to grow coffee (as a result of climate, I’m told) are in the southeast part of the country, in and around Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The inland state of Minas Gerais is the biggest producer.
But here’s the thing. Rio de Janeiro is along the coast and Sao Paulo is not, though as of 1869 it had been connected to the port of Santos by rail. This geographical feature made Sao Paulo a logical place for rail to converge as it made its way from the coffee plantations in the interior of the country to the coast, and then out to the rest of the world.
Coffee was the economic purpose. And it was facilitated by Brazil’s longstanding use of slave labor.
In 1888 that changed. Slavery was abolished, giving Brazil the dubious distinction of being the last country in the Western world to do so. The problem is that the coffee industry relied heavily on this labor. So to fill this void and keep the coffee industry happy, a deliberate effort was made to increase immigration.
From 1870 to 2010, about 2.3 million immigrants settled in the state of Sao Paulo, many from Italy and Japan. Today, about half of the city is thought to have at least some Italian ancestry. And it is generally believed that it was this significant influx of immigrants that helped the city to industrialize in the way that it did.
Big and diverse. And coffee probably had a lot to do with it.
Each year, Bloomberg NEF (New Energy Finance) publishes a long-term forecast of how electric vehicles and shared mobility will/might impact our cities. Predicting the future is never easy. And forecasts are never right. But they’re valuable to do.
By 2040, BNEF believes that 57% of global passenger vehicle sales and 30% of the global passenger vehicle fleet will have some form of an electric drivetrain. Either full battery electric (BEV) or plug-in-hybrid electric (PHEV). Looking at this another way, we have about 17 years (2037) until ICE and electric vehicles are expected to intersect and hit 50/50 in terms of global sales.
A big part of what is driving the adoption of electric vehicles is that the price of lithium-ion batteries keeps coming down. Assuming this trend continues, the price of EVs and ICE vehicles (in most segments) should reach parity sometime in the mid-2020s. Meaning, yes, it’s more expensive to produce an EV today.
All of this will also impact mobility services (ride-hailing and ride-sharing). Today, less than 5% of annual kilometers traveled by passenger vehicles around the world is thought to be done through some form of a ride-hailing app. That’s still a pretty significant number, actually. Though only about 1.8% of this fleet is electric.
By 2040, shared mobility services are expected to rise to 19% (see above) and — because their costs are coming down — 80% of this fleet is expected to be electric. Autonomous vehicles are not expected to meaningfully impact global mobility until the 2030s. But the growth in shared mobility services is still expected to reduce the demand for car ownership, and likely parking.
Other high-level findings from BNEF’s 2019 Electric Vehicle Outlook can be found here. If you want to access the full report, you’ll need to be a BNEF client.
On October 3, New York City did something very similar to what Toronto did on King Street. It restricted through traffic on 14th Street to only trucks and buses, and turned the street into the city’s first “busway.”
Under the new rules, cars, vans, and taxis are restricted every day of the week from 6am to 10pm, unless they’re dropping off or picking someone up, or entering into a parking garage (i.e. local traffic only). But after this, they need to make the first available right and turn off the street. Again, it’s pretty similar to the way things work here on King.
On the first day of the 18-month pilot program, the buses actually had to slow down in order to keep to their schedule. They were moving too quickly. Previously one of the slowest routes in the city, the M14 bus is now expected to increase its average speed by about 25%.
The reality is that we need to get better at moving people around our cities without a car. This is one way to do it and we know it works. My prediction is that the 14th Street pilot will prove to be a success. It will then get replicated in other parts of Manhattan. Probably on other crosstown streets.
This recent Streetsblog article about the possibility of turning the M Ocean View line in San Francisco into a kind of subway is a good reminder about the always important connection between transit investment and density. The question I always pose to myself is, “If I were a private company deciding where to spend the money on a new and expensive subway line, what would I look for?” Most of us recognize that population and employment densities would be near, if not at, the top of the list.
Of course, if the company were fully private, then we would run the risk of low-density / unprofitable areas of the city not being serviced by transit. For a variety of reasons, that’s not an ideal outcome, which is why transit operators are mostly subsidized. The challenge is that the way we plan transit in most — or all? — cities has become so highly politicized today. That’s how we end up with the wrong transit technologies in areas that don’t have the density to properly support them.
Now, I don’t know the specifics of the M Ocean View line. (Maybe some of you do and will provide those thoughts in the comments below.) So this is not a post about what may or may not be appropriate in this particular instance. But it is a commentary on the importance of fiscal prudence and sound transportation planning.
This recent study used geotagged tweets to measure social connectedness within American cities. There are two measures: (1) concentrated mobility and (2) equitable mobility. The first measures the extent to which social connections (geotagged tweets) are concentrated in a set of places within the city. And the second looks at the degree in which people move between neighborhoods in roughly similar proportions. These measures are the y-axis and the x-axis, respectively, in this graph:
So how do you read this chart?
Well if you look at New York, you’ll see that it is relatively high in concentrated mobility, but the lowest in terms of equitable mobility. This means that social connections are highly concentrated and that there’s low connectedness to other neighborhoods within the city. Miami, on the other hand, is the opposite. It’s also an outlier. Few hubs. But its social connections appear to cross neighborhoods and spread across the city.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the study found that the size of a city seems to have the biggest impact on social connectedness. Which makes sense — it becomes harder to get around and so people start to localize. I am reminded of this whenever my friends in Los Angeles tell me they never go to the beach because it’s simply too difficult and too time consuming to get across the city.
This also became clear to me after I started playing around with the Moves App back in 2015. The app no longer exists, but it was an activity tracker that allowed you to map where you, well, moved. And the more time you spent in one place, the more concentrated the activity would become. They depicted this through larger and larger circles. Example maps, here. My maps revealed that I need to branch out into different neighborhoods more often.
This recent Economist article makes the argument that, despite the recent (and sometimes annoying) proliferation of electric scooters across Europe, we probably shouldn’t be that grouchy about them. And that’s, “because the rise of the electric scooter is part of a broader and welcome phenomenon: the gradual retreat of the car from the European city.” By way of one example, by next year, Paris will have grown its bike lane network by 50% in five years.
The article ends with the point that, while this may seem like a “revolution,” it’s actually a “reversion.” European cities such as Paris and Antwerp (examples from the article) were both built before the advent of the car and were never really designed for it, although Haussmann’s wide avenues certainly helped. All of this gets back to a point I tried to make over the weekend with this post about driving and parking, and the relevance of urban form.
Reversion is a lot easier than a revolution. And for most North American cities, a revolution is what’s needed if we are in fact serious about a post-car future.
I now know what all the fuss is about. Yesterday I rode a dockless (Lime) scooter for the first time. I took in lieu of an Uber in order to get to the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT) on Lisbon’s waterfront.
Here’s another photo from my ride:
We don’t have these scooters in Toronto, but I understand they are imminent. And now that I’ve used one — and learned how shockingly fun they are — I can see why they are proliferating across so many cities.
They’re a solution to the last mile problem, but they’re also fast enough (20 km/h) that they can be a substitute for other forms of urban mobility, as was the case for me yesterday. I can also see myself using one to get to the office when I would rather not sweat through my suit.
Of course, there is the much talked about problem of scooters as urban litter. It’s a real thing and I am seeing that firsthand here in Lisbon. Because they are dockless, people leave them anywhere and everywhere. At the same time, part of what makes them so convenient is that, well, you can leave them anywhere and everywhere.
I’m confident there’s a tidier solution that doesn’t involve fixed docking stations. Geofencing, perhaps? Cars are “dockless” and we’ve sort of figured that out. Many cities are already working on and experimenting with different solutions. Here’s an example from Tel Aviv. I have also noticed a natural clustering effect.
I’m not sure how good of a business they will prove to be. The barriers to entry seem fairly low right now. You just need some Chinese scooters and an app, which is why I am noticing so many competing companies. But as the market matures, increased regulation could change this.
We are going through a period of growing pains and it’s not particularly elegant. However, I believe we’ll get there. So I am looking forward to riding these scooters when they do finally land in Toronto.
