Tag: paris

• Slamming the breaks on anti-motorist measures

  Last week the Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak, announced a number of initiatives designed to support drivers. The slogan is “slamming the brakes on anti-motorist measures” and you can find more information about it, over here.

  Naturally this is sparking the usual debate about driving vs. all the other forms of mobility. But it also seems to be part of some sort of broader political strategy intended to distance his party from things like environmental sustainability, net zero targets, and 15-minute city design.

  If you’re looking for a way to process the above announcement, this recent FT article by John Burn-Murdoch is an excellent place to start. Firstly, the UK (outside of London) is generally poorly served by public transport. This is an important thing to know. By the below measure — percentage of large cities that have trams, a metro, or urban light rail — it is even worse than the US:

  

  In fact, one way to think about and measure mobility in the UK is to think in terms of the following geographic categories: there’s US cities, European cities (including London), and then there’s the rest of the UK. In the case of US cities, they have very clearly optimized around road infrastructure. Meaning, the vast majority of people don’t take transit to work, but the area (km2) you can cover by car (in 30 mins) is high.

  Look at Houston and Dallas on the left side of this graph:

  

  On the other hand, European cities (again, including London) have optimized in the opposite direction. A lot more people walk, cycle, and take transit to work. In the case of cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, Bilbao, Prague, and others, the number is greater than 60%! However, they’re sucky places to drive, as I learned this past summer. The area you can cover by car within 30 mins, is relatively low (bottom right of the above graph).

  The challenge for British cities (excluding London), is that they seem to be right in the middle (burgundy dots above). Poor public transport (low percentage of trips to work). And poor road infrastructure (limited area accessible by car within 30 mins). So it is perhaps no surprise that Sunak is honing in on this issue. London is not representative of Britain. And based on the above data, the majority of people living in British cities are almost certainly mobility frustrated.

  Of course, to correct this issue you have two options. You can move toward the left (in the above chart) and optimize for road infrastructure. Or you can move to the right and optimize for public transport and other forms of mobility. Based on last week’s announcement, Sunak has chosen the left.

  Charts: FT

  2023.10.01

• The end of private car ownership

  

  Here is an argument that Philadelphia-based Diana Lind recently made on her blog, The New Urban Order:

  I believe we’re at the beginning of the end of private car ownership in American cities. This idea came from thinking about the next steps when our RAV4 dies in the coming year or so: not only shouldn’t we replace it, but we won’t want to replace it. Right now only about a quarter of Americans do not drive to work, and only 9 percent of Americans do not have access to a car at all. But I think that in the coming decade there’s going to be a ton of potential to convert people living in dense cities and neighborhoods away from private cars.

  There are a number of reasons for why she believes this is going to be the case and, to quickly summarize, they are: remote work, declining birth rates, more old people, Uber and other services, and autonomous vehicles. And generally, I would agree that there is a strong case to be made here.

  But one thing that she does not explicitly talk about is the relevance of built form in this move away from private car ownership. She does mention “people living in dense cities” (see above), but does this mean that we are to assume density will remain a prerequisite, as it mostly is today?

  Urban density dictates so much of how we move around. When I was driving around Paris during the summer, I couldn’t wait to return our car and get back on foot. You should have also seen the gymnastics we pulled off to refill the tank. Driving in the city was annoying. Paris is designed for walking, taking the metro and, now, cycling.

  On the other hand, when I land in Salt Lake City (Park City), the first thing I do is head to the car rental area. The city is getting better at trying to reorient itself, and there is a tram (Green Line) that runs from the airport through downtown, but it very much remains a driving city. And ideally you want something like a Toyota 4Runner that will take you through snow and up steep pitches.

  So while I agree that, directionally, Diana is right, I think the question remains: What does this mean for individual cities and their built environments? In a city like Paris, it is obvious. Private car ownership is highly likely to continue declining. But in a place like Salt Lake City, I think it’s going to be much more challenging and take a lot longer.

  Photo by Chris Henry on Unsplash

  2023.09.29

• What’s real anymore?

  Generative AI has made it a lot easier to make things up using software like Photoshop. This, of course, isn’t a new thing. But it has gotten significantly easier for people like me who aren’t experts in photo editing.

  Here are two examples that I created this morning. The first is a photo of me from last summer in the Salt Flats of Utah:

  

  And here I am again after adding new clothes, a dog friend, a couple taking photos, a more impressive backdrop, and some sort of body of water in front of me:

  

  The second is a photo from Paris:

  

  Now here it is again with tall buildings in the background, glass storefronts, a few neon signs, string lights above the middle of the street, a bollard blocking car access, and a few more people:

  

  These aren’t entirely perfect if you’re really paying attention. But for the most part, I think they’re pretty convincing — especially the second one.

  Generated images are only going to get better going forward and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But we do have to start training ourselves to question whether something is real or doctored. It’s already hard to tell.

  2023.09.23

• Learning French, again

  

  I grew up going to a French school. For a significant portion of my early education, I had every single class — except English class — in French. But to be honest, I never really loved it. I had started midway through elementary school and so I always felt like my French was never quite good enough.

  I was behind relative to my classmates. I needed special tutoring to get caught up (while my classmates were off learning a third language). And so I used to constantly beg my mom to take me out of French school and put me in a, you know, regular English school. I know this was tough for my mom, but her response was always steadfast: “You’ll thank me when you’re older.”

  At the time, I couldn’t possibly imagine her ever being correct with this statement. But it turns out, she was. Today, I’m grateful to be able to travel to a place like Paris and kind of speak the language. (I say kind of because, hey, it’s been a long time since high school!)

  And I’m grateful that when I go into Mabel’s Bakery across from Junction House that I can order a coffee and a croissant in French. (Most of the people there are from France. Try it for yourself. They’re lovely humans.)

  In fact, I enjoy it so much that I recently decided to enroll in a French class at Alliance Française here in Toronto. (Fresh $80 textbook pictured above.) Obviously the 9-year-old version of myself would be completely shocked with this absurd decision. But I guess this is just what happens when you’ve been indoctrinated from a young age.

  Or maybe I just really want to build something in France one day.

  2023.09.22

• 1/21st of a second home

  I don’t know for exactly how long, but for a very long time people have been trying to solve this real estate problem: “I have a desire to own a home, or multiple homes, around the world. However, I don’t know how often I’d actually use it/them, and this desire is both expensive and a pain in the ass.”

  And so unless you have a lot of money and can make the pain in the ass part go away, there seems to exist an ongoing need to make fulfilling this desire both cheaper and easier. Perhaps the most common ways are through a timeshare property or through some kind of fractional ownership structure, where you own a share of a property.

  Some companies are even “tokenizing” this second structure on blockchains. I have read about one company that is buying vacation homes and then issuing 365 corresponding tokens. Each token represents 1 day of occupancy (and actual title ownership apparently). In theory this sounds kind of neat, but you’re also buying a second home with potentially 364 other strangers.

  So here’s another approach that I just learned about. The UK-based company, August, has devised a model that works like this:

  • August starts with “homeowner curation.” Meaning, they start by vetting homeowners to make sure that they’re not weird or something.
  • Once they have a suitable collection of homeowners, August sets up a new real estate entity that all of the homeowners must then fund equally.
  • This entity, by way of August, goes out and buys 5 properties, and each homeowner receives an equal share of the ownership. (Typically, they target 16-21 groups per entity.)
  • August renovates the 5 properties, gets them ready for occupancy, and then manages them on ongoing basis. This includes bookings.
  • Finally, each homeowner gets an average of 8-10 weeks per year across all of their homes.

  In terms of the homes themselves, their pied-à-terre collection includes homes in Paris, Rome, Cannes, Barcelona, and London. They are typically between 70-100 square meters with 2 bedrooms and 1-2 bathrooms. And the average price/value is supposedly around €1,250,000 (post-renovation?), with the entry price of a share starting at €340,000.

  I’m not sure if this share figure is based on 21 homeowners, but if it is, then that’s €7,140,000 of equity being raised in order to buy somewhere around €6,250,000 of real estate. Is the spread their margin for setting this all up? There’s also an annual fee per owner (€8,600), which presumably covers operating costs and the ongoing management of the properties.

  A model like this naturally provokes a lot of questions. What happens if somebody wants to sell? Does the next buyer need to be similarly vetted for overall weirdness? And how liquid is 1/21st of a 5-property apartment portfolio? I don’t know these answers, but intuitively these shares have got to be less liquid than a 100% sale.

  However, as a solution to the problem of “I have a desire to own homes across Europe but I’m not quite rich enough to make it truly carefree”, this seems like a pretty clever solution.

  2023.09.21

• Paris in August 🇫🇷

  We’re no longer in Paris. We’ve been back in Toronto for about 3 weeks now. But the pictures live on and I finally got around to processing all of the ones that I took on my Fujifilm X-T3 (23mm f/2).

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  2023.09.18

• Eliminating poopy water

  

  Lots of cities around the world, including Toronto, have (at least partially) what is called a combined sewer system. If the sewer system was built prior to the 1940s and it hasn’t been replaced, there’s a good chance that it could be a combined system. About a quarter of Toronto and about 60% of New York City still run on combined systems.

  What this means is that both stormwater and sewage run in the same pipes. Most of the time this is fine, but if there’s a heavy precipitation event and the system backs up, then you have poop getting diverted into rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. In Toronto, this happens in places like the Don River and the inner harbor, and in Paris it happens in places like the Seine.

  I was recently reading something suggesting that sewage generally gets dumped into the Seine about 12x per year as result of major rain events. This is why it’s such a difficult and expensive task to make these bodies of water swimmable, which is something that Paris wants to do before it hosts the Olympics next year.

  Thankfully, Toronto also wants to do the same. And in 2018, it started construction on the largest stormwater management program in the city’s history. The overall budget is about $3 billion. Once complete, it should more or less eliminate combined sewer overflows, meaning our waters will become a lot cleaner and more swimmable.

  This certainly isn’t the sexiest capital project to announce and talk about. It largely happens behind the scenes. But it is going to lead to a significant quality of life upgrade for the cities willing to take it on — one that will pay dividends well into the future.

  Photo by Andre Gaulin on Unsplash

  2023.09.09

• People prefer IKEA’s maze-like design

  IKEA opened its first permanent showroom in 1953. And by 1965, it had opened a 500,000 sf flagship store on the outskirts of Stockholm.

  Supposedly, the inspiration for this new store was Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York. Inspired by its continuous looping design, IKEA wanted to create a real-life version of its well-known catalog. This led to the current maze-like design where you wander through staged living spaces and get excited to buy lots of things.

  However, as IKEA began to open in more urban locations it actually started doing away with this prototypical design. The thinking, which seems perfectly reasonable, was that mazes weren’t appropriate for smaller and more urban locations. These customers would want to pop in, quickly get what they need, and then leave.

  But it turns out they were wrong. Their customers are telling them the opposite: they still want mazes. In other words, they want a curated experience that helps them figure out what to buy. According to IKEA: “People buy more when they are shown more.” Sounds right. And so IKEA is now working to make its urban stores more, you know, maze-like.

  The company has already done this in cities like Vienna and Paris, and apparently it consistently leads to higher sales. It’s a good reminder that (1) humans are still humans regardless of where they live and (2) if you want people to visit and linger in your physical store, it’s good practice to curate experiences.

  P.S. I love IKEA.

  2023.09.05

• La tour Montparnasse at ground level

  

  The Tour Montparnasse in Paris recently turned 50. We spoke about that over here. But having visited the tower last week, including its top observation deck, I can now confidently say that I understand why many/most Parisians dislike it so much.

  It is a complex that could be in any city in the world and it is clear that it has been seeing disinvestment for quite some time (presumably due to its upcoming renovation). 

  However, a lot of the discussion seems to be focused on how its built form is a towering contrast to the rest of Paris. This is, of course, correct. But the same is true of the Eiffel Tower. One big and important difference is how these two towers meet the ground.

  La Tour Eiffel sits in a beautiful landscaped park where people sit and hang out (photo by me):

  

  Whereas the Tour Montparnasse is disconnected from its surrounding context. It feels like that train station on the wrong side of town (photos from Google Streetview):

  

  

  

  So it’s no wonder that its height gets picked on. What is implicit in this treatment of the ground plane is a belief that this tower is not worthy of celebrating. It does not deserve a beautiful park. And it does not deserve to be a ceremonial view terminus like every other icon in Paris.

  Thankfully, the current design for its renovation appears to address this (rendering via Nouvelle AOM):

  

  And this is arguably the most important design move. Ironically, what happens at the ground level could be what makes people finally appreciate what happens up top.

  2023.09.04

• The Arc de Triomphe roundabout takes some getting used to

  In case I haven’t been clear enough: I love cities. I vividly remember being a kid and being excited to come downtown. My mom has told me that my eyes used to light up — every, single, time. Even today, when I’m away from Toronto and I return home, I’m excited to see the skyline. I miss it.

  This afternoon I got that same feeling on our return to Paris, even though it is not home. We spent the last two days in Normandy, specifically Étretat and Rouen, and as beautiful and as wonderful as these places are, I was genuinely excited to come back to the capital.

  My other revelation is that driving in Paris sucks.

  I would much rather walk, cycle, or take the metro. That is what this city is designed for. Still, I’m happy that we rented a car for Normandy and that I learned — after being honked at — how to appropriately conduct myself in the infamous Arc de Triomphe roundabout.

  Unlike every other roundabout in the world, you do not yield to cars already in the circle; you yield to cars entering the circle. Once you understand that, it’s significantly easier. Though, supposedly, car accidents that happen within the circle are automatically every driver’s fault and every insurer pays.

  I guess that says something about its orderliness.

  Aren’t cities wonderful?

  2023.08.28