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: regional rail

  • 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.

  • Line 1 to dinner

    On most days, I walk to the office. That is going to be changing later this summer, but what I’m about to say will still apply.

    Because I walk more often than I drive, whenever I have to go somewhere that necessitates a car and that obligates me to leave during the evening rush, the first thing I usually think to myself is “shit, it’s going to really suck getting out of downtown.”

    I have very little patience when it comes to sitting in traffic. So when I’m faced with this kind of situation, my mind immediately goes to: “okay Brandon, what are your other options here?”

    And this is exactly what happened this past Friday. I had a dinner up in Vaughan after work and I opted to take the subway to VMC station (the northern terminus of one of Toronto’s lines).

    It was actually my first time riding this new line extension and it was cool to see the area around the station. It’s not yet a 15-minute community, but I believe it can get there with some narrow streets and the right kind of ground floors.

    The entire trip took about 45 minutes, and I can tell you that on more than one occasion I thought to myself, “this is way better than sitting in traffic.”

  • Two-way, all-day regional rail

    Neat B and I had a very good friend’s 40th birthday dinner in the Junction this evening.

    So naturally, we walked over to the UP Express station from our offices in the Financial District and took the train one stop to Bloor Street. When we got off — along with everyone else who uses our airport link as a regional express train — we then walked the West Toronto Railpath up to the restaurant on Dupont Street. All in all, it took us about 35 minutes. We hopped on the 5:30PM train and we arrived at Lucia around 5:50PM.

    I know that a lot of people use this particular train to get to and from work, but I’m always so happy whenever I do it. I will take this over being stuck in traffic every day of the week. And for me, it is a powerful reminder of just how critical “two-way, all-day regional rail service” is to this urban region. We can talk all we want about better traffic signals, ramping up enforcement, or whatever, but the real solution to solving traffic congestion is getting people moving in other ways.

    Anyway, I digress. Here’s a photo of the delicious pasta we had:

    Happy birthday Philip!