On Monday morning, I flew on Delta from Salt Lake City to Toronto, which in this direction takes just over 3 hours. And it was my first time ever experiencing reasonably reliable wi-fi on a flight. Maybe this is already common for the people who… Read More
Sometime before the Paris 2024 Olympics this summer, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is expected to announce who will host the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games. Right now, the two frontrunners are thought to be the French Alps and Salt Lake City/Park City — I… Read More
I used Turo for the first time this evening. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Turo is like Airbnb, but for cars. It connects people who have cars with people who need rental cars. Here is a photo of ours at SLC: The pickup… Read More
It is well known that Salt Lake City has some of the biggest blocks and widest streets in the United States. This is typically a challenge if you’re trying to create a walkable urban environment; however, it can also be an opportunity, because it means… Read More
Back in the spring, I wrote about a study that was done by the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley that measured “downtown recoveries” using mobile phone data. In other words, it looked at where people’s phones were lingering to try and… Read More
As an add-on to yesterday’s post about ground floor retail in mixed-use developments, I thought I would provide a few illustrative and real-world examples to demonstrate some of the challenges that I was trying to describe. Note that this post is not meant to be… Read More
Earlier this year, Salt Lake City enacted new policy called the Downtown Heights and Street Activation Ordinance. As the name suggests, the ordinance addresses building heights, allows for taller buildings in the city, and works to improve ground floor animation. This is among other things.… Read More
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… Read More
This is an interesting article from Brookings that talks about the “myths of converting offices into housing.” What I especially like about the article is that it’s nuanced, and it directly addresses many of the myths that currently surround offices. The first one is that… Read More
Every now and then somebody comes forward and proposes an urban gondola. The most recent one that I have heard about here in Toronto was this one from 2016 called the “Don Valley Cable Car.” But like many gondola proposals, it sort of just disappeared.… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 