The School of Cities at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley have been using mobile phone data to track the recovery of 62 downtowns across North America. This work has been being published at downtownrecovery.com,… Read More
According to this annual survey by Henley & Partners (first chart from Bloomberg), these are the top 10 wealthiest cities in the world when you count the number of high-net-worth individuals (i.e. people with investable wealth greater than US$1 million): However, if you instead count… Read More
On July 1 of this year, a new California bill, called the “Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act of 2022”, will go into effect. And the goal of this legislation is to significantly increase the supply of new homes in the state by allowing… Read More
Consider the following stat: 65% of all transit trips across the US in 2019 came from just 6 metro areas: New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, these are all places with dense and walkable urban centers. In other words,… Read More
As I mentioned yesterday, I am not a structural engineer. However, my friend James Cranford is. He is Principal at Stephenson Engineering and he was nice enough to answer a few of my questions about soft story buildings (storey if you’re Canadian). BD: What is… Read More
Cruise, the autonomous taxi service owned by GM, is working toward offering 24/7 service in San Francisco. I wrote about that here. And so it recently came out with some supportive data suggesting that between September and November of last year, it completed 2,800 rides… Read More
What do you get when you have some of the most stringent affordable housing requirements in the United States? You might think that you get lots and lots of affordable housing, but that is not the case in San Francisco. Paradoxically, you still get some… Read More
Over the past few years, I have been writing about the fall off in public transit ridership that we have seen as a result of the pandemic. Most recently, I mentioned it in my predictions for 2023. This topic doesn’t seem to get a lot… Read More
It has become tradition around here that at the end of each year I write down my predictions for the following one. And in 2022, I did that here. The overarching point of writing something like this down publicly is not necessarily to be right… Read More
Cruise, which I wrote about earlier this year, has just announced that its autonomous taxi service will soon be available to the general public 24 hours a day, across all of San Francisco. Initially the service was only available between 11PM and 5AM (when traffic… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 