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.

Subscribe

Tag: strava

  • Fall ride on the Bench

    Today I went for a bike ride on the Niagara Peninsula.

    We started at Project Bench, went to the Jordan Village (where the street was having its grand re-opening), stopped in at RPM Bakehouse for an obligatory apple sticky bun (the line was out the door and we got the last one), and then did a big loop that took us along the Welland Canal and through Port Dalhousie.

    Here’s the map:

    It was a great ride, and it might be one of my last long rides for the season. It’s just about time to pull out the snowboard. But for now, I’m going to put tiger balm on my knees and go to bed early. See you tomorrow.

  • To the badlands for burgers

    My friend Austin Kjorven convinced me that we should ride 70 km today so that I can try the beer and burgers at Badlands Brewing Company. Here’s the route we took:

    I can now confirm that their smash burgers are as advertised. Great buns. I even had two of them just to make sure the first one wasn’t some sort of fluke.

    My knees are, however, still giving me problems. I even tried KT tape and the brightest compression socks available in Austin’s closet.

    Still, it was an awesome ride. If you happen to find yourself near Caledon, Ontario, definitely check out the Badlands Brewing Company.

  • Happy May long weekend

    This morning, I went cycling with my good friend Austin Kjorven up in Milton. And it was a stark reminder that he is an athlete and holds a Guinness World Record, and that I spend the vast majority of my days sitting at a desk.

    I’m excited for more riding this summer. Happy May long weekend, everyone.

  • Sunday morning is for riding

    This is a fun circuit.

    Go west to the Humber Bay Arch Bridge.

    Shoot up the Humber River and pass under various bridges and subway tracks.

    Arrive in Weston (which, by the way, was established in 1796). Go west on Lawrence to Royal York (there are a couple of hills here that will get your bum up).

    Then bomb down Royal York as fast as you can until you arrive at San Remo Bakery for coffee, donuts, cured meats, and other wonderful things that I don’t normally order.

    The circuit:

  • Okay, I’m hooked

    I’ve always loved cycling, but never before have I had a bike like this:

    And boy does it make a world of a difference.

    Here’s my inaugural ride (excluding the night ride I did last week where I mostly couldn’t see where I was going):

    The High Park loop was a lot of fun. The entire park is closed to cars on the weekends (though I understand that some people are upset about this feature).

    I want to do a ride like this at least once a week, which means I’m probably going to need to get something from Pas Normal Studios to pad my ass. I’m also working my way up to clipless shoes.

    Cycling is fun and Toronto is a great city for it.

  • I finally got a road bike

    I did it. I finally got (well, ordered) a new and more serious road bike.

    I have been planning to do this since last year. I almost bought a friend’s Cervelo a few weeks ago, but I took it to Gears on King Street and they immediately told me it was too small for me. The frame was 58cm and apparently I need 60cm.

    So I instead ordered a new Cannondale CAAD13. It’s one that my serious cycling friends — people like Jeremiah Shamess — tell me is a good “starter bike.”

    I’m excited to get going. In the winter, I am, as most of you know, all about snowboarding. But I need something active/challenging for the summer that I can be equally fanatical about. Maybe that thing will be cycling.

    The one thing I do need to give some more thought to is cycling to the office. I know a bunch of people who do this, but they tend to go to the gym and then shower before heading to their desk. I’m not sure I want to make this my morning routine.

    Either way, I guess it’s time to dust off my Strava. If any of you are into cycling, hit me up on Twitter/X.

    Photo: Cannondale

  • Munich is planning an ambitious…Radschnellverbindungen

    On Monday of this past long weekend, I went for a quick bike ride over to the Beaches, up to Little India, and then back down to the St. Lawrence Market. 

    The ride along Lake Shore and through the Beaches is one of my favorites. Minus a few awkward twists and turns as you leave the East Bayfront, it’s generally smooth sailing. It feels a bit like a bike highway.

    It took me about 24 minutes to get to the beach, which means I was traveling on average just over 20 km/h. If you lived in the Beaches and worked downtown, that would be a perfectly reasonable commute in my mind.

    And it’s for reasons like this that Munich is looking to invest in a huge network of bike highways. They’re calling it a Radschnellverbindungen – which I might start ambitiously calling some of the bike paths in Toronto – and the idea is to connect the city with all of the suburbs.

    Below is a map of the routes they’re looking at. The purple lines are “suitable routes” and the blue lines are corridors they’ve looked at it. If I’m wrong in my translation, blame Google.

    They are still in the feasibility stage, but the idea is for each bike path to be 4 meters wide and have no cross streets or traffic lights – essential a highway for bikes.

    And if you think this all sounds like a pipe dream, check out this video of the recently opened Cykelslangen (Cycle Snake) in Copenhagen.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iypvbe6J6Qs?rel=0]

    Would you commute to work on your bike if you had a highway, just like cars do?

  • How mobile apps are going to help us build better cities

    image

    Some of you might know that I’ve recently started using a mobile app called Strava. It’s a platform that allows you to track your runs and bike rides, as well as those of your friends. It tells you your speed, elevation changes, and it also maps your trips–among many other things. Here’s what my 50 km ‘Ride for Heart’ looks like from last Sunday.

    But what’s even more interesting is how cities are starting to use the data this app collects:

    For $20,000 a year, transportation planners and others can access Strava Metro, which provides an unprecedented look at where and how people are biking. It can tell them where they speed up and slow down, for example, or where they might stay in the street or ride on a crosswalk. That information can reveal where bike lanes or traffic calming measures would be useful, and if those already installed are effective.

    It’s a perfect example of how “tech” is infiltrating so many other sectors. Mobile technology and networks are generating huge amounts of data and it’s happening at an increasing rate. We’re gaining insights into the way people live that simply wasn’t possible before. Some of this information will inevitably be misused, but a lot of it will be used to improve the way we live our lives.

    I know that the City of Toronto also has its own proprietary cycling app and is hoping to collect similar sorts of data from it. But intuitively, I don’t think they’ll be able to compete with the scale of a platform like Strava. Though I certainly applaud the initiative.

    The information age is an exciting time.

    Image: Strava via Wired

  • We want what we want

    This past Sunday night I was out for a bike ride with a few friends all around downtown Toronto. According to Strava, we did almost 22 km. Click here to see our route. During the ride, one of my friends said something to me that stood out. He said that when he’s on a bike he wants all cars off the road; but when he’s in a car, he wants all bikes off the road.

    Now, this may seem like a fairly banal statement, but I think it demonstrates a number of things about people and the way we interact with cities. First, we’re all probably pretty selfish. We want what we want at a specific moment in time and we easily forget what it’s like to be on the other side of a situation.

    Second, I think it reinforces what I wrote a month ago in a post called: Every street can’t be everything to everyone. If we want to improve the user experience for a variety of different use cases (driving, biking, walking and so on), we should decide when and where we’re going to optimize for each. 

    The reason my friend said what he said was because we were riding on a road with no bike lanes. We were swerving in and around cars. And when the street is shared like this it naturally becomes a competition of who can be the most aggressive and dominate the road–bikes or cars. But as exciting as that might be, it’s probably not an ideal way to build our cities.