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: taxi driver

  • 1970s New York, through the lens of a taxi driver

    Even if you never experienced it yourself, we have all heard the lore of 1970s New York City. It was a raw, dangerous, and unpolished city that was simultaneously teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and providing fertile ground for artists and many other forms of expression (some suspect and some not).

    Jane Jacobs is famous for saying that “new ideas often require old buildings.” And the New York of this era was exactly that kind of city. Artist Donald Judd (a favorite of mine) bought his five-storey cast-iron building in Soho (on Spring Street) around this time (1968). He paid just under $70,000.

    So it is perhaps easy to romanticize this more accessible (and equitable?) version of New York. But there were many other things going on the city at this time beyond minimalist art in Soho loft buildings.

    This photo essay by Joseph Rodriguez does a great job at telling some of those other stories in a decidedly humanistic way. Joseph was a New York cab driver from 1977 to 1985. And his final years, he had taken up photography and had started documenting the people and the city through his windows.

    His incredible photos are also available in this book called, TAXI: Journey Through My Windows 1977-1987.

    Photo: Joseph Rodriguez

  • Why can’t cities reach equilibrium?

    The October issue of The New Yorker has an interesting piece called: Naked Cities – The death and life of urban America.

    I find the article ends up rambling a bit, but I like the idea presented right at the beginning. The idea that cities can never really find equilibrium. They’re either dying, or victims of their own success.

    Here’s that paragraph:

    Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness. In the seventies and eighties, the seemingly permanent urban crisis became the verdict that American civilization had passed on itself. Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods, drinking more espresso per capita in Seattle than in Naples, while in San Francisco the demand for inner-city housing is so keen that one-bedroom apartments become scenes of civic conflict—and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege. We oscillate between “Taxi Driver” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” without arriving at a stable picture of something in between.

    I like this because there’s truth to it. But at the end of day, this is just one of the many challenges facing great city building. 

    To solve the problem of affordable housing you could just be a city in decline. But that’s not much fun. So the better option, however difficult it may be, is to figure out how to manage the negative externalities associated with winning.

  • The Tesla Easter egg

    I was rushing to get to a real estate forum dinner last night and so instead of walking — which is normally what I would have done — I decided to grab an UberX. As some of you might be aware, I like UberX. It’s convenient to use. And the fares are cheaper than regular taxis. So why wouldn’t I use it?

    But last night I got an extra treat. A guy named Mike picked me up in his Tesla Model S:

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    According to Mike there are two of these “Easter eggs“ in the UberX Toronto fleet, which I was also told is now up to hundreds of cars. So it’s not everyday that you’ll get picked up in a Tesla.

    If you’ve never been in a Tesla, the first thing you’ll likely notice is the absolutely epic screen that sits in the dash. Most people’s laptops don’t have a screen this big. It’s gorgeous.

    But there are a bunch of small details that also standout. For example, the door handles sit flush with the door until they’re needed. Here’s a video of how they work:

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxavZ2QxuLY]

    But the real question that is probably on your mind is: Why is some guy with a Tesla driving around Toronto offering rides via UberX? That was certainly one of the first questions I asked him after I got in the car.

    And the answer is that he does it for fun.

    He actually owns a medical clinic in Markham, but comes downtown on the evenings and weekends to drive around and meet new people. In fact, he called it the “best networking tool on the planet.” Because as soon as he picks people up in his Tesla, they immediately take him seriously and want to have a conversation. That has translated into business relationships and even invites to parties. As in, he drives a group to a party and they ask him to come in — which he said he often does.

    If he really took it seriously and did it full-time, he figures he could make around $40,000 – 50,000 a year driving for UberX. And I believe that’s close to what a regular taxi driver would make. But again, that’s not why he’s doing it. Isn’t it interesting how things change?