Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1054

Bob Lutz is a former vice chairman and head of product development at General Motors. Recently, he had this to say about the future of the auto industry. 

Here are a couple of powerful snippets:

It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era.

The auto industry is on an accelerating change curve. For hundreds of years, the horse was the prime mover of humans and for the past 120 years it has been the automobile.

Now we are approaching the end of the line for the automobile because travel will be in standardized modules.

Everyone will have five years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap or trade it on a module.

Bob is 85 years old. This is somebody who spent his entire life in the auto industry telling us that the old model is now done. 

It reinforces something that I wrote about here , where the “end of the automotive era” was pegged at around 2021. 

And it is part of the mental model that I have started relying on today for decision making.

Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash

Toronto is now a week into the King Street Transit Pilot .

It’s still early days and transit guru  Steve Munro hasn’t yet published any before and after route performance. He will . But already the sentiment seems to be clear: This shit is working. There are many recounts of people’s commute times being more than cut in half. 

As somebody who walks this stretch of King every day, this isn’t surprising to me. There has been a dramatic reduction in the number of cars on the street.

What is perhaps surprising is that none of the surrounding streets seem to be any busier. I would like to see the data, but it feels as if most of the cars have simply disappeared. Are more people now taking transit? Has this been your impression?

Of course, the pilot isn’t perfect. What is not working are the signs that tell drivers they can’t drive through most of the intersections (only turn right). The circular green lights confuse them or they simply don’t care. 

There have been suggestions for better signals, such as this one :

And if the pilot in its current incarnation does stick, I am sure there will be many additional improvements like this one made. But even at this early stage, Toronto is calling the pilot a “ transit miracle .”

When City Council approved the pilot in the summer it had a preliminary cost estimate of $1.5 million . (Figure excludes the lost parking revenue associated with removing approximately 180 on-street parking spaces).

This is a relatively minuscule amount considering it has had an immediate impact, basically overnight, on the commute times of the 65,000 or so people who use this line every day.

And it feels even more minuscule when you consider that our Scarborough Subway extension is expected to cost $3.35+ billion to build and only service around 64,000 people a day when you look far into the future – 2031 to be exact.

The lesson here on King Street should be that light rail and surface transit routes can move lots of people very efficiently and cost effectively when you empower them to do precisely that.

Unconditional basic income is a popular idea these days, particularly in the tech community , as one way to respond to growing inequality. (Though, could our current levels of inequality just be the result of  a larger economic cycle ?)

One of the obvious counterarguments is that free money will make people lazy. But there are a number of studies out there, including real world examples, that suggest this isn’t necessarily true.

Wired recently published an interesting recount of one such example. 

In the late 90′s the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina opened up a casino. Many would argue that casinos are horrible as an economic development tool, but in this instance the roughly 15,000 tribal members were all promised an equal cut of the casino’s profits.

The first payments worked out to about $595 each. But in 2016, each tribal member received approximately $12,000. 

The operator takes 3% of annual profits as a management fee, and then the rest is funneled back into the community to cover things like healthcare and infrastructure. About half of the casino’s profits go toward these “per capita payments.”

All of this has made for an interesting case study on what can happen when you distribute unconditional money to low-income households. 

What researchers discovered was a slew of positive externalities ranging from not only higher household incomes and fewer people below the poverty line, but also better health outcomes and children staying in school longer.

For the full Wired article, click here .