Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1107

One of the great things about social media is that it gives us access to data that previously didn’t exist or was difficult to collect.

Take, for example, LinkedIn’s monthly report on employment trends called the Workforce Report. They look at which industries are hiring, where people are moving for jobs, and so on. Click here for the June 2017 edition. 

Note that architecture/engineering hiring appears to be up nationally, which is usually a positive leading indicator.

I’ll leave you all to go through the report, but I did want to pull out a few of their maps and one of their takeaways. Below are maps of the cities that lost the most workers and gained the most workers over the last 12 months.

The established trend of people moving from colder northern cities to warmer amenity-rich cities seem to play out here.

That said, one of their “key insights” is that fewer workers today are moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Since February 2017, there has been a 17% decline in the net number of workers.

They blame housing affordability (ahem, lack of supply). People are simply turning to other great cities like Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Austin. They’re growing and cheaper.

One of the other cool things about the report is that you can drill down into individual cities to see where people are moving from . I looked up Miami and Chicago just to do a quick comparison. 

Not surprisingly, Miami is seeing a significant contingent from South America. What’s interesting about this random comparison is how international Miami is and how regional Chicago is in terms of their draws.

I would love to see similar data for Canada. This is valuable stuff.

Designing a building for 5+ years into the future can be tricky. The pace of change in the world today is astounding.

Last month Seth Miller published a Medium article called: This is how Big Oil will die . His argument is that the cost of running an electric self-driving vehicle will be so low – simpler technology and no labor cost – that the personal vehicle as we know it will come to an end. People are inevitably going to give up their cars, which will result in a peaking of oil consumption.

We’ve talked about this future many times before on the blog. But Miller’s argument ties it back to oil and also comes with a set of predictions taken from a report prepared by the consulting company RethinkX:

- Self-driving cars will launch around 2021.
- A private ride will be priced at 16¢ per mile, falling to 10¢ over time.
- A shared ride will be priced at 5¢ per mile, falling to 3¢ over time.
- By 2022, oil use will have peaked.
- By 2023, used car prices will crash as people give up their vehicles. New car sales for individuals will drop to nearly zero.
- By 2030, gasoline use for cars will have dropped to near zero, and total crude oil use will have dropped by 30% compared to today.

If all of these predictions prove to be true, then what should we be doing today to prepare our cities for this future?

Dylan Reid of Spacing was recently at the International Transport Forum in Leipzig, Germany and has been publishing some interesting posts related to transit. Here is one about what makes transit systems succeed and fail.

I really like the point that we too often think about transit projects as culminating with a big opening, while overlooking the importance of operations. It’s a bit like focusing on the wedding ceremony and forgetting that the ceremony is only really there to (hopefully) mark the beginning of a lifelong union.

One of the reasons why this is important is because, as Reid points out, “fares need to provide a strong and consistent proportion of the agency’s funding.” So you need bums in seats, which means you need to build the right transit in the right locations. In other words, a new subway line through a low density suburb will probably result in an abysmal farebox recovery ratio .

At the same time:

“…fares will rarely cover all of an agency’s costs. Hong Kong’s Kam noted that, to be truly autonomous, an operator needs an additional dedicated, independent source of revenue. This cannot be based on additional transit-related non-fare revenue (e.g. advertising) – such revenue is helpful but never significant. It needs to be an external source. In Hong Kong, it is based on the agency’s extensive property ownership, but in other cities it could be a congestion charge , a dedicated sales or income tax, or other mechanism. Only with such a source can the agency have the independence to make its own choices for reinvestment and improvements.”

This is one of the reasons why I am such a strong supporter of road pricing .

Another point that Reid makes is that transit agencies should always have a consistent pipeline of new projects, rather than erratic periods of expansion. This makes a lot of sense given what it takes to ramp up for a large infrastructure project. But it’s obviously contingent on having sustainable funding sources.

Click here  if you’d like to read the rest of Dylan Reid’s post.