Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1215

Monocle’s annual survey of the top 25 most liveable cities in the world was just released. It’s now in its 10th year. I found it in my inbox this morning and it was a good reminder that it was about time I renewed my subscription. I’ve been a regular reader of Monocle since 2007, but I let my membership lapse last year.

Of course, any sort of list like this is going to be subjective. It all depends on the methodology you use. Still, their annual survey is an interesting way to see what each city is up to and where the tides are going. This year Monocle put extra weighting on each city’s nightlife. If you’re not a subscriber, here’s a short video you can watch. It will give you a rundown of all the cities. (I was happy to see Montréal creep onto the list. Incredible city.)

This focus on the night is something that I’ve been writing about a lot both on this blog and elsewhere . It’s an idea that’s picking up momentum around the world as an economic development strategy. But for whatever reason, uptake seems to be slower here in North America.

I like how architect Anna Dietzsch puts it in this video . She says that Rio may have the beaches, but Sao Paulo (where she’s based) has the night. That’s exactly how cities should be thinking about this opportunity. It used to be that cities thrived almost entirely because of location, waterways, transport, and other natural features (example: Buffalo ). But increasingly, it’s becoming about things like nightlife.

Vancouver may have the mountains, but Toronto has…

Image: Monocle

I woke up this morning to this view:

I then went for a swim. The water tends to be on the cooler side in the Georgian Bay , but with the weather we’ve been having it’s pretty perfect right now.

At this point I’m thinking about a beer and some reading. I have Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty sitting in my car. It’s next in the queue.

I am telling you all of this simply to be transparent. 

Recently I had someone caution me that I should be careful about being too public and too open. I won’t get into specifics, but I was told that sometimes it’s better to just fly under the radar.

I recognize that there have to be limits to transparency, but as a rule of thumb I subscribe to the opposite approach. When possible and when appropriate, I would rather be more, rather than less, transparent. 

This blog is who I am. It’s indicative of how I think. And it discloses what I’m doing. So I don’t see a lot of downside. What you read is what you get. You’ll know if we should be friends and/or do business together.

After I wrote about what I’m doing next I had a bunch of emails come in from various people telling me what they’re doing and, in some cases, suggesting that we work together. Some people had development sites that they thought I should take a look at. And some people immediately asked if I was hiring.

I am grateful for each of those emails. But I also know that they’re an outcome of openness and transparency.

Last night I had a dream that I was driving around in a snowstorm and, for whatever reason, my tires had almost no tread on them. So I was all over the road. Strange. I have no idea what this means, if anything at all.

But it did remind me that I can absolutely imagine a time when the thought of driving your own car (outside of it being maybe a hobby) will seem positively archaic. I mean, think about how messy our current system is. Roads are a chaotic and oftentimes dangerous place.

The more interesting question for me though is: how will self-driving vehicles change our cities, our habits, and so on? In Elon Musk’s recently published Master Plan (Part Deux) he outlines 4 main goals for Tesla:

1. Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
   

2. Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
   

3. Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
   

4. Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it
   

Let’s think about what these could mean.

One translates into decentralized energy generation and storage. Now all of a sudden the cars on our roads will be roaming around our cities collecting and storing energy, eventually returning home at the end of the day to power our homes. I can already imagine fleets of sun worshipping cars chasing the light as it moves across our cities.

Two is recognition that self-driving vehicles are going to have a meaningful impact on traditional public transit. (Elon reveals that Tesla is working on high passenger-density urban transport.)

Three addresses the chaotic current state and the massive potential of networked cars.

Four is particularly interesting to me. I wonder to what extent this income will simply subsidize car ownership or if it could actually transform cars into an investment (rather than purely an expense). Will people end up buying self-driving vehicles in the same way that people buy real estate for yield?

Furthermore, how does this notion of a shared vehicle pool now completely change the way we think about parking requirements. For instance, today we think about parking in terms of individual usage. This tenant requires/wants X amount of parking. All 2-bedroom apartments require Y amount of parking.

But if we’re now all sharing our vehicles, parking requirements would then be based on some broader and collective demand curve. Parking would become less individualistic and instead become more of a yard where self-driving vehicles come to store themselves when not in use.

Once again, we reach a point where utilization rates go up for each vehicle and overall parking demand goes down. Good thing we’re getting rid of parking minimums .

What else could you see happening?