Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1258

Road pricing is on the table in Toronto. (Somebody has to fund the expensive Gardiner Expressway East rebuild.) On March 11, 2016, the City issued a Request for Proposal for: “ Options for Establishment of Toll Facilities on F.G. Gardiner Expressway/Don Valley Parkway .”

As a vocal supporter of road pricing , I am happy to see us headed in this direction. And I bet that today’s post will just be the beginning of my ruminations on this topic.

Because naturally, it raises a lot of questions:

Should the pricing be fixed or variable? Similar to how Uber’s surge pricing model is intended to ensure that there are always enough drivers on the road, should our road pricing model strive to eliminate traffic congestion by increasing the price of the road as demand rises beyond road capacity? I like the idea of a “congestion charge” rather than just a road toll. There’s something very efficient about it.

Who should pay? Should anyone and everyone who uses the road pay? Or should it just be be non-Toronto residents who aren’t already paying property taxes in the city? I would imagine that this latter scenario would be easier for Toronto politicians to get behind, since there will obviously be a segment of people who flat out don’t want road tolls/pricing. But if we stick with the principle that it’s a “congestion charge”, then everyone should pay. It doesn’t matter where you live when you are demand trying to exceed the available supply of road.

(I’m running a Twitter poll  right now with this exact question. At the time of writing this post, “everyone should pay” is winning.)

Should electric vehicles be exempt from the road tolls or congestion charges in order to help accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels? With Tesla getting ready to announce its mass market Model 3 (price $35,000), I’ve been thinking lately that the car I currently own may very well be the last gasoline car I ever own.

It’s still early days for road pricing and our mayor doesn’t seem to be a fan . So who knows how far we’ll get with this RFP. But I for one hope that we find the courage to make the difficult decisions and that this new revenue stream is leveraged for the purpose of building more sustainable forms of urban transport in this city. 

Let’s make a 50 year decision and not an election cycle decision.

I’m reading a book right now called Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt . 

One of my graduate school buddies recommended it to me on one of our annual ski/snowboard trips and I’m finally getting around to reading it. I’m only about half way through it, but I’m enjoying it so much that I have decided to write about it today.

One of the protagonists in the book is a Toronto-native by the name of Brad Katsuyama . That’s probably one of the reasons I like it – although Michael Lewis makes all Canadians out to be overly polite and well-behaved. Is that what we’re like?

The other reason I like the book is that a lot of it actually has to do with geography. Technology and the internet were supposed to make cities and location irrelevant. But as Flash Boys argues, location and physical connectivity matter a great deal in the world of high-frequency trading. Each millisecond matters.

To illustrate this point, the book starts by describing the construction of a $300 million, 827-mile cable running as straight as humanly possible from Chicago to New Jersey in order to reduce data travel times from 17 to 13 milliseconds. That’s how much the milliseconds matter.

This is also not a topic that I know a lot about and so it’s eye opening (and a bit disappointing) to learn about the sorts of things that happen in our financial markets. If any of you would like to borrow the book after I’m done (and are located in Toronto), leave me a comment below.

In 2010, Gal and Tania Adir, aged 23 and 24, respectively, began renovating high-value apartments in central London.

Today, they are known as The Adir Group and have about £50m in development under way .

But more than just a developer, the group has grown to become “the parent company of a quickly expanding collection of complementary brands bound together by a desire to enhance people’s lifestyle through quality and beauty.”

In addition to G&T (their residential development arm), they also founded Net.Works (a co-working space) and Nuper (a co-op living scheme). This last focus isn’t up on their website yet, but I read about it on Michael Mortensen’s blog . The goal of Nuper is to create affordable living solutions for young talent in London.

I wanted to profile The Adir Group because I think it’s incredible how young they were when they got started (I was just starting graduate school at 23) and because I like their approach of creating a collection of complementary companies.

I am excited to see where the next generation of developers (myself included) take this business. Already we are seeing some new approaches emerge.