Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 130

Uber's stock has done exceptionally well this year. At the time of writing this post, it's up over 60% year-to-date. But at the same time, it remains unclear to me what the relationship will be between Uber and this brave new world of autonomous vehicles.

I mean, right now, if you're in Phoenix, I'm told you can order a Waymo car through Uber's app. But if you're in San Francisco, Waymo customers must use the Waymo app. It's all bit mirky right now, but Uber is just trying to put " as many cars on Uber's network as possible ."

There's also an argument that, for the foreseeable future, ride-hailing networks are going to need some mixture of both human and robot drivers. I get this argument. But beyond the short term, I think there will be strong incentives to completely eliminate human drivers.

Last month, the New York Times announced that Uber is in talks with Travis Kalanick, the company's co-founder who got pushed out 8 years ago, to help him buy autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai .

It's a bit of an interesting story. Pony is a Chinese company, but because the US doesn't want Chinese tech to become too deeply embedded in the American economy — and has become increasingly hostile to such companies — it has been readying a clean US subsidiary of the business for sale.

This is what Travis allegedly wants to buy with the help of Uber. And it's particularly noteworthy because it could be an indication that Uber is worried about Waymo and wants to have its own AV unit (which it had previously, but then sold off in an effort to quickly reach profitability).

My sense is that Uber needs to do something along these lines. The risk of not having autonomous vehicle capabilities is simply too great.

Cover photo by Viktor Avdeev on Unsplash

Neat B and I just booked some end-of-the-summer travel. We're going to bounce around to a few different places, but the plan is to end up in Paris and then spend a week there working remotely — you know, from the Paris office.

And by the Paris office, I mean a generous 323 sf aparthotel with a small kitchen, workspace, and shared laundry facility that we rented in the 10th. I started by searching diligently for an Airbnb; but I couldn't find anything we liked, so I ended booking something through Edgar Suites .

As part of this trip, I'm aiming to meet as many industry people as possible and hopefully tour some development projects. One of my goals is to better understand how Paris consistently pulls off beautiful infill housing projects like this .

So if you're a developer, architect, investor, or other kind of city builder based in Paris, please drop me a line at brandon.donnelly@globizen.com. I'd love to connect and learn more about your city and market, and about what you're up to.

Coffee and yummy pastries on me, of course.

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While this is true , I do I have some suggestions. At the top of the list is this: Toronto needs to make better recreational use of Lake Ontario and its waterways. More specifically, it needs a summer bathing culture.

One of the gold standards for this is easily Zürich . The city has a long history of urban swimming right in Lake Zürich and the Limmat River. And because the city has some of the cleanest urban water in the world, all that is really needed are platforms leading straight into water. But Zürich also has a rich history of beautiful public bathhouses (called Badis). These facilities accommodate the obvious daytime functions, but they also transform at night into bars, clubs, and event venues. It's for these reasons that their seasonal opening in May is often viewed as the official opening of summer in the city. This is what Toronto needs. So how do we make that happen?

The obvious first step is that we need clean water, which means we need to eliminate the poop . This remains a problem and here's why (taken from this 2014 document ):

About 30% of the land area, which is really in the older area of the city [of Toronto], is serviced by combined sewers. That's a single pipe that carries both raw sewage and stormwater runoff when it rains. Inherent in the way these systems were configured back in the late 1800s and up to about 1950 is that during heavy rains there's a spillage of combined sewer overflow, as we call it. It's a mixture of raw sewage and stormwater runoff. We have about 80 outfalls across the city, 34 of which discharge to Lake Ontario.

The good news is that we're working on it. In 2018, Toronto started on the largest stormwater management program in the city's history with the promise that it will virtually eliminate the release of combined sewer outflows into the Lower Don River, Taylor-Massey Creek and Toronto's Inner Harbour. I don't know enough, technically, to say whether this will get us all the way there, but I do know that it is absolutely crucial to making Toronto more like Zürich. Zürich also some combined sewers, but they use large retention tanks to hold excess wastewater and prevent it from overflowing into Lake Zürich and the Limmat River.

The second step is that we need to invest in incredible bathhouse facilities. From what I can tell, this is also a work in progress. As part of the preliminary design for the Parliament Slip (in the city's central waterfront), there is a proposal for a floating barge and two outdoor pools. There may even be a snack bar! (Let's hope it's a lot more than that.) This won't be the same experience as swimming directly in Lake Zürich, but it will still be awesome and Toronto should make it happen.

But there are other opportunities. One that often comes to mind for me is Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion . Originally constructed in 1922 and renovated in 1980, today it mostly feels abandoned, other than the mediocre cafe facing the boardwalk (and yes, the adjacent pool). It's severely underutilized and under kept. What we ought to do is host an international design competition and challenge the world to rethink it and its relationship to the lake, just as we did for our central waterfront. And of course, we should do this in parallel with making our bodies of water some of the cleanest in the world.

Toronto needs a summer bathing culture.

Photos from Zürich Tourism