Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1401

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html

Earlier this week I watched the above TED talk called, The happy secret to better work.  It’s only 12 minutes long.

In it, Shawn Achor argues that we’ve got it all wrong and backwards when it comes to our happiness. We constantly set (moving) goals and then tell ourselves that once we achieve those goals we’ll be happy.

We tell ourselves that once we get that degree, buy that new home, or secure that new promotion, that we’ll be happier. And I’m definitely guilty of that sometimes. I think many goal oriented people are.

But his argument is that if happiness sits outside of those moving targets, we’ll never be as happy as we could be. Happiness needs to sit within those goals. In other words, we need to focus on being happy today, not tomorrow.

But the other powerful thing about this approach is that greater happiness has been shown to improve productivity. So if you simply flip this equation, you’ll probably be not only happier but more successful.

At the end of last year, somebody told me that they were really enjoying my blog because of how positive I always seem to be about the future of cities and the world.

And that was honestly one of the nicest things to hear from a reader, because I truly believe that optimism, not pessimism, is what moves the world forward.

One of the projects that I’m most excited about here in Toronto is the renovation and addition to One Spadina Crescent . The building sits in the middle of a roundabout along Spadina Avenue and occupies what is easily one of the most ceremonial positions in the city.

But for as long as I can remember, the building hasn’t been living up to its full potential. So much so that in the 1960s it was going to be demolished in order to make way for the proposed  Spadina Expressway . That would have been an absolute tragedy. Thankfully, our friend Jane Jacobs stopped that one.

Today, exciting things are happening at One Spadina Crescent. The Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto is in the midst of renovating and expanding the building, and will eventually relocate there from its current location on College Street.

When it’s all said and done, One Spadina Crescent will look something like this (via Daniels ).

From the south:

From the west:

From the north:

What’s most exciting to me about this project are the following 3 things:

First, it’s an opportunity to connect One Spadina Crescent to the surrounding urban fabric. Today, it feels very much like an island in the middle of the street. 

Second, it’s a wonderful example of the new layering on top of the old, which is something that I believe we should aspire to do in our cities. The University of Toronto has become quite good at doing that on campus.

And finally, the intent is for this building and site to include a number of research centers and public facing functions devoted to architecture, design, and city building. And so One Spadina could become quite the hub in the city. That’s exciting.

If you’d like to take a look inside the building (pre-renovation), check out these great photos by Peter MacCallum . The picture at the top of this post is his.

The total number of vehicle miles traveled in the US used to largely do only one thing: go up. This is made it fairly easy for the Federal Highway Administration (FWHA) to forecast how much more Americans were going to drive in the coming years – they just extended the trend line.

Below is what that looked like since the early 1970s (via FRED Economic Data) . You’ll see that the total vehicle miles traveled went from somewhere around 1.1 trillion miles to around 3 trillion miles in and around the late 2000s. The shaded areas represent recessionary periods.

But then in 2007, something happened. Total vehicle miles traveled peaked, declined, and then flat lined at just under 3 trillion miles. Here’s what that looked like (the ending time period is October 2014):

However, since this was new for the FHWA, they continued to believe that this would ultimately correct itself and that total VMTs would eventually continue on their linear ascent. So here’s what their projections looked like (via State Smart Transportation Initiative) :

Clearly things didn’t go as planned.

But then in May of last year (2014), the FHWA finally changed its tune and released this forecast , which had the following projections:

It outlined 3 economic scenarios: a pessimistic one, a baseline one, and an optimistic one. In their baseline outlook, they believed that the annual growth rate for total vehicle miles traveled in the US would be 0.75% over a 30 year period running from 2012 to 2042.

At the same time, they also stated that population growth would average about 0.7% per year through this same period. This means that the FHWA has more or less conceded that total vehicles traveled per person will likely remain flat , which is a significant change from previous forecasts.

Now, given their track record, I don’t think any of us should put a lot of faith in the accuracy of these numbers. Per capita driving could flat line. But it might also go down, which is what it has been doing over the past few years .

Either way, I do think it’s worth thinking about this shift. It’s a pretty big deal.

Top Image: Flickr