Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1450

Last week The National Post published an article  talking about Toronto's  Crosstown LRT and how it’s spurring a wave of development all along Eglinton Avenue. Below is a map, taken from that article, showcasing some of the developments that are currently in the pipeline and awaiting the Crosstown’s opening date of 2020.

Not surprisingly, developers like transit investment. But more specifically, they like fixed track transit investment. Rarely do new bus routes elicit the same sort of response that you’re seeing above. And that’s because fixed track investment has permanence. If you’re going to go long on an area, you want certainty.

As the Crosstown tunnel boring machines move across midtown Toronto, I thought it would be interesting to look at a transit concept that I first learned about through Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit blog. It’s called: the radius of demand . 

One of things that transportation planners look at when designing and building a new line is the spacing of stops. Typically, as you move from buses all the way up to subways, the spacing between stops and stations increases. Spacing is always a bit of a trade off though, because more stops means easier access for riders, but it also means slower overall service. Somewhat famously, Paris designed its metro system so that you’re rarely more than 500 meters away from a station. 

Once you have your station locations, it’s quite common to then draw a radius around each stop to simulate the catchment area. In other words: How much of the city can I service with this station and how far will people be willing to walk in order to get there? However, this distance, which is the radius of the circle, usually depends on the type of transit. Oftentimes people are willing to walk further in order to get to faster transit service.

But what’s most interesting about this radius of demand is that it’s entirely dependent on the fabric of the city. Take for example, the following two maps from Seattle, which I have taken from Walker’s blog . On the left is a suburban setting and on the right is a downtown setting. In both cases, the red circle represents a 1 km radius.

Now, if humans could fly over barriers, such as highways, and every Seattle resident was willing to fly exactly 1 km to a transit station, these two radiuses of demand would be perfectly accurate. But since that’s not the case, we instead need to look at what actually represents a 1 km walk – those are the blue lines in each image.

Because once you do that, you realize that the cul-de-sacs and highways on the left make it impossible for most of that radius of demand to actually walk to the station in under 1 km. So the catchment area actually becomes much smaller. On the other hand, if you look at the image on the right, you’ll see that the tried and true city grid is actually remarkably efficient for walking. Almost all of the circle is serviced.

So as the Eglinton Crosstown LRT makes its way through the center of Toronto, I think it’s important to keep in mind that it’ll be cutting through quite a few different kinds of street grids. Some of them will be highly conducive to transit usage and others not as much. And in many ways, this is one of the greatest challenges of transit investment. The track itself is only one part of the puzzle.

That’s why the City of Toronto is also undertaking a planning exercise called Eglinton Connects . Its intent is to leverage the opportunities, as well as address the challenges, that will result from Metrolinx’s Crosstown LRT. If you’re interested in the future of Eglinton Avenue, you should consider getting involved . Oftentimes it’s only the critics that speak up. But that’s not the best way to build anything.

Earlier this week it was announced that Fred Wilson and his firm Union Square Ventures have just led a $4M Series A round of venture funding in the Toronto-based startup Figure1 . Figure1 is essentially “Instagram for doctors.” Here’s how it works (via WSJ ):

Today, more than 125,000 health-care professionals use Figure 1 to view or share free medical imagery, including photos of patients with personally identifiable details blurred out or excluded; x-rays; charts; and still images taken from MRI or CAT scans, for example.

The app’s users include board-certified doctors, registered nurses, medical and nursing students, physicians’ assistants, and others who use the app and share images for teaching and studying purposes, or even to request community feedback about a possible diagnosis.

With this round, USV is now up to 3 investments in the Toronto/Waterloo region (I think of us as one center). The other 2 are Kik (out of Waterloo) and Wattpad , which is actually headquartered here in the St. Lawrence Market.

What’s exciting to me about all of this is that it’s further evidence of a growing and thriving Toronto/Waterloo startup ecosystem. And while to some it may not seem like a big deal for yet another mobile app to receive funding, it’s actually great news.

Because as these companies grow and become successful, they’ll not only create new jobs in the region, but also create a tremendous amount of wealth and expertise. And when this wealth and expertise gets reinvested into future startups, you end up with a powerful snowball effect. That’s how startup ecosystems are built.

It’s also great to see companies staying put, because the pull towards more established startup hubs can be significant. When my friend Evgeny raised a Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz last year, he told me that they asked him to move 500px down to California. As is the case with a lot of VCs, they like their portfolio companies to be nearby.

But ultimately 500px decided to stay headquartered here in downtown Toronto. And they did that for a few reasons: There’s lots of great engineering talent here and it usually comes at a discount relative to California (5-15%). He also finds that employees here are more loyal. There's less turnover. In California, everyone is looking for that next best startup to join. Here 500px gets to be that big fish in a small pond.

Anyways, a big congratulations to the Figure1 team. I hope they continue crushing it and that they stay put in Toronto. If you’re a healthcare professional, you can click here to download the app.

Last weekend a friend of mine sent me an article from The Economist talking about why trams, streetcars, and light rail are a waste of money . The argument is basically that steetcars are expensive, less efficient, and that – despite North America’s renewed interest in them – we should instead be spending our scarce public dollars on more buses.

Here’s a snippet from the article :

…but cash spent on streetcars displaces spending on other, more cost-effective forms of public transport like buses, which offer cheaper and more-efficient service but are considerably less sexy. The capital cost per mile of a streetcar is between $30m and $75m, while a rapid bus service costs anywhere between $3m and $30m, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

Now, there’s no question that buse routes are initially cheaper to implement. You don’t have track to build. But I don’t agree that the cost structure is quite that simple if you consider the number of people you need to move in your city. I struggle to see buses as a more efficient service.

The big difference between modern light rail and buses is capacity. Toronto’s new streetcars  will move about 3 times as many people as your typical bus . So you’d need to triple the number of buses and triple the number of drivers – adding to your labor costs – if you want to have a chance at moving the same number of people. 

Streetcars are also electric, which means they run on a renewable energy source. We’re in the process of making this switch with private transport , so why go backwards when it comes to public transport? You can certainly run electric buses as well, but then you’re building overhead power lines and bringing up your initial costs.

I think the challenge is that when people think of light rail, they think of slow lumbering streetcars. I agree that many of these lines are inefficient and I’ve written about it . But there are a number of ways to implement light rail. And when done well it can efficiently move a lot of people for costs that are far less than a subway.

Image: Aecom