Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1471

I take the subway to the office every day and oftentimes I find myself standing there thinking about what the most efficient subway car interior would look like. I guess it’s the architect and designer in me, but I keep trying to rethink the seating arrangement.

My first thought is always that the perpendicular seats that shoot out into the middle of the train are a complete waste of space. If you’re tall (I’m 6’3”), they’re actually uncomfortable to sit in. Every time I do, I feel as if my femur is too long for the allotted space. 

One top of that, nobody ever wants to sit in the interior seat—primarily, I think, because they’re cumbersome to get in and out of when somebody is sitting beside you. So you end up with a countless number of cases where those benches are only half occupied.

But what’s really interesting about this thought exercise is that it can’t be done without also closely analyzing human behavior. Here’s what I’ve noticed here in Toronto.

People want to be as far away as possible from other people on the subway. It’s weird to sit beside someone unless you really have to. In fact, try this exercise: Walk onto a sparsely populated subway and sit directly beside somebody. I bet you that person will move and/or give you a dirty look.

What this means is that the end seats always fill up first. People don’t want middle seats, which, I’ve learned , is why they put grab poles in the middle of benches longer than 2 seats. They’re trying to simulate an end seat and make that middle seat feel less like it’s, well, in the middle. You get a pole in between you and the person next to you.

But before sitting in the middle seat, most people would rather stand. Standing is preferable to rubbing shoulders with someone, unless the subway train gets really busy, in which case people will start to sit anywhere. Typically people like to stand right beside the doors, because there’s a place to lean and it’s easy to get off when your stop comes. But this isn’t ideal from an onboarding and offboarding standpoint. It’s people in the way.

Of course, there are many others who have spent a lot more time than me thinking about this topic. A quick search revealed this Wired article talking about this very subject. And below is the layout that they recommend. The design is from the Transportation Research Board.

Their recommendation is to basically remove the seating around the middle doors, so that it’s easier for people to get on and off the train, and to stack airplane style seating towards both ends. In this scenario, the middle gets optimized for standing and the ends get optimized for sitting.

Now it’s your turn. Do you think this would be better or worse than what you have today in your city? Let me know in the comments below.

The City of Toronto recently started an initiative called “ Comprehensive to the Core .” It’s a look at how downtown Toronto–which is growing at 4 times the rate of the rest of the city–should continue to grow moving forward so that it remains a great place to live, work, learn and play.

Here’s a presentation that was delivered last month by the city. It’s mostly infographics and so it’s a quick and fun read. And here’s an infographic that does a nice job of summarizing what’s happening in the core of Toronto.

What it’s saying is that downtown Toronto–which they consider to be bound by Bathurst Street in the west, the Don Valley Parkway in the east, the lake in the south, and Dupont Street in the north–is responsible for 51% of the city’s entire GDP. It’s also responsible for 33% of all jobs in the city and 25% of the city’s entire tax base. And yet in terms of size, it represents only 3% of the city’s land area.

That’s a powerful reminder of the economic potential of density and agglomeration economies. It’s also a reminder that we shouldn’t let politics deprive our economic engine of the services and investments it needs.

This morning while I was reading about gentrification in Berlin , I clicked through to an interesting overview of homeownership and renting in England and Wales over the last century . Here’s a video. If you can’t see it below, click here .

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDnGryGJ1ZA]

The video starts in 1918, where the vast majority of households (77%) rented. As of 2011, this number has reversed. 64% of households in England and Wales now own their home.

If you compare this housing trend to what happened in the United States and Canada, you’ll see a similarity. Although, the US was ahead in terms of promoting homeownership. They reached 50% ownership somewhere in the mid 1940s, whereas England and Wales didn’t reach this number until around 1971.

All of this is an interesting reminder that our obsession with homeownership is a relatively new one. But it’s also not a universal one. The homeownership rate in Berlin is 15.6% , and it’s only 49.5% in London. People in big cities tend to rent more.