Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1516

I just came across an interesting web app created by geographer and programmer Andrew Hardin that maps public transit travel times for San Francisco, Seattle, Boulder and Denver.

The app allows you to click on a location within one of these cities (or enter an address) and then receive a visual representation of travel times from that location.

Both public transit and walking are factored in, and the fastest of the two is then modeled. The public transit data is taken from each respective authority and is similar to the data used by Google Maps.

With these sorts of applications, I always wonder what it might look like overlaid with additional data points, such as home prices. Intuitively I would expect the best connected neighborhoods to also have some of the highest real estate values.

I just stumbled upon an interesting piece in the Boston Globe (from last December) talking about how the bicycle is “ emerging as a new conservative front in the culture wars. ”

It starts by talking about Toronto mayor Rob Ford and asks: Who elected this guy? Their response comes down to mode of transport.

The answer, in large part, comes down to transit. Ford is famously pro-car, and his strongest support came from suburbs outside downtown Toronto, where voters drive into the city during the day and return by car in the evening. One political scientist found that the strongest predictor of whether someone voted for Ford in the 2010 mayoral election was the person’s method of commuting: Car commuters were Ford voters; everyone else wasn’t. Ford repaid their loyalty by declaring on his first day as mayor that the “war on cars” was over; he abolished the vehicle registration tax and announced a plan to kill light rail in the city simply because, he said, streetcars “are just a pain in the rear end.”

The article then goes on to argue that Ford is at the forefront of a growing conservative movement using bikes as a new political lightning rod. Conservative politicians view cyclists as urbanites (statistically this is true) and therefore not part of their core voter base (statistically this is also true). And so hating on bikes has become a convenient way for them to galvanize their support base.

But beyond bikes, we’re really talking about a bigger city building issue: How do you unify a city with such divergent priorities? How do we stop this downtown versus the suburbs mentality? These are important questions and I don’t think the answer is to de-amalgamate Toronto . That’s the easy way out.

Whether we like it or not, the Toronto region functions as one contiguous economic unit and, if we want to be able to effectively compete on the global stage, we’re going to need cohesion. We need to get our house in order. It’s still early days for Toronto’s 2014 mayoral election, but I really hope the next 4 years turn out to be better than the last. I think they will.

This morning Kevin Marshall tweeted me a link to a blog post by Andy Weissman (partner at Union Square Ventures in New York). The post is about how small things matter —even small words.

He starts by talking about a new sidewalk extension and curb cut at 86th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan. This may seem like a pretty banal thing to talk about, but it’s in support of his argument that small things—like even a curb cut—can be used to solve bigger problems. In this case, the intersection was a dangerous one because of poor pedestrian visibility.

But what I really like is how he describes the pulse of New York:

"The rhythm of NYC is such that we need to keep moving and in motion; as a result, waiting to cross a street by standing at the curb is not enough, we must walk into the street to get going or keep our momentum."

This is great and it’s bang on. People in New York don’t stand at the curb waiting for the light to change. They impatiently push onto the street and wait for the first opportunity to cross. This may seem like a small tendency, but I think it speaks volumes about the character of New York.

People in Toronto generally don’t do this.

They (not me) wait patiently at the street corner even if there aren’t any cars coming. Why? Think about this the next time you’re standing on guard at the crosswalk. Don’t lose the momentum. The world rewards those who poke the box and keep moving.