Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1531

Yesterday during lunch with a colleague, the topic of skateboarding came up. And I was reminded of how much I used to love it. There was a time when I used to skateboard everyday. If I missed a day or two, I felt rusty.

What I loved about it was how incredibly challenging it was to learn and perfect new tricks. And there were always ways to continually push yourself to the next level, whether it was the number of boards you could ollie (jump) or the number of steps you could ollie down. You’d start with 3 stairs. Then it was 4. Then 5. Then 2 sets of 5. And so on. Once you mastered those, you could then introduce a kickflip to make it even more challenging. The possibilities were endless. And so— to borrow Daniel Pink’s terminology —it was all about mastery for me.

Here are a few of my old skate decks (they’re on the wall in my apartment):

But in addition to teaching me that there’s no substitute for discipline and practice, skateboarding also helped shape my love of cities (either that, or I was a born urbanist and skateboarding was a symptom). 

Street skating is an inherently urban activity. There’s no defined field or rink. The entire city is at your disposal. And so as a skateboarder, you’re always on the look out for interesting things “to skate.” You want steps, ledges, edges, and changes in grade. You also look for sequences. What tricks can I string together across this urban landscape? You wouldn’t believe how exciting these features can be to a skateboarder.

In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that skateboarders are probably some of the finest surveyors of public space around. How many people do you know go around counting stairs, examining railings and measuring ledge heights? Skateboarders do.

But as much as street skating is all about the city, that relationship is often an acrimonious one. Skateboarding is viewed as a property destroyer, an annoyance and, in some cases, a criminal activity.

A perfect example of this is the story of  LOVE Park in Philadelphia  (it was a public plaza, not a park). LOVE Park was a legendary space in the skateboarding community. It put Philadelphia skateboarding on the map. It was iconic. If you skated during that era, you knew about LOVE Park.

However, on April 25th, 2002, the Mayor of Philadelphia ordered that the park be closed off and remodelled to remove all the elements that skateboarders loved about it. It was decided that skateboarding was not an acceptable behaviour in an urban public plaza.

That act made a huge dent in the Philadelphia skate community . And the park became essentially a homeless shelter. 

As a former skateboarder, urbanist and ex-resident of Philadelphia, this always baffled me. Cities all around the world spend a great deal of time and money trying to create spaces that people will actually use. And here you not only had an intensely used one, but one that spurred a grassroots global phenomenon. It’s precisely what makes cities so great.

Thankfully, many cities have woken up to the benefits of street skating by building purpose built skate parks. But in my view, those spaces lack something that places like LOVE Park had. LOVE Park was authentic. It was about a serendipitous repurposing. It had a sense of place.

On September 18th, 2013, the Premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne , established a “ transit investment strategy advisory panel .” Their mandate was to advise the Province on how to respond to the revenue tools proposed by Metrolinx (also an Ontario agency) to fund transit expansion in the region. Well that panel has just released their final report and you can read it here .

I’d like to highlight 3 things from the report.

1.

The first is their assessment of how Canada’s transit policy framework stacks up against our competitors. Here’s a snippet:

"Canada remains the only G8 country without a coordinated national framework of policies and programs for funding expansion and renewal of transit systems. As shown in the chart opposite, a review of national transit policy frameworks done by the Canadian Urban Transit Association indicates that Canada ranks at the bottom in terms of its engagement in urban public transit."

And here’s the chart they’re talking about. I hope it’s legible.

2.

The second is their conclusion on highway tolls:

"Although highway tolls can raise a significant amount of revenue and influence travel behaviour, they are expensive, complicated, and require a lot of lead time to implement. Once transit alternatives are in place, road tolls meet our criteria and are a valid option. Following the opening of the new Highway 407 East, the Province has the option of designating the new toll revenue to the Next Wave. For now, however, the Panel has not recommended Highway Tolls as a revenue source."

If you’ve read any of my posts on electronic road pricing , you’ll know that I support the pricing of roads and congestion.

3.

The third is their list of what they call “next wave projects”, which are essentially priority projects. Here’s their list for phase one of it:

• Relief Line

• GO Two-Way All Day (excluding Lakeshore)

• Hurontario LRT

• Electrification of Union-Pearson Express

• Yonge North Subway (partial extension, delivered after Relief Line is in service)

• Priority portions of other rapid transit – Hamilton, Durham, Dundas, Brampton

I’m happy to see the relief subway line on the top of that list.

If you have any thoughts on transit planning in the Greater Toronto Area, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

Last night I watched an interesting presentation by Fred Wilson  (New York VC) where he talks ( at LeWeb in Paris ) about the big 3 technology trends shaping our world. In his view, they are 1) non-hierarchical networks (think Twitter vs. newspapers); 2) unbundling; and 3) smartphones (the most obvious of the 3). It’s a great talk even if you’re not interested in technology per se, because these trends are impacting virtually every industry, from banking to education.

This morning Fred wrote a post on his blog called “ The Limits of Capitalism. " And I think it’s an excellent follow-up to his talk on the future. I would also classify myself as a capitalist, but I also think that unfettered capitalism will eventually break down. And in the context of the changes outlined in his presentation, I think we need to think long and hard about how we’re going to—not stop them from happening, because they’re inevitable—but best cope with them.

Because already we’re seeing rising income inequality and a complete “ bifurcation of the labor market into high-skill and low-skill jobs. " And that in turn is impacting our cities. In fact, that bifurcation is what largely got Rob Ford elected here in Toronto.