Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1535

I spent a lot of time in the suburbs over the holidays and it got me thinking.

For all the talk about intensification here in Toronto, adapting our car dependent suburbs to become, well, less car dependent is going to be an enormous challenge. Once you’ve built out an area around the car, it’s almost impossible to go back. 

One of the biggest challenges is going to be figuring out how to turn the suburbs from inward to outward. If you think about it, the suburbs are an incredibly inward type of development pattern.

Retail plazas typically have their entrances—not off main streets—but off internal parking lots. And residential areas often have backyards facing the main streets because nobody wants a house fronting on a major thoroughfare. These are the design principles we’ve used to create our suburbs.

But the result is that we’ve created environments that are inhospitable to pedestrians. What enjoyment would you get out of walking along a street where everything has its back turned to you? This is the anthesis of animated street life. And in this case, Margaret Thatcher would probably be right: I would feel like a failure taking the bus .

To compensate for this kind of environment, we’ve made it virtually mandatory to have a car. It’s the only reasonable way to get around. Writer  Rebecca Solnit put it best when she said:

“In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.”

And that’s precisely it. We built around the car and not around people. And in doing so, we made ourselves dependent. I don’t know about you, but there’s something liberating about being able to walk to all the things I commonly want—food, money, coffee and so on. But maybe that’s just me.

Whether you’re developing a building, planning transit, starting a company or just trying to do something different , there will always be haters. But pessimists don’t change the world—optimists do.

I came across a great post last night by venture capitalist Ben Horowitz . It’s called, “ Can-Do vs. Can’t Do Culture. " And I think you’d be well served to keep a copy of it on file and read it before every single meeting where you’ll be asked to provide input on something new.

He’s specifically talking about a growing and discouraging trend of naysaying in the tech community, but the lessons apply more broadly to innovation as a whole.

I love these lines:

"The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time. That’s why they are innovative — until now, nobody ever figured out that they were good ideas."

"From a psychological standpoint, in order to achieve a great breakthrough, you must be able to suspend disbelief indefinitely. The technology startup world is where brilliant people come to imagine the impossible."

But the best part of Horowitz’s post is an excerpt from an internal Western Union report (then the largest telegraph provider in the US) recommending that the company not purchase Alexander Graham Bell’s invention (the telephone) and patents for $100,000.

The Telephone purports to transmit the speaking voice over telegraph wires. We found that the voice is very weak and indistinct, and grows even weaker when long wires are used between the transmitter and receiver. Technically, we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles.

Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their “telephone devices” in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?

The electricians of our company have developed all the significant improvements in the telegraph art to date, and we see no reason why a group of outsiders, with extravagant and impractical ideas, should be entertained, when they have not the slightest idea of the true problems involved. Mr. G.G. Hubbard’s fanciful predictions, while they sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a toy …

In view of these facts, we feel that Mr. G.G. Hubbard’s request for $100,000 of the sale of this patent is utterly unreasonable, since this device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase.

It’s a classic example of The Innovator’s Dilemma (a book written by management guru and HBS professor Clayton Christensen). Many firms see their businesses disrupted because they blindly stick to the innovation that made them successful in the first place—ignoring what’s coming up on the horizon.

In the case of Western Union, they could not imagine “telephone devices” in every city. The idea was pure lunacy to them. Of course to us today, they look like myopic fools. We now not only have telephone devices in every city, but a full fledged computer in every pocket. Imagine that.

Which is why I think it’s important to remember that the way to drive the world forward is—to use Horowitz’s terminology—through hope and curiosity. Suspend disbelief. Think big. Dare to be crazy. Because you’re only crazy until you’re proven to be a genius.

Last night the Toronto Transit Commission offered free service starting at 7pm. This is typical of Toronto on New Year’s Eve, as it is with many other cities. I think it’s great thing to do and I love seeing so many people taking transit to get around. I took it everywhere last night.

Since I knew I would be doing a lot of walking, I charged up my  Fitbit Flex  and strapped it on around lunch time. Here is my New Year’s Eve according to Fitbit. I took 11,239 steps yesterday afternoon/evening.

Activity tracking and health monitoring devices have really taken off over the past year. And I absolutely do think they help motivate. But beyond an individual level, I also think this data could be really interesting in aggregate and overlaid with other data points, such as where people live, where they work, how they travel/commute, and so on.

Many have speculated that  urban sprawl makes people fat  since it privileges driving over walking. But with all the data that companies such as Fitbit and Nike are collecting, it would be interesting to see some hard data on how much more urbanites really walk compared to suburbanites.

One idea would be to use  Walk Score  and examine the correlation between the walkability of a person’s neighbourhood and the average number of steps they take everyday. Intuitively, it seems like there would be a strong one. But it would be cool to see it quantified. I’d happily share my data if somebody would like to take this on.

Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome to 2014.