Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1536

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.

It’s nearly 2014. And I suspect many of you are about to begin pursuing your New Year’s resolutions (or are at least contemplating the idea). Unfortunately, I’m here to deliver some bad news: they don’t work. Statistically, the odds are against you. In fact, a 2007 survey done in the UK found that 88% of all resolutions end in failure!

So why do we keep making them? Well, old habits die hard.

But to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions. They strike me as silly. If I smoked (which I don’t), why would I wait until the New Year to “quit”? Because I don’t really want to quit and this prolongs it. It’s a form of procrastination.

If you really want to do something, do it right now— whether it’s May or October. It’s that simple. And if you’re not willing to do it right now, then, to be honest, you probably don’t want it that bad. And if you wait until the New Year, you’ll almost certainly fail.

But I will say that I do enjoy and believe in goal setting. I keep lots of lists (using apps like Clear and Evernote ). In particular, I like to actively manage two sets of goals. I call them “My Progressive Goals” and “My Disciplines.”

Progressive goals are things, like the name suggests, that grow and evolve over time. For example, completing my MBA, ahead of schedule, was one of my progressive goals for 2013. Check.

My Disciplines, on the other hand, are activities that in and of themselves don’t change. They’re just things I’ve committed to doing and I use the list as both a reminder and as a way of ensuring I don’t take on too much (which I have a tendency of doing).

These are things like blogging here everyday, going to the gym regularly, and doing one big snowboard trip with the guys from Penn every year . I’ll still set progressive goals within each discipline, but the disciplines themselves stay the same. They are, after all, disciplines.

So as much as I scoff at New Year’s resolutions, I have been tuning up my goals and disciplines for 2014. Blogging became a big part of my life in 2013 and I look forward to getting better at it in the New Year. Thanks for reading Architect This City. Don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter .

Onwards my friends!

I’m late in writing this blog post because I was up in Collingwood for the day snowboarding. I’m exhausted, but I do have something to say.

One of the things I always find interesting when I’m driving north of the city is how far Toronto’s major north-south streets extend. Go out to Aurora or Newmarket and you’ll still come across many familiar faces such as Jane, Keele, Dufferin, Bathurst and Yonge Street. And the distance between each of them is exactly the same as it is in the city: 2 kilometres.

This may not seem like much of a big deal, but have you ever wondered how this street grid was established?

These streets are actually concession roads . And they were used to subdivide undeveloped land in Upper and Lower Canada into a grid that could then be further subdivided into farming lots. Each square of the grid is 2 km x 2 km, or 1,000 acres.

Look at a map of the Greater Toronto Area and you’ll see it:

But what I find most intriguing about this grid system is that it was designed around farming— not our current use case. The intent was to further subdivide each 1,000 acre lot into smaller 100 acre farming lots. And these concession roads were for access—they weren’t city blocks.

By comparison, there’s another city that’s famously run off a regular street grid. You may have heard of it. It’s called New York. And its street grid was established in the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811. Some even go so far as to say that it’s “ the single most important document in New York’s development. " 

But New York’s grid is much different than the one I’m talking about. Because of its smaller scale ( 20 blocks a mile going north-south ), New York’s was decidedly urban. It was meant for city building.

Now, in the case of Toronto, concession roads obviously never stopped us from developing a thriving city. We filled in each square to make them as urban as we needed them to be. But as planning ideals changed, so did the infilling of those squares. Our grid was flexible enough to accommodate everything from farm land to suburban subdivisions.

But I can’t help but wonder how the Greater Toronto Area would have turned out had we, quite simply, chosen a different size of square. What if instead of 2 km x 2 km, we had made them 1 km x 1 km? Or what if we made them even smaller? What would the Toronto region look like today?

Sometimes it may seem like a simple decision, but in reality the implications are huge.