Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1569

Next City published an interesting article this morning on the politics behind Rob Ford’s subway obsession. I encourage you to have a read if you’re interested in politics, transit and/or the increasing polarization of North American cities (core vs. suburbs). It’s called Canada’s Strangest Straphanger.

There are a number of great take-aways from the article, but I’d like to highlight one that I’m not sure many Torontonians realize: There’s currently no light rail (LRT) in the city. We have streetcars, of course. But no light rail. There’s a difference.

Here’s an exert from Next City:

“It is true that most people in Scarborough don’t want a light rail. They want a subway, and the reason they want it is that there is no light rail in Toronto,” says Jay Young, SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “We just have streetcars and subways and they think light rail is a streetcar, when actually it’s very close to a subway in terms of having its own right of way.”

This may seem like semantics, but it’s not. Again, one difference is that light rail has its own right of way and streetcars compete with vehicular traffic. The other significant difference is station spacing . Streetcars stops are spaced similar to bus stops, which let’s say averages around 250m. LRT stations on the other hand are often in the range of 400-600m. This makes them similar to subways.

It’s for this reason that even though the St Clair streetcar has its own right of way, I would not personally consider it a true LRT. As someone who lived in midtown for over 3 years, I can tell you that the stations are way too close together and that it’s highly inefficient during peak times - much like the rest of our streetcar network.

Given the constant debates going on this city about light rail vs. subways , I think it’s important that we’re clear on definitions. Light rail has the potential to be an effective (read: cheaper and faster) way of delivering rapid transit to a greater number of people in the city. Before we dismiss that proposition, let’s please understand what it is.

Remember when you first started using the internet and nobody wanted to reveal their actual identity? Everyone used aliases, because it was weird to share sensitive information - like your full name - on the internet. One of my earliest usernames was bdonn. I used it for everything. I had bdonn@aol.com.

Well, things have certainly changed.

Could you have imagined that we’d get to a world where “over sharing” is viewed as a real - albeit first world - problem and phrases like “I share therefore I am” get thrown around. It’s a pretty dramatic departure from how we used to feel about privacy. And for the younger generation, who grew up entirely with social media, I don’t even think privacy is on the radar.

Some would argue that this is a problem, which is why a group of academics over at Berkeley created a web app called Ready or Not? What it does is allow anyone to enter a Twitter or Instagram username and see a plotted map of where that user has shared from.

Here’s what it spit out for me based on my recent tweets:

The hope is that this will promote awareness around the fact that even one short tweet could be potentially revealing your exact geographic location. But I wonder to what extent people are actually unaware that this is happening or is just that they’re comfortable sharing this information? What do you think?

A couple of months ago I had coffee with an urban planner who had recently relocated from the Bay Area back to Toronto. One of the interesting things that came up during our conversation - that I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to before - was how corporate shuttle buses (from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and so on) could be impacting cities.

On the surface, they seem fairly benign. Most of the big tech companies are located outside of San Francisco, but young smart people today like living in cities . So let’s run shuttles buses that take people back and forth. Employees get to live the life they want and employers get broader access to human capital. It seems like a win-win.

But in reality, some argue that these shuttles buses reinforce a powerful trend already plaguing the region: The alienation of non-tech people . George Packer of the New Yorker called the buses "a vivid emblem of the tech boom’s stratifying effect in the Bay Area."

What I wonder though is to what extent these buses are not just an emblem, but an actual driver of stratification and other negative outcomes. The first concern that comes to my mind is the possibility for this to lead to infrastructure disinvestment. Already there seems to be a philosophical divide around transit ( see BART strike ).

Wired just published an interesting set of maps that try and map “ Silicon Valley’s gentrification problem through corporate shuttle routes. " They’re worth checking out. It’s also interesting to see how they collected the data; it was a fairly messy process.