Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 216

Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect based in New York City. He is the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) and the author of two books.

His first book, published in 2013, was A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America . And as the title suggests, it was about the virtues of dense urban agglomerations. You know, the kind of cities that I like and have good bike lanes.

His second book, which just came out, is called The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy . In this one, he talks about the role of architecture and urbanism in fighting both climate change and social division.

Below is an excerpt from a recent interview in Bloomberg where he discusses the book's theme of "social friction." This snippet is also a timely follow-up to yesterday's post about autonomous vehicles:

Cars are problematic when it comes to connective design. It doesn’t matter if they’re electric because the problem with a car is it’s a divider. It’s a metal bubble and it keeps you from interacting with your neighbors. So the virtues of mass transit, public parks and well-designed buildings in cities are not just that they are good for the climate. They are also good for this sense of social coherence. If we’re going to live up to our promise as a country — a multicultural democracy — we need to have spaces that both reflect and perpetuate that.

I haven't read the book yet, but it sounds like it's in the wheelhouse of this blog. If you'd like to, here's a link .

One of the reasons why I'm interested in the autonomous vehicle space is that I know our built environment is sticky. And because we've designed so much of it around the car, it's hard to imagine this dependance going away anytime soon.

In fact, there's a very real possibility that autonomy leads to further decentralization. That is typically what happens when we make it easier and cheaper for people to travel longer distances. They sprawl. So we ought to start preparing ourselves for the positive and negative externalities.

I'm not a deep expert on autonomous vehicles, but as an interested observer, Waymo appears ahead of Tesla in delivering this future. Waymo has been offering fully driverless rides since 2020 and Tesla is still at L2 autonomy, which means a driver needs to be present in the vehicle.

I hear from lots of people that their Full Self Driving (FSD) software is pretty good, but according to some studies , it can require human intervention as often as every 13 miles. This doesn't necessarily mean that Tesla won't be first to "solve autonomy," but their Cybercab isn't here yet .

If you're interested in this topic, here is an article by Timothy Lee summarizing a discussion that he recently had with the co-CEO of Waymo, Dmitri Dolgov. Some of it is a little technical, but it does offer a comparison between Tesla and Waymo.

That is, how their approaches differ and what the future might look like.

Mexico City is all kinds of big. It is the largest metropolitan area in North America, the largest Spanish-speaking city, and broadly one of the largest megacities in the world. Because of this, it can be, you know, hard to move around.

I remember visiting the city for the first time when I was in elementary school, and it standing out to me that everyone had one day of the week when they were simply not allowed to drive their car. It was/is a form of load balancing. Imagine that. (I don't know if this is still the case, or if it's even more stringent today.)

I also remember visiting the city later on, when I was in grad school, and it standing out to me that their metro had women-only cars. This was and continues to be an attempt to try and minimize the amount of sexual harassment that takes place on transit. Again, it can be hard to move around Mexico City.

The city's latest solution is one that has found success in other Latin American cities, such as Medellin , and that is: cable cars. Relative to subway or light rail, they're inexpensive. They're also good at navigating steep terrain, and their stations can be inserted into dense urban areas. This includes working-class neighborhoods who might otherwise have very limited mobility options.

For reasons like these, Mexico City has spent the last three years building three new cable car lines, the most recent of which opened just last month. The city now has the longest cable car line in the world. But more importantly, it has a new transit add-on that is moving up to 80,000 people per day .

This isn't as much as rail. But that's okay. The point of these lines is to bring more people closer in so that they can then connect to more services and other mobility options. And to do it quickly. Three new lines in three years is impressive. And from the sounds of it , it has transformed many people's lives for the better.

Here are maps of the 3 lines, zoomed out a bit so that you can see how they fit into the city's broader urban context: