Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 324

Montréal had its first snowstorm of the season this week, and if you look on X, you'll find images and videos like these

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What's remarkable is the number of people who, at least from these tweets, continue to cycle in the winter. In fact, in the above video, there looks to be more bikes on the road than cars. Plowed lanes certainly help!

According to the city of Montréal , about 80% of the network is maintained for year-round use (717 km of its 900 km network). But I'm sure that there are a lot of people who still can't imagine anyone wanting to cycle in these conditions. So what is the actual winter usage?

Thankfully, Montréal has bike counters. 55 of them to be exact. And all of the data can be viewed, here . The busiest location is Saint Denis and Rue des Carrières. This falls within their Réseau Express Vélo (REV) network, which is a series of protected lanes intended to do what the name suggests.

The daily average for this counter is currently 4,403 riders, but the summer peak looks to be closer to 10,000. And this year, it has seen close to 1.5 million rides in total. This is a significant number. I mean, imagine 1.5 million more car trips on the road.

Looking at yesterday's data, the daily count was 1,292. If you very crudely divide this by my 10,000 summer peak estimate, you get to around 13%. And this happens to line up with what seems to be the city's generally accepted winter cycling retention ratio .

Not surprisingly, fewer people want to cycle in the winter. But the number is not nothing. If you multiple 1,292 cycling trips by 120 days (roughly December to March), that's still over 150,000 trips (I know, I didn't account for weekends). On top of this, the city's winter cycling retention rate appears to be increasing.

So just because you may not want to cycle to work in the winter, it doesn't necessarily mean that others feel the same way.

When I was in grad school they used to always tell us that architects are a leading indicator for the development business. Because if architects are getting fewer jobs/billings, it means that at some point in the future there will be fewer construction starts and then fewer completions. And not surprisingly, that is what we are seeing happening right now. Below is the latest data from the AIA/Deltek Architecture Billings Index (via Bloomberg).

Billings, inquiries (an even earlier leading indicator for billings), and design contracts are down:

And it seems to be most pronounced in the West and the Northeast:

This is always something to watch if you want to try and forecast where hard costs might be going and what completions might look like in the next few years.

If you're looking for a rough overview of how US business income taxation works -- and who isn't really -- this is an interesting article by Matt Levine . He has a knack for making this stuff a lot more interesting. The real purpose of the article, though, is as a lead up to talking about Biden's proposed "billionaire minimum tax". At the highest level, here's the idea :

His most recent budget would require taxpayers worth more than $100 million to pay a minimum of 25% on their capital gains each year, whether they sold assets for a profit or continue to hold them.

The way things work today is that unrealized capital gains are not taxed. Meaning you can own something like a stock for a really long time and not pay any capital gains on it, until of course you sell or realize the gains. So this is a philosophical kind of change. And in Matt's words, it is both "jarring" and "possibly unconstitutional".

But I guess it doesn't affect that many people. There are, according to CNBC , somewhere around 10,660 centi-millionaires in the US. I wonder why it's not called a centi-millionaire minimum tax, though. (I know why.)