Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 369

I had an interesting meeting today talking about the structural approach behind this OMA-designed project in Brooklyn (pictured above).

I have always found structural engineering fascinating. Structures, along with physics, were some of my favorite classes from high school all the way to grad school. So even though I don't think my personality is ideally suited to engineering, if I were ever to become an engineer, I'm fairly certain that I would need to be a structural one.

For this project the big structural challenge was the large cantilevers that you see above in the tower on the left. As I understand it, there a number of ways to deal with this. One way would be to just design large transfer slabs and/or beams. But given the size of this tower, these would end up being very deep, and so you'd be really compromising the spaces where these structural transfers occur.

How they actually dealt with it is through sloping columns (which you can see in the above photo if you look closely). What these columns do is gradually transfer the loads across multiple floors in the building, until they reach structure that runs all the way down the tower.

At the same time, the spaces underneath the sloping columns are essentially "hung" from above. Meaning the columns are in tension, instead of being in compression, which is typically how columns work. The result is that you get some sloping columns in the suites. But I think that's kind of cool. If you're nerdy enough to care, it tells you how the structure of the building is working.

Obvious disclaimer: I am not a structural engineer. You probably want to consult one if you're looking to do a cantilevered tower with sloping columns.

Photo: Elevated Angles via Highbury Concrete

So apparently Lyft is the largest bikeshare operator in North America . They operate around 68,000 bikes and scooters, which equaled some 52 million rides last year. Ridership also continues to grow. Since 2020, ridership has grown in cities like New York (+56%), Chicago (+79%), Boston (82%), and Denver (+170%).

However, this part of Lyft's business was in the news this week because the company announced that they are entertaining proposals to sell it, as well as "strategic partnerships." The company has said that it remains committed to offering bikes through the Lyft app, but clearly it is trying to shore up its balance sheet.

This raises some interesting questions. Can bikeshare be a profitable and sustainable for-profit business? Or do we now need to be thinking of it as an important public service that is deserving of subsidies -- similar to how public transit and cars/roads work in most cities? My own view is that these networks are here to stay regardless of how profitable or unprofitable they might be.

For additional stats on Lyft's bikeshare business, click here . One of the figures that I found interesting, but not surprising, was that 71% of riders use bikeshare for "fun." This is by far the most popular use case. The next most popular use is "errands" at 39%.

There is a Freshii at the bottom of our office building that is staffed by exactly one human. This human's main job is to prepare food orders and then distribute those food orders to the humans waiting for lunch.

If you'd like to place an order, well that is done through an iPad-like device on the counter and a video feed of someone that is seemingly located very far away from the bottom of our office building. You just tell the person on the screen what you'd like and they ring it through.

And if you'd like to add a drink to your order, simply grab it yourself, hold it up to the iPad, and then boom. There's very little room for chitchatting. This is an important lunch transaction.

Virtual humans are not a new thing. Some, though not many, residential buildings use them in place of in-person concierges. I don't know exactly how much money this saves, but I would imagine that it's meaningful. You can now leverage one human across multiple buildings.

So I think there's no question that the world is heading in this direction. That is, less rather than more human interaction. But clearly this is all about utility. It's about delivering you a healthy lunch bowl as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you're instead looking to sit by yourself at a bar and learn something from the bartender, or you're looking for a truly remarkable hospitality experience -- well those are different things all together.