Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 426

Cruise, the autonomous taxi service owned by GM, is working toward offering 24/7 service in San Francisco. I wrote about that here . And so it recently came out with some supportive data suggesting that between September and November of last year, it completed 2,800 rides covering some 27,000 miles, and that it did so without a major collision or injury.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, however, disagrees . They are opposing Cruise's service expansion plans, and have reported 92 incidents where Cruise's autonomous taxis have obstructed traffic, caused delays to transit, blocked lanes and, apparently in two cases, driven over firehoses.

These two things are not all that surprising. Firstly, autonomous vehicles are still in their infancy and they are known to do silly things. Part of this, I'm sure, is because they're programmed around road and life safety. And so if they don't know what to do, they're going to default to what is deemed safe, even if it means blocking a lane or obstructing traffic.

Secondly, transit agencies are suffering in our post-pandemic world . So this is an obvious and understandable case of self-interest. And it's not new . But at the same time, we've all seen this movie many times before, from Napster to Uber. Progress is disruptive. But does it really make sense to stop?

https://youtu.be/TjouGyWXVM0

You can tell a lot about a place by the quality of its public toilets. I don't know about you, but if I'm at a restaurant and the toilets are filthy, I automatically assume that the kitchen is at least as filthy.

And so what does it say about Japan that it decided to hire the country's leading architects to design 17 new public toilets in Tokyo?

I first wrote about "The Tokyo Toilet" back in the summer of 2021. But now that the majority of them have been constructed, I figured it was time to revisit the project.

The two toilets designed by Shigeru Ban are particularly noteworthy in that they are clear glass boxes that become automatically opaque when in use. This was done so you can see if there's anyone lurking inside.

I also love this one by Kazoo Sato .

But of course, all of them are remarkable and all of them are probably better than the general level of public architecture that you'll find in most other cities.

If you're working on a development pro forma and trying to figure out what construction costs might be at some point in the future, the surest bet is to assume that they will be more than they are today and that they will grow at a rate that exceeds the rate of inflation. And here's some historical data to back up this claim.

What here is, is a great post by Brian Potter, where he looks at various construction cost indices from about the last century to try and answer the question: does construction ever get cheaper? While the answer to this question is technically "yes", it is doesn't happen all that often. Typically, the average yearly increases look something like this:

And if you net out CPI from these figures, you get a table that looks like this:

Blue means that the respective index grew faster than the rate of inflation, and red means that it grew less than (or the same as) the rate of inflation. And here we obviously have more blue than red.

So what's causing this?

Well, if you break out material costs, as Potter has done, you'll see that over the same time period, building materials don't usually follow this same trajectory. Instead, they tend to rise at or below the rate of inflation. What this suggests is that the culprit is likely labor costs, which would be consistent with the fact that construction labor productivity has been steadily declining since probably the middle of the 20th century.

Tables: Brian Potter