Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 432

This is the current state of global electric vehicle adoption:

• Last year was the first year that global electric-vehicle sales reached 10% of all car sales -- the total was around 7.8 million cars (see above chart)

• Fully-electric vehicles accounted for about 5.8% of all car sales in the US, 11% of all car sales in Europe, and about 19% of all car sales in China -- China is leading in this department

• The US saw 807,180 fully-electric vehicle sales last year -- Tesla remains the biggest EV maker in the world

• In Germany, electric vehicles accounted for about 25% of all new vehicles produced last year -- BMW reported a 5% decline in new-car sales, but saw its EV sales more than 2x

• Similar story with Volkswagen: 7% decline in new-car sales; 26% increase in EV sales

• This year, some are predicting that China will see EV sales increase to every third car, and that it will reach its tipping point sometime between 2025-2030

It is obvious where all of this is heading. It is simply a question of how fast, and who will be the leaders at the end of the day.

All data sourced from the WSJ

The founder and Editor-in-Chief of Monocle Magazine , Tyler Brûle, recently had a nice trip to Ottawa :

If you’ve never been to Ottawa, don’t bother. Of all the G7 capitals, it’s one that hardly conjures up much in the way of attractive images. Don’t believe me? Try it. What comes to mind? What stands out? You see what I mean? No Big Ben, no Lincoln Memorial, no Eiffel Tower. Ottawa might have had an easier time when Germany was partitioned and Bonn was its capital but that credit ran out when Berlin was reinstated as Haúptstadt and the Brandenburg Gate roared back as a symbol for the Federal Republic’s capital.

He and his mom also thoroughly enjoyed their hotel:

We walked into the bar and the whole space seemed gripped by a similar force that plagued the front desk: no speed, movement or sense of urgency. A man-child showed us to the table and barely said a word. His colleagues at the bar were having their own discussion, disconnected from the patrons around them. I started to laugh. My mother urged me to stop. “It’s incredible that this is the best that our country can do for people coming to the capital, no?” I said.

As an unabashedly proud Canadian, this is deeply upsetting. It is upsetting because a lack of movement, a lack of urgency, and an overall lack of engagement are truly terrible qualities to possess. But more importantly, it is upsetting because one could argue that Tyler's Ottawa and hotel experiences were a microcosm of some broader national issues around Canadian complacency.

Here is an interesting set of maps ( from this study ) showing density trends, population trends, and residential area trends (i.e. sprawl), across Europe between 2006-2012 and 2012-2018:

The key takeaway is that, broadly speaking, there is -- or at least there was five years ago -- a new density trend across most European cities. From 2006 to 2012, the prevailing trend was de-densification. That is, fewer people per hectare. However, from 2012 to 2018, that trend largely reversed. With the exception of the Iberian Peninsula and Eastern Europe, the majority of cities flipped to densification.

The study tells us that there are two main reasons for this switch. The first is that more cities started growing again. During the first period, about 60% of cities in the sample size of 300+ cities, were adding people. In the second period, this figure increased to 75%. It's also worth noting that this growth is being largely driven by immigration, and increasingly so. The number of cities with positive natural growth diminished from 67% to 51% between the two study periods.

The second driver is a reduction in sprawl. Though almost every city in the study continued to expand outward, the rate of expansion was much lower between 2012 and 2018. So less land consumption, and more people. That's how you increase your urban density. Of course, it would be interesting to see if any of this has changed or reversed (again) as a result of the pandemic. 2018 kind of feels like eons ago, doesn't it?