Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 441

I was having coffee this week with a self-described luddite and, after we ordered our coffees, he surprised me by pulling out his iPhone and initiating ApplePay. Knowing him and his general views on technology, I said, "I'm surprised that you of all people are now using ApplePay." To which he responded, "I can't believe it took me this long to start using it. It's so convenient! I now barely ever pull out my wallet." Yup, it is very convenient.

It also just so happens that this month marks the 10 year anniversary of contactless payments on London's public transport network . This meaning payment via a bank or credit card, and not via an Oyster card. In fact, part of the reason why London did this was because bus drivers were struggling with both having to give change and having to deal with people who didn't have enough funds on their Oyster cards.

So Transport for London (TfL) decided to spend £11 million, design and code the entire thing in-house, and then roll it out across the network starting in 2012. Apparently , adoption started off relatively slowly. At the end of 2013, only about 6 million journeys were made using contactless payments -- this is against an initial projection of 25 million. But fast forward to today, and around 70% of all bus journeys are now contactless.

What is also interesting about this is that TfL now licenses their contactless technology to other cities around the world. Here is a £15 million deal that was announced in 2016, which suggests that they could be generating a fairly respectable return on their initial investment. But aside from this, contactless payments are an obviously good way to onboard people onto public transport. There's no special card. No lining up at a ticket kiosk. And yes, you can even use your phone.

Photo by  Tomas Anton Escobar  on  Unsplash

I tweeted two polls today. The first one is mostly useless:

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1605255076641120258?s=20&t=KIFpmPuB74_ZvKe_QFrXVQ

It asked whether developers should build more 3-bedroom apartments/condominiums. And not surprisingly, the vast majority of people voted yes. Of course, the problem with this poll is that it says nothing about the overall affordability of these larger suites. ( We've talked about this many times before on the blog.)

So it is akin to asking: Should Mercedes put this concept car into production and make it widely available? My answer would obviously be yes. It's a sweet car. I would like one. But I also don't like spending money on depreciating "assets", so in the end I probably wouldn't buy it. That said, if you're in the market for a sweet 3-bedroom condominium, I could sell you one right now.

The second poll is this one here :

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1605308117474058240?s=20&t=KIFpmPuB74_ZvKe_QFrXVQ

My overly simplistic view of taxes is that it is generally good practice to tax the things you want less of -- you know, things like cigarettes and pollution -- and reduce taxes on the things you want more of -- you know, things like housing and income.

The irony of this poll is that the vast majority of people voted for road tolls as the way to increase municipal funding. But in practice, this is not what we do at all! We heavily tax new housing and we are extremely reticent to even accurately price the usage of roads and highways.

Here in Toronto, I guess we kind of tried a few times , but in the end it never passes . Part of the problem, I think, is visibility. New home taxes are easy to hide from consumers. It is also easy to just vilify big bad developers. Road prices, on the other hand, are highly visible and they hit you repeatedly.

Perhaps what we ought to do is become more transparent about the charges that are levied on all new housing. I bet most people would be surprised.

These are autonomous sidewalk robots from Cartken :

And last week, Uber announced that customers in Miami would start to see some of their food and grocery orders being delivered by them. The way it works is pretty simple. The app tells you when you need to meet your robot on the sidewalk (they apparently don't do elevators). You open their secure compartment through your phone (or a code?). And then there's your food! Next year, both companies intend to roll out this service across more of Miami-Dade and in other cities.

This isn't the first sidewalk robot in existence. I've seen a handful of ones here in Toronto. But if it works, this could be a pretty meaningful partnership. Uber used to do self-driving autonomy in-house, and it was always positioned as central to the company's future. Uber ended up selling off that part of its business in 2020 in order to raise cash and because autonomy started feeling a lot more difficult than probably most people expected. But what seems clear is that automation remains an important objective for the company. And for good reason.

I would imagine that, for some people, it's going to feel weird seeing fleets of sidewalk robots roaming around our cities with shawarma wraps and burritos. But one of the things that services like Uber Eats have taught us is that a lot of people are willing to pay a premium for extreme convenience. So if these robots can add to that convenience and also make fulfillment a little cheaper, I suspect that people will quickly get over the weirdness.

Supposedly on-demand shawarma is also good for communities :

“We are excited about how this partnership with Uber will bring the advantages of robotics to food delivery—and ultimately create more connected communities,” said Christian Bersch, Co-founder and CEO at Cartken. “Together, we have the opportunity to reduce traffic congestion, help local merchants to increase delivery capacity, and bring consumers fast, convenient, and emission-free deliveries.”