Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 743

The above chart from Bloomberg City Lab shows driving, walking, and transit mobility for 12 cities during this pandemic. The data source is Apple's mobility index, which is based on travel queries within its app. So this isn't going to capture how everyone is moving about, but presumably it is somewhat indicative. Although I couldn't tell you the last time I used an app to tell me where to walk. Maybe that's just me though.

A few things are worth point out. As we have seen before on this blog , Seattleites (do people actually use this demonym?) stopped using transit at a faster rate than most other cities in the US. And according to the above chart, they have also been slower to return to it. This has me continuing to wonder, "why is Seattle such an outlier?" Generally though, these graphs do seem to suggest that people are shying away from transit.

Taipei looks to have fared the best out of this subset of cities, which is consistent with what has been publicly reported about its handling of the pandemic. Taipei has turned out to be an exemplar city during all of this. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that it remembers SARS and knew what to do -- the least of which was to simply take it seriously at the outset.

Image: Bloomberg City Lab

Just northwest of the intersection of Lansdowne Avenue and Dupont Street here in Toronto, there is something known as the Davenport Diamond. It refers to the intersection of two rail lines. Going north-south is the Barrie GO corridor (regional rail service). And going east-west is a set of Canadian Pacific Railway tracks. The problem with this Diamond is that it is one of the busiest train intersections in North America and these two corridors meet at grade. So it is a problem for service levels on this corridor.

To address this bottleneck, Metrolinx has been working on a project called the Davenport Diamond Guideway and Greenway . First and foremost, what it will do is elevate the Barrie GO corridor between Bloor Street in the south and Davenport Road in the north, allowing trains to pass over the CP tracks (rail over rail), as well as over streets like Wallace Avenue (rail over road). Metrolinx expects to have this guideway complete by spring 2023 and it will be a good thing for rail service levels across this region. Construction activity is already happening.

But the other thing this guideway does is open up the ground (literally) for a new greenway . Metrolinx is calling this the public realm component of the project, and it expects to procure this work separately, as well as complete it only after the guideway is operational. The ETA for this is 2024. However, a design was completed for the greenway back in 2018. It was completed by gh3 -- one of my favorite architecture firms in the city. And it is my understanding that this original design will be the foundation for the public realm design. Or at least, I hope it will.

If you haven't yet seen gh3's design, you can check it out over here .

Image: gh3

City Observatory has a new report out called, Youth Movement: Accelerating America's Urban Renaissance . In it, they look at and track the number of 25 to 34-year-olds with a 4-year college degree living in "close-in neighborhoods" within the 51 largest metro areas in the United States. The first thing I asked myself when I read this was, "what's a close-in neighborhood?" They define it as being a three mile radius centered on the CBD of each metro area. They opted for a distance-based measurement because municipal boundaries usually vary a lot and can therefore be misleading.

So what did they discover? From 2010 to 2016, the number of young and well-educated people in central neighborhoods increased by about 32% or 1.2 million. And it happened in every single large US metro area. In 80% of these cities, the growth rate also increased compared to the period of 2000 to 2010. Overall, City Observatory believes that this demographic cohort is now about 2.5x more likely to live in a close-in neighborhood compared to other Americans. And I don't believe that this pandemic is going to change that.

One of the things that's interesting about this study is that it takes you below some of the top line numbers that you might hear. For example, the above chart starts by showing you the total population living "close-in" within the top 51 metro areas -- again, people living within 3 miles of a CBD. From 2000 to 2010, this population figure was more or less flat at about 9.4 million people. But the number of adults and young adults with a 4-year degree increased pretty significantly, driving up the college attainment rate. So even though the total population may not have changed, the demographic composition did.

For a copy of the full report, click here .