Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 812

I spent a good chunk of this morning talking and thinking about underground building details that most people (unless you're in the industry) would never think to consider. This is not a criticism on most people. I mean, I don't know how iPhones are made. I just use and enjoy them. But when it comes to buildings, I'm paid to ask questions and understand how things work.

There's a lot of risk in the ground.

You have to think about things like bearing capacity, environmental contamination (usually), hydrostatic pressure and, generally, how you're going to manage water, particularly if you have a high groundwater table. Usually this last one is about making sure you're keeping the water out. A pretty important detail both below and above grade.

So when I came home tonight and saw the below tweet , I felt obligated to write about it.

https://twitter.com/kayeblegvad/status/1197266655891599362?s=20

If you read the reply from NYC's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, you'll see that this is them testing something they call a "flex gate." It is a flood barrier that allows them to seal off subway entrances in the case of a storm surge and they run these tests (shown above) for 4 hours at a time to make sure they're installed property . This one was.

Managing water is a big part of city building. New York City, Miami, Venice , and countless others know this all too well right now.

Earlier this year, the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) published this report on the impacts of ride hailing services in the City of Toronto.

And then today, the Ryerson City Building Institute leveraged it to opine on how "on-demand tech" might improve transit going forward. That's how I discovered it.

What is clear from the report is that ride-hailing services -- which they refer to as Private Transportation Companies (PTC) -- are driven by two dominant use cases: 1) going out at night and 2) commuting to and from work.

Friday and Saturday nights are by far the busiest periods for PTC travel, with the peak usually happening around midnight on Sunday morning. About 13,100 trips per hour, mostly concentrated in the core.

Overall, it is estimated that Toronto does about 176,000 daily PTC trips (as of March 2019). That places it behind New York and Chicago in terms of the size of the market. But Toronto also didn't complete its first PTC until 2014. Here's a comparison chart:

Another diagram that I found interesting was the proportion of shared ride trips by neighborhood. It shows that much of the inner suburbs are hailing shared rides -- sometimes as high as 45% of all trips. This is interesting because it is people effectively gaming the system.

Because the population densities are lower in the suburbs than in the core, you're a lot less likely to get paired with other riders when you select that option. So what tends to happen is that you end up getting a private ride for the price of shared ride. I know I've played the odds before.

If you'd like to download a full copy of the report, click here .

Toronto's Chief Planner, Gregg Lintern , posted this on Twitter a few days (if you can't see it below, click here) :

https://twitter.com/GreggLintern/status/1196265311491776512?s=20

A couple things came to mind when I saw this.

First, it's a reminder that census data is painfully slow. Five years is a long time and a lot can and will change during that time period, including the kind of built form that people are living in.

Second, I agree with Gregg. Toronto is in the process of transforming into a majority apartment/condo dwelling city (if it hasn't already), and it signals a pretty important juncture in our city's history.

It also begs an important question: How should our planning response change and adjust as this percentage of urban dwellers continues to creep upward?