Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 826

On October 3, New York City did something very similar to what Toronto did on King Street. It restricted through traffic on 14th Street to only trucks and buses, and turned the street into the city's first "busway."

Under the new rules, cars, vans, and taxis are restricted every day of the week from 6am to 10pm, unless they're dropping off or picking someone up, or entering into a parking garage (i.e. local traffic only). But after this, they need to make the first available right and turn off the street. Again, it's pretty similar to the way things work here on King.

https://twitter.com/travis_robert/status/1179813054235721728?s=20

On the first day of the 18-month pilot program, the buses actually had to slow down in order to keep to their schedule. They were moving too quickly. Previously one of the slowest routes in the city, the M14 bus is now expected to increase its average speed by about 25%.

Not surprisingly, a number of people were concerned that this new busway would hurt businesses along the route. This same concern has been an issue in Toronto. But this is New York. We're talking about the US city with the highest percentage of households without a vehicle .

The reality is that we need to get better at moving people around our cities without a car. This is one way to do it and we know it works. My prediction is that the 14th Street pilot will prove to be a success. It will then get replicated in other parts of Manhattan. Probably on other crosstown streets.

Last week, audio clips from an internal Q&A session at Facebook were leaked and published by the Verge . These meetings have historically always been private. In what I think was the right move, the company then decided to publicly livestream a subsequent Q&A session -- you know, to show that they had nothing to hide.

The media tended to focus on Mark Zuckerberg's comments about the threat of Facebook being broken up by regulators. #BreakUpBigTech. Lots of people are also attempting to glean what this leak might signal about the company's current corporate culture. But there are lots of other interesting soundbites.

Here's an excerpt from Zuckerberg about the Chinese social media app, TikTok :

So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

TikTok now has over 1.4 billion installs outside of China according to TechCrunch . And in the first half of this year, it supposedly booked more than $7 billion in revenue (though most of it came from China). The company is also saying that it posted its first profit in June of this year.

All of this is, indeed, "a very interesting phenomenon."

But it's even more interesting because this is probably the first consumer-facing Chinese internet product with massive global adoption. And it has Facebook paying attention. They're now the ones who have to play copycat -- their version of TikTok is called Lasso. Of course, it's not nearly as popular.

Bloomberg recently came up with a new index to define the distribution of wealth across adults in the world . They're calling it your "net worth number" and the scale ranges from -2 to 11. Sadly, because the gap is so significant between the rich and the poor, it is based on a logarithmic or non-linear scale. Here's how they break it down:

Logarithms of negative numbers aren't a thing, and so, technically, if your liabilities exceed your assets (i.e. you have a negative net worth) you shouldn't appear on this index. But Bloomberg has added those people -- which could be students with debt, after all -- into the -2 category of their scale. These are people with a penny to their name.

Now, the number of adults in each bracket is purely an estimate. If you look at different sources, you will end up with different numbers. Bloomberg believes that there are 2,800 adult billionaires in the world (numbers 9 to 11); whereas Credit Suisse's estimate is about 1,600. (I wonder if it's easier to estimate the number of billionaires or the number of -2's.)

Still, it is eye-opening to see where most adults sit (at number 3) and how bottom heavy this index is.