Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 901

Today we visited BMW Welt (World) and the BMW Museum in Munich. BMW Welt was designed by COOP HIMMELB(L)AU out of Vienna. It is the result of a design competition that the BMW Group held in 2001. Construction of the ~73,000 square meter facility was completed in 2007. The project is centered around a great hall and an elevated vehicle delivery area known as Premiere. It was designed -- and this includes the HVAC system -- to handle 40 car deliveries per hour, or 250 per day. I guess they don't work a full 8 hours. Below are two photos that I took of the delivery area. The circles you see on the floor in the second picture are rotating platforms. This is where you want to pick up your new car.

And here is a plan of the entire Welt space via COOP HIMMELB(L)AU:

I also really enjoyed the BMW Museum, which is housed in a separate building adjacent to the BMW Tower (the one that looks like engine cylinders). The "art cars" were a lot of fun. I'm sure that many of you will be able to guess the artist behind this one:

But what I enjoyed most were the classics like this one here:

The least interesting cars for me were the ones that weren't old enough to be "classic", but also weren't new and shiny. This can happen with architectural styles as well. Designs sometime need time to settle in. For more photos of BMW Welt and the BMW Museum, follow me on Instagram . Drawings/Isometrics: COOP HIMMELB(L)AU

We drove on the Autobahn today. Our Ford remained as smooth as ever. They take their cars seriously here and force regular inspections. But this got me wondering about safety records and why more countries haven't adopted similar approaches to highway driving. Here is Germany's 2014 record from Wikipedia :

It turns out that the injury and fatality rates on the Autobahn -- measured per billion vehicle kilometers traveled -- are actually relatively low compared to urban and rural road classes. It is also relatively low compared to international standards. Here is a 2012 comparison, also via Wikipedia :

Europe as a whole does very well in this regard (not that this specifically addresses Autobahn safety). Generally, fatalities have declined significantly over the last few decades. Here is a chart from the World Health Organization :

What is clear to me after seeing this data, though, is that the greater problem looks to exist outside of our highways and motorways.

Last summer Bloomberg ran a visual essay on how America uses its land . In case some of you missed it, I thought I would share it here today. They started by breaking the country down into 6 main land uses. Each square represents about 250,000 acres.

What likely won't surprise any of you is that urban areas punch well above their weight:

Even though urban areas make up just 3.6 percent of the total size of the 48 contiguous states, four in five Americans live, work and play there. With so much of the U.S. population in urban areas, it’s little surprise that these areas contribute an outsize amount to the economy. The 10 most productive metropolitan areas alone contributed to about 40 percent of U.S. GDP in 2016.

Here's a further breakdown of the map:

There is a lot that is interesting here. Note that golf courses made the cut.