Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 92

About 35 minutes south of Project Bench is a waterfront community on Lake Erie called Crystal Beach. And within Crystal Beach is a restaurant owned by celebrity chef Matty Matheson called Rizzo's House of Parm . This is a Niagara Region restaurant that has been on our team's list since it opened in 2022, but we've just never been able to make it work — until yesterday.

If you're in the mood for some Italian-American comfort food and are somewhat proximate, I would definitely recommend it. The food is solid, the portions make me happy, and the place has a great overall vibe. But here's what I would also say: you don't need to make a special drive from Toronto. Save that for you know what .

When it comes to cities, quality of life is a subjective measure. Some people may prefer a small city where homes are more affordable and commute times are negligible, while others may find the unique amenities of a big city more appealing — enough to outweigh the negatives.

Whatever the exact case, there are some obvious negatives that come with urban scale. The usual suspects are high housing costs, traffic congestion, noise and pollution, crime and safety concerns, and the list goes on. But is it universally true that quality of life has to decline as a city grows?

I don't think so at all. I wasn't able to find a good primary source on this topic, but the obvious example and outlier that comes to mind is Tokyo. It is both the largest metropolitan area in the world and a city that consistently ranks near the top of most quality of life indices.

So how do they do it?

There are lots of ingredients that go into a city like Tokyo, but I would argue that one of if not its most important, is its transit network. Tokyo has one of the highest rail modal splits and one of the lowest driving rates in the world . And it's the only way a city of this scale could actually function as efficiently as it does.

This is not me being an ideologue (which I am sometimes called); it is me being a pragmatist. Show me a big global city with more than 10 million people that is oriented around the car and does not have a traffic congestion problem, and I'll happily change my mind.

Cover photo by Leongsan on Unsplash

Rivian makes electric vehicles designed for adventure. But in addition to this (I'm deliberately avoiding the word also ), they've just spun out another company called Also , which makes e-bikes, quads, and other mobility products. This month, they revealed their new flagship product called the TM-B (transcendent mobile - bike). If you can't see the embedded video above, click here .

I'm not sure how big the market will be for a US$4,500 e-bike, at least in the short term, but the tech seems pretty awesome. And I think the bigger deal here is that this is now a well-funded company focused on " form factors that are all sub-car ." Rivian is a car company, but they recognize that to really drive sustainability into our transportation networks, we need to also think beyond the car.

Cover photo: Also