Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 993

Bill Gurley – who by the way is an investor in Uber – has an interesting piece up on his blog about the thing he loves most about Uber . It is the ability for the network to level load on its own. And here’s what he means by that:

In spite of all the ink that journalists, analysts, and pundits have spilled on Uber over the years, no mainstream article has focused on what I consider to be the most elegant feature of this now ubiquitous, high growth global service — no driver-partner is ever told where or when to work. This is quite remarkable — an entire global network miraculously “level loads” on its own. Driver-partners unilaterally decide when they want to work and where they want to work. The flip side is also true — they have unlimited freedom to choose when they do NOT want to work. Despite the complete lack of a “driver-partner schedule” this system delivers pick-up times that are less than 5 minutes (in most US cities (with populations over 25K) and in 412 cities in 55 other countries. The Uber network, along with Mr. Smith’s invisible hand, is able to elegantly match supply and demand, without the “schedules” and “shifts” that are the norm in most every other industry.

When surveyed , most people seem to prefer a job where they set their own schedule and get to be their own boss, compared to a steady 9 to 5 job with benefits and a fixed salary. Assuming that’s true, then this is a feature worth talking about.

A couple of months ago I wrote about Bird , the electric scooter sharing company that is trying to solve the last-mile problem. They are expanding across the US and it is seemingly wildly popular.

But its popularity is also leading some people to call them a public nuisance . Perhaps the biggest contributor to that is the fact that the system is dockless. That is, when you get to your destination you can park the Bird wherever you want.

That’s obviously a great feature for users (who wants to look around for a docking station?), but it’s also causing a proliferation of “Bird litter” in the cities and neighborhoods where they are widely used. 

I am sure this will eventually get resolved.

The other thing about going dockless is that you now have a charging problem. Where and when do these scooters get charged and by whom? Bird solves this problem through decentralized contract workers called “ Bird hunters .”

You register to be one and then Bird pays you $5 to $20 for every scooter charged, depending on how difficult the Bird is to find. And as you can expect, these scooters are getting left all over the place.

I thought this was a clever solution. And apparently it is popular with high school students looking to earn extra cash. Some are making several hundred dollars a day by spending their evenings picking up and dropping off Birds.

The National Center of Health Statistics just released this update on births and birth rates for the United States in 2017. The provisional number of births last year was 3,853,472, which represents a 2% reduction from 2016 and the lowest number in 30 years. The general fertility rate was 60.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44, which represents a 3% reduction from 2016. Also a record low.

Here is a chart from the report showing birth rates for selected age ranges from 1990 to 2016 (the 2017 numbers are provisional):

Many of the age ranges have remained stable. Notable are the decline in the teenage (15-19) birth rate and the increase in births to women aged 40-44. The teenage birth rate declined 7% from 2016 and has averaged a decline of nearly 8% a year since 2007. And the birth rate for women aged 40-44 has generally been rising since 1982.

I am sure that you can all think of many explanations for the above phenomena without even diving into the report. I find all of this relevant because demographics obviously impact the real estate business and how we build cities.