Well, NIMBYism + privacy paranoia. Torontonians who were never going to live there, hadn't attended the open houses, and weren't willing to even try it as a small-scale experiment apparently had veto power over what Sidewalk could do with their own property.
What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
31–40 of 112 posts
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#32The project was killed for the right reasons; the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it. If smart cities are inevitable, then a mega-corporation like Google with all the resources in the world should be jumping at the opportunity to build a new settlement where none currently exists. Shouldering the cost of such a project should not be a h…
> the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it.
When I lived in San Francisco proper this was the same reason I didn't have high speed fiber. NIMBYs didn't want a little green can out front of their houses.
Sometimes progress has to be made despite the residents so they can ultimately reap the benefits.
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#33As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google is 110% the wrong company to be involved. Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house? If Google, or any other…
Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house?
No.
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#34As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google is 110% the wrong company to be involved. Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house? If Google, or any other…
As someone who lives in Toronto, I'm disappointed we couldn't even have this as an experiment with smart city technologies. "It's time to build" and all that.
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#35The project was killed for the right reasons; the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it. If smart cities are inevitable, then a mega-corporation like Google with all the resources in the world should be jumping at the opportunity to build a new settlement where none currently exists. Shouldering the cost of such a project should not be a h…
I thought this was the proof of concept? No one lives there now, no one would be forced to move there.
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
My big problem from the beginning was that the money flow made no sense. Why should Toronto be paying for a Google experiment? Google benefitted far more than any other party involved, and that felt slimy.
Google bought 12 acres of waterfront property and was working on development. Aside from the usual level of involvement (meetings, permitting, etc) the city had no skin in the game.
They bought the land at a heavy discount, continued to stretch their proposal far beyond the scope of the original RFP, demanded further city investment into transit/land development in order to facilitate their idea, and proposed low-income housing that was frankly a crap deal. In the end Google would've been reaping all the profits of the development deal while the city pays to clean up the mess.
It basically boiled down to somewhere between a mediocre and a pretty bad deal for the local economy, instead of letting a local developer do their thing. I wouldn't have been surprised if it ended up costing (especially if you add in the land discount and subsidies) taxpayers well over a billion dollars. The whole thing reeked of a PR stunt for the Gov working with Big Tech, but I don't know of a single citizen who thought it was a good idea.
Next time, follow a fair RFP process. I'd rather have Amazon try and develop the waterfront.
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#37As someone who lives in Toronto, the collapse of this project is a great outcome. While the goals of the project seem forward thinking and could benefit society in the long run (in terms of renewable building, etc) Google is 110% the wrong company to be involved. Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house? If Google, or any other…
Imagine you lived there and your google account gets banned by some overzealous ML model. Do you just get locked out of your house? No.
Since Google hates passwords, I can't imagine that they would support plain old metal keys for doors. Neither can I imagine how unlocking a Google door wouldn't involve an arbitrarily closable Google account. Other incidents have shown that once your Google account is closed, Google won't talk to you.
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I've been saying for ages that the big companies need to have their banning policies be public overseen and accountable if they plan on having any significant impact on our lives in this way.
The last public number was that Twitter was banning 10 fake bots per second. How exactly do you plan to have a public oversight process for fighting fraud and abuse at scale?
Well if those bots are able to login and prove they're real people, it wouldn't be a problem. I suspect, though, with bots, they'll just create new accounts and not even bother with any sort of appeals process.
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#39The project was killed for the right reasons; the residents, people that have to deal with its consequences and for whom the benefits were vaguely defined, opposed it. If smart cities are inevitable, then a mega-corporation like Google with all the resources in the world should be jumping at the opportunity to build a new settlement where none currently exists. Shouldering the cost of such a project should not be a h…
Well, company towns are probably a bad idea too, if for different reasons.
But there's probably room for smart cities created by the public sector where no personal data is collected and the goal is livability rather than profit.
Re: What killed Quayside, Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious smart city in Toronto?
#40> transforming what had previously been an area east of downtown Toronto characterized by desolate parking lots and the graffiti-strewn foundations of demolished buildings Guess Toronto got its crap back. > Affordable housing was a top concern among Toronto residents before the pandemic, and in the economic fallout it will only grow as a priority, she said, as an example. It’s ironic. At least in technology, the way…
Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the technology price value trend. Housing today is barely better in terms of quality or value from 50 years ago. To expect housing to improve as fast as handheld devices is unrealistic, but I think they should be improving at around the same rate as cars.
If you think the price of housing has anything to do with the craft and materials involved, versus zoning, mortgage policy, the race to get into “good” school districts…well, I have a bridge that goes to the newly available land in the Portlands area of Toronto to sell you.
(The absolute drama that involves building anything in Toronto would drive you mad. Gaze upon the NIMBYs fighting tooth and nail to prevent high-density housing on the Danforth and despair.)