Details on Sidewalk Labs’ waterfront tech district remain fuzzy

Public will have to wait until July for details of what’s planned for the sensor-laden east waterfront district, and the full draft plan won’t be revealed until October, meeting is told.

Thestar.com
May 3, 2018
David Rider

Halfway through a year-long public consultation on a potential high-tech test district, Torontonians will have to wait months to see concrete proposals.

About 200 people at the latest public roundtable hosted by Sidewalk Labs, the Manhattan-based urban innovation sister company of Google Inc., and tri-governmental agency Waterfront Toronto, were told they’ll have to wait until July for details of what’s planned for the sensor-laden east waterfront district, and the full draft plan won’t be revealed until October.

That is a big problem, said Bianca Wylie, an open government advocate and co-founder of Tech Reset Canada who attended the session at Daniels Spectrum on Dundas St. E.

“You can’t talk about privacy until you have the products and services; you need to see exactly how this works,” she said, adding the final plan should be released before October. “You don’t have public legitimacy; they are going to have to hold more public meetings.”

Dan Levitan, a spokesman for Sidewalk Labs, defended the process, saying the meetings and other consultation tools are needed to develop a plan for the district that reflects Torontonians’ wishes and concerns. Consultation won’t stop with the final plan, said Levitan, who noted that Waterfront Toronto, the city of Toronto and Sidewalk must all approve “Quayside” before it can become reality.

At the session, data security and privacy were a major concern, dominating a question-and-answer session.

Rit Aggarwala, Sidewalk Labs’ chief policy officer, said data collected by sensors monitoring everything from traffic to weather would not be sold to anyone. But he cautioned that data on people in the district must be used to improve mobility, housing and more.

“We need to have information. That doesn’t have to be personally identifiable information,” he said.

Questions from a previous session in March about whether data would be kept on Canadian, and not U.S. servers, went unanswered.

Still, transportation planner Anthony Smith, who attended the session, sees promise in the plan.

“I think there’s a lot of innovative thinking and new creative ideas for the city,” said Smith, who added that he’ll be “excited to see real plans.”

Smith’s main concern is how the 800-acre Port Lands, mostly city-owned, interact with the 12-acre Quayside site at Queens Quay and Parliament St.

“The (Quayside) site right now is very small and I don’t think they can do very much there,” he said.

“I want to understand the bigger opportunity and what we’re really signing up for; this could be a starting point or it could trap us in a sort of dark corner.”