Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan: Guest post: An analysis of all the new public agencies proposed in the MIDP

Posted on July 21, 2019 by bhaggart

I won’t start posting about the actual MIDP for a couple of days (so much background reading…), but to whet your appetite, please enjoy this comprehensive guest post from Dr. Natasha Tusikov of York University. – bh

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries available here

Sidewalk Labs, the Google sister company, outlines its plans for the proposed smart city on Toronto’s eastern waterfront in its Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP), released June 24, 2019. As part of its ambitious 1,500-page MIDP, Sidewalk Labs proposes the creation of five so-called “management entities” falling under a public administrator that would be responsible for managing the IDEA District on Toronto’s eastern waterfront. The new public administrator would involve creating a public body, amending an existing government department, or, possibly considerably augmenting Waterfront Toronto’s authority. As envisioned by Sidewalk Labs, the new public administrator would be a governmental body with relevant departments from the City of Toronto as stakeholders.

The public administrator would manage and oversee the Waterfront Transportation Management Association (WTMA), focused on mobility, and the Waterfront Sustainability Association (WSA), focused on sustainability. The public administrator would also act as sole trustee for one private body, the Waterfront Housing Trust (WHT), a public-private financing entity.

In addition, the public administrator would help coordinate the management the Open Space Alliance (OSA) and the Urban Data Trust. The OSA, which would focus on managing physical and digital infrastructure in public spaces, would be managed by a public-private body. The Urban Data Trust, which would govern all data collected and used within the IDEA District would exist first as an independent non-profit organization and then, potentially, evolve into a public agency.

Based upon a preliminary analysis of the Master Innovation and Development Plan, the following is intended to provide a concise overview of the five management entities that the public administrator would directly manage or facilitate coordination among public and private stakeholders. Although Sidewalk Labs devotes sections in chapters to each of the management entities, information on these entities and their duties is scattered across the entire MIDP.

This overview describes each proposed entity and also identifies key regulatory adjustments that would be needed to implement its plans. It also highlights the proposed sources of funding because funding will come from new fees (paid by residents or businesses) or by reallocating revenues. People will have to pay for this. Sidewalk Labs lists all its proposed regulatory adjustments and reforms in the Volume 3, Supplemental Tables, pages 224-232.

Expanded Geographical Scope

The original Request for Proposal, released by Waterfront Toronto, the tripartite public agency that issued the bid, pertained only to the 12-acre Quayside region, although there was a possiN post graphic 1bility for the successful vendor to apply for an expansion or for the project to be extended into the wider Eastern Waterfront under certain conditions. In its MIDP, however, Sidewalk Labs proposed plans cover 190 acres of what its terms an “Innovation Development and Economic Acceleration” (IDEA) District. The IDEA District would have seven neighbourhoods (see Sidewalk Labs’ map). Sidewalk Labs argues that its ideas and proposed technologies would be most effective when deployed throughout the larger IDEA district (outlined in the map below in checked line). Villiers Island West is Sidewalk Labs’ proposed site for the new Canadian Google headquarters.

The “management entities”

Waterfront Transportation Management Association (WTMA)

Q: What is the Waterfront Transportation Management Association?

As proposed by Sidewalk Labs, the WTMA would be established as a new public body under the

IDEA District public administrator. The WTMA would be responsible for managing and operating physical and digital infrastructure relating to transportation within the IDEA district, most significantly deploying a real-time data-based mobility management system to coordinate all traffic.

Q: What stated need would the WTMA address?

According to Sidewalk Labs, an innovative approach to mobility and transportation, including its proposal for real-time pricing for parking and passenger drop-off/pick-up, requires the coordination and direction of a single dedicated entity. This single entity does not currently exist within Toronto as many of the functions that Sidewalk Labs proposes for the WTMA are undertaken by separate departments, such as the Transportation Services Division and the Toronto Transit Commission. Sidewalk Labs contends that bringing together these functions under a single entity–the WTMA–and adding additional functions like the mobility management system, will deliver more efficient, sustainable mobility services in the proposed IDEA District.

Q: What are the proposed responsibilities of the WTMA?

The WTMA would be responsible for creating and operating a mobility management system. Working in collaboration with the City of Toronto’s Transportation Services Division and the Toronto Transit Commission, the WTMA would:

  • maintain and replace the proposed modular pavement system, which are hexagonal pavers used to construct streets (including heating or traffic signals);
  • deploy a real-time mobility management system that monitors and coordinates all streets and traffic signals within the IDEA District in real time, gathering data on traffic volume, delays, weather, and emergency vehicles to coordinate traffic and provide real-time information on pricing (e.g., of parking or curbside drop-offs) and route closures;
  • assume control over curbside policy and control over pricing of the use of curbs, areas currently the purview of the City of Toronto;
  • oversee planning, operations, and maintenance of new mobility-related infrastructure, such as dynamic curbs (Note: dynamic curbs use lighted pavement or signs to makes street spaces flexible to provide passenger loading zones during rush hour and public spaces at off-peak times for activities like pop-up street fairs);
  • apply data analytics to employ real-time pricing on parking and curb usage, as well as manage and set those prices;
  • procure and operate new technologies, such as adaptive traffic signals, dynamic pavement, freight and deliveries, and integrate systems with third-party navigation apps;
  • set speed limits on speed-separated streets;
  • undertake (or contract public or third parties to) construct and finance roads or parking facilities, and clear snow and debris; and
  • create a mobility subscription package for IDEA District residents, which would include a TTC monthly pass and travel credits or subsidies across all modes, including bikeshare or ride-hail services.

Q: How would the WTMA be funded?

Sidewalk Labs proposes that the WTMA’s operations be financed by fees in a way that ensures the entity is self-sustaining. In particular, WTMA would collect fees for parking, curbside pick-up/drop-off fees, road user fees for ride-hail vehicles using the project’s specially designed local streets, and charges for mobility services in relation to its operation of dynamic streets and curbs within the IDEA District. Revenue would also come from on-site parking garages and the sale of mobility packages.

Q: What would be required to implement the WTMA?

Sidewalk Labs proposes to create the Waterfront Transportation Management Association as a public body under the proposed IDEA District Public Administrator which would require amending existing or creating new legislation. Certain policymaking and enforcement responsibilities would have to be devolved from Toronto’s Transportation Services Division and Toronto Parking Authority to the WTMA, such as control over parking and curbs.

Q: What challenges does the WTMA raise?

The creation of the WTMA as a new public entity would require amending existing or introducing new legislation. As envisioned, the WTMA would assume control over parking and curbside policymaking, pricing, and enforcement from the City of Toronto and the Toronto Parking Authority. How this devolution of duties and loss of revenue from parking within the IDEA District may affect the Toronto Parking Authority will have to be considered.

While Sidewalk Labs envisions one entity coordinating all transportation and mobility services within the IDEA District with a steering committee with representatives from all three levels of government, it’s unclear how the WTMA would operate with existing departments within Toronto. Sidewalk Labs states that the WTMA would be largely (or entirely) self-funded through the collection of revenue from parking and curb pricing. However, given the breadth of its proposed duties, the WTMA will likely need ongoing public funding to fulfill its mandate. It’s also unclear whether there is the political and public appetite for creating a new public agency to coordinate transportation issues within a single neighbourhood.

A risk that Sidewalk Labs clearly lays out in its master plan is that the WTMA would yield greater benefits at the scale of the River District and even more so at the IDEA District, which could not effectively be realized if it were deployed only in the smaller Quayside district. Waterfront Toronto’s original Request for Proposal was for Quayside only, not for the much larger IDEA District proposed by Sidewalk Labs. Another significant challenge to the proposed WTMA entity is that if the transportation management system were restricted to Quayside instead of being extended across the IDEA District, according to Sidewalk Labs, the effects “would be limited, as there are simply not enough intersections to balance safety, congestion and trip choices” (2019, Ch. 1, p. 95). Sidewalk Labs clearly states that it wants to apply its proposals throughout the IDEA District instead of the much-smaller Quayside area that was the subject of the public consultations.

 Key regulatory adjustments:

In order to implement its dynamic curb and real-time pricing plans, and to set its own speed limits within the IDEA District, amendments would be needed to the Ontario Highway Traffic Act, City of Toronto Act, City of Toronto Municipal Code, the City of Toronto Zoning Bylaw, and the City of Toronto Complete Streets Guidelines. While these amendments may deliver useful services, permitting the IDEA District to have carte blanche to change rules on parking, speed limits, and street and curb usage could create an unhelpful patchwork of rules and regulatory bodies across Toronto.

Waterfront Sustainability Association (WSA)

Q: What is the Waterfront Sustainability Association?

Sidewalk Labs proposes that the Waterfront Sustainability Association be established as a new public body under the IDEA District public administrator with the responsibility for administering private entities responsible for environmental sustainability, including energy and waste water.

Q: What stated need would the WSA address?

In Waterfront Toronto’s Request for Proposal, it set a goal of making the waterfront area a climate-positive community. In response, Sidewalk Labs proposed the WSA to focus on environmental sustainability, including in regards to waste-water and storm-water management, and an advanced power grid.

Q: What are the proposed responsibilities of the WSA?

The Waterfront Sustainability Association would be responsible for operating and overseeing four advanced sustainability systems in the IDEA District: the thermal grid, waste management system, advanced power grid, and storm-water management system. This includes:

  • issuing and overseeing operating contracts as needed;
  • monitoring compliance with and enforcing service contracts with private third-party operators, including contractual rates;
  • establishing a mechanism to hold operators accountable and fairly representing the interests of users in the district for systems that are not currently subject to public regulation; and
  • compiling and reviewing key operator performance metrics, including in relation to sustainability objectives.

Q: How would the WSA be funded?

Each system operator (e.g., thermal energy) would be responsible for paying certain fees, such as covering the costs for the Waterfront Sustainability Association to maintain operational oversight. System operators would also pay fees to the lead developer for advanced systems (initially Sidewalk Labs and later the public administrator). Participating operators would fund the WSA through fees prorated based on each operator’s revenue.

Q: What challenges does the WSA raise?

The creation of the Waterfront Sustainability Association as a new public entity, similar to the WTMA, would require amending existing or introducing new legislation. As with the WTMA, it’s unclear whether there is the political and public appetite for creating a new public agency to coordinate sustainability-related issues within a single neighbourhood. A risk is that the Waterfront Sustainability Organization would not be self-financing through the collection of fees from system operators, but would require an ongoing source of public funding to fulfill its responsibilities.

Key regulatory adjustments:

In order to implement its plans for sustainable storm-water management, permissions would be needed to the City of Toronto Act, Ontario Energy Board, Ontario Water Resources Act, and the City of Toronto Wet Weather Management Guidelines. For its thermal grid extensions, the plans would require permissions from Toronto District Heating Corporation Act, Public Utilities Act, and the City of Toronto Act.

Open Space Alliance

Q: What is the Open Space Alliance (OSA)?

As proposed by Sidewalk Labs, the Open Space Alliance would be a non-profit, non-governmental organization that would enter into public-private partnerships with the City of Toronto and private third-party entities (land owners/developers) to manage and coordinate various physical and digital infrastructure in public spaces in the Quayside, the River District, and the IDEA District.

Q: What stated need would the Open Space Alliance address?

Sidewalk Labs says the Public Realm Advisory Working Group urged it to consider “an innovative governance model for public space” and to work with the City of Toronto’s Parks, Forestry, and Recreation department to “structure a sustainable management and funding plan that would ensure public ownership of parks while allowing for innovation in programming, operations, and maintenance” (Sidewalk Labs 2019, Ch. 2, p. 197).

Q: What are the proposed responsibilities of the Open Space Alliance?

Sidewalk Labs proposes an ambitious range of roles that include maintenance of physical infrastructure, arts and cultural programing, piloting new technologies, and serving as a steward for open spaces across the IDEA District. In particular, the MIDP proposes that the OSA:

  • be responsible for the ongoing maintenance and management of green storm-water infrastructure in the River District;
  • play a central coordination function across programming, operations, and maintenance to maximize access and enjoyment of shared open spaces, including in former vehicular rights-of-ways;
  • administer physical and digital infrastructure that could help people shape and program shared spaces involving, for example, civic technologists running pilots in open public spaces;
  • work with building owners to install and manage prototypical architectural designs in outdoor spaces, particularly Sidewalk Labs’ proposed building raincoats that shelter sidewalks, fanshells that cover open spaces, and lantern forests that block pedestrians from wind between buildings;
  • fund the procurement of technology services that could help improve programming, operations, and maintenance;
  • fund and support technology-enabled arts and cultural programing, such as artist residencies and design competitions;
  • coordinate, administer and oversee the proposed innovative systems, such as district-wide green infrastructure, digital and physical infrastructure for public artworks and film shoots, weather mitigation, digital maintenance technologies, and new tools for community programming;
  • and, importantly, manage the physical and digital infrastructure delivered by Sidewalk Labs.

Q: How would the Open Space Alliance be funded?

Sidewalk Labs proposes the Open Space Alliance would be jointly financed and managed by public (e.g. Parks, Forestry & Recreation Division) and private stakeholders (e.g. land owners, local businesses) in partnership with the City of Toronto. Funding from the City of Toronto would be diverted from traditional city parks funding. Landlords and tenants in the IDEA District would fund OSA’s operational and capital expenses. Specifically, developers would pay the Open Space Alliance an “upfront green infrastructure fee” and a monthly maintenance fee for the construction and maintenance of water management infrastructure within the developers’ sites. In addition, the Open Space Alliance would receive revenue from sponsored events, special elements, and concessions.

Q: What would be required to implement the Open Space Alliance?

The Open Space Alliance would be created a non-profit organization. As proposed by Sidewalk Labs, it would be jointly governed and financed by the City of Toronto and private third parties, and the IDEA District community would also have input on the OSA’s operations. A portion of municipal park funding would be directed toward the OSA, and likely funding from other public sources would be required to ensure its ongoing viability. The OSA is proposed to replace certain roles currently undertaken by the City of Toronto Parks, Forestry & Recreation Division, including operations and maintenance of public spaces.

Q: What challenges does the Open Space Alliance raise?

As proposed, the Open Space Alliance would be responsible for a broad array of services, from maintenance of storm-water infrastructure, and the operation of public spaces and outdoor architectural features across the IDEA District to the operation and coordination of physical and digital technologies created by Sidewalk Labs, and supporting cultural and community programing. This diversity of services would be a challenging workload for any department, even when carried out across a relatively small area such as the IDEA District. In addition, Sidewalk Labs’ proposal that the OSA manage the physical and digital infrastructure delivered by Sidewalk Labs would appear to unfairly privilege one company over others.

The Parks, Forestry & Recreation Division at the City of Toronto would be affected as a portion of its funding would be diverted toward the OSA. This Division would also be affected as some of its roles and functions, such as the maintenance of public spaces, would be undertaken by the OSA within the IDEA District. The OSA would likely require an ongoing source of public funding in addition to the fees collected from developers and land owners. What’s unknown is the OSA’s governance structure, its legal authority, the specifics of its funding, and its relationship to existing non-governmental and governmental bodies working in public spaces, cultural programing and digital infrastructure.

Key regulatory adjustments:

In order to implement its plans for the outdoor comfort system using building raincoats, fanshells, and forest lanterns, amendments would be needed to the City of Toronto Municipal Code.

 Urban Data Trust

Q: What is the Urban Data Trust?

As proposed by Sidewalk Labs, the Urban Data Trust would be an independent non-profit entity that would govern the collection and use of what Sidewalk Labs terms “urban data” in the IDEA District. Urban data refers to data collected from the physical environment, such as parks, and it includes both personal information from identifiable individuals and non-identifiable data. Although Sidewalk Labs uses the term “data trust,” the company argues that it is not “a ‘trust’ in the legal sense” (Sidewalk Labs 2019, Ch. 5, p. 423). Instead this trust is a “legal structure that provides for independent stewardship of data,” a definition of a data trust from the Open Data Institute, a U.K. non-profit (Open Data Institute 2019, p. 2).

Q: What stated need would the Urban Data Trust address?

Sidewalk Labs says that an important theme it heard during the public consultation was the public’s concern with the ownership and stewardship of urban data. In response, Sidewalk Labs contends that the trust would create an accountable, transparent process to manage and approve the collection and use of urban data.

Q: What are the proposed responsibilities of the Urban Data Trust?

Generally, the trust would govern the collection, use, disclosure, and storage of urban data within the IDEA District. Applicants for data collection or use would make submissions to the trust to review and approval. This would involve reviewing the data to verify the applicant’s compliance with all applicable laws and an assessment that weighs the activities’ proposed benefits and the potential harms. The trust is also responsible for managing the access of publicly available data through data sharing agreements. The trust would have the authority to audit applicants as required and order the removal of data collection devices in the event of a violation.

Q: How would the Urban Data Trust be funded?

Applicants seeking to collect or use data in the IDEA District would pay a data collection and use-administration fee to cover the trust’s costs. However, it would be likely that the trust would require ongoing funds from government to maintain its operations. Sidewalk Labs proposes that the trust evolve into a public or quasi-public agency in the long term, and such an agency would most likely rely upon, at least in part, public funding.

Q: What would be required to implement the Urban Data Trust?

In the short term, Sidewalk Labs proposes that the trust be created as an independent, non-profit, non-governmental agency. This entity would operate by establishing legal agreements with all applicants who seek to collect or use data pertaining to the IDEA District. Those agreements, together with a set of legally binding rules drafted by the trust in consultation with its public and private stakeholders, would govern how data is collected, stored, used, and commercialized, would monitor compliance with its rules, and would take legal action against non-compliance. In this phase, Sidewalk Labs proposes that the trust’s focus in this phase would be Sidewalk Labs’ own data collection projects.

In the longer term, should the trust be transformed into a public-sector agency or a quasi-public agency, legislation would need to be amended or introduced and an ongoing source of public funding secured.

The trust, in consultation with relevant stakeholders and regulatory bodies, including the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, would need to determine where the publicly accessible data would be stored, unless the trust would also act as the data repository.

Q: What challenges does the Urban Data Trust raise?

How this trust would operate, its structure and regulatory powers, the source and scope of its legal authority, its possible sources of public funding, and its relation to other regulatory bodies and governmental departments within the city of Toronto and province remain unclear, as does the political and public appetite for creating a new public agency.

Another challenge in relation to the proposed data trust are the trustee’s roles in creating and enforcing rules regarding data collection, storage, protection, and use, including commercialization. Depending on how the regulatory body is structured and its legal authority, the data trustees, whether public or private actors, could have considerable regulatory power.

While understandable, it’s rather self-interested for Sidewalk Labs to submit that its projects should be first in line for consideration by a neophyte regulator that it proposed. More problematically, if the data trust goes ahead, Sidewalk Labs’ involvement with the trust in the first phase would likely shape discussions of how (or even if) the temporary trust should involve into something more permanent, perhaps in ways that serve Sidewalk Labs’ interests at the expense of other interested parties.

Waterfront Housing Trust

Q: What is the Waterfront Housing Trust?

Sidewalk Labs proposes that the Waterfront Housing Trust be established as a private trust that would act as a public-private financing entity to administer below-market housing program in the IDEA District. The IDEA Public Administrator would serve as the Trust’s sole trustee.

Q: What stated need would the Waterfront Housing Trust address?

The City of Toronto is facing a serious shortage of affordable housing and one of Waterfront Toronto’s priorities is housing affordability. In response, Sidewalk Labs proposes the creation of the Waterfront Housing Trust as a new financial vehicle to collect and distribute funding from a variety of sources, including a condo resale fee proposed for the IDEA District. The trust is intended to incubate alternative funding sources, including low-cost loans to reduce lending costs and improve funding predictability for developers of affordable housing.

Q: How would the Waterfront Housing Trust be funded?

Individuals selling condos within the IDEA District would pay a percentage of the sales price to support affordable housing. Sidewalk Labs contends that the Waterfront Housing Trust would collect these funds and pair them with existing funding sources, and use the combined funds for an affordable housing strategy for the IDEA District

Q: What challenges does the Waterfront Housing Trust raise?

As proposed, the Waterfront Housing Trust would aggregate funding from existing sources for affordable housing and pair this revenue with its new tax on condo resellers. Formal approval may need to be obtained from the entity currently responsible for distributing affordable housing funding.

 Key regulatory adjustments

The Waterfront Housing Trust would have to seek authorization to build units smaller than indicated in the Affordable Rental Housing Guidelines of the City of Toronto Affordable Housing Office. Approval would be needed from the City of Toronto Affordable Rental Housing Guidelines and Ontario Building Code. Sidewalk Labs notes that the Waterfront Housing Trust would also need approval from the federal government and City of Toronto in order to receive funding for a portfolio of properties, rather than development by development.

Assumptions and concerns

There are a number of unproven and unstated assumptions underlying Sidewalk Labs’ proposal of five management entities and a super-Public Administrator for the IDEA District.

  • Most seriously, there’s an assumption that the current distribution of services and responsibilities among multiple government departments is necessarily inefficient. It’s assumed that bringing together diverse responsibilities under one department will improve efficiency and responsiveness, especially when aided (somehow) with technology.
  • There’s also a risky assumption that user fees will be able to solely or largely support the creation and ongoing operation of these entities. However, there is no associated costing showing the estimated revenue from user fees or the projected costs of creating the new management entities.

Where more bureaucracy equals innovation?

Sidewalk Labs’ plan come with a heavy public bureaucratic burden, an odd thing to propose given that over the past several decades the move has been away from over-governance. It’s hard to see, for example, the current Ontario government and small-c conservative mayor of Toronto, embracing five new “management entities” a super-Public Administrator to govern a relatively small area of Toronto’s eastern waterfront.

For a plan that was supposed to provide “innovative” solutions to mobility and data governance, among other issues, there is a strong–and highly problematic–reliance upon traditional top-down governance mechanisms and public funding.

The issues discussed in this post should raise serious alarm bells for policymakers at the municipal, provincial and even federal levels of government, as well as among the general public, and force a reconsideration of this project.

References

Open Data Institute. (2019). Data Trusts.

Sidewalk Labs. (2019). Master Innovation and Development Report. Chapter 5: Digital Innovation.

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Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Bonus entry 3: What responsible public consultations look like, and why the Quayside consultations are not that

Posted on July 20, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries available here

As a former federal parliamentary committee staffer, who has helped organize my fair share of consultations and who has written many reports on said consultations, it’s been professionally painful witnessing the amateurish chaos storm engulfing the consultations over Sidewalk Labs’ plans for Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront.

To understand exactly how unhelpful the Waterfront consultation process is, imagine for a moment that Sidewalk Labs were a government agency proposing this development, and that a parliamentary committee (Waterfront Toronto) were charged with reviewing it.

In this scenario, the agency would submit its report to the committee, and the worker bees (i.e., me and my colleagues) would begin analyzing it for the committee. The committee clerk, under direction from the committee members, would start scheduling hearings. The hearings would probably begin with agency officials being questioned (in public) about the proposal, followed by public consultations, their intensiveness and extensiveness being determined by the nature of the proposal.

Then, we worker bees would prepare a report and recommendations based on what the committee had heard, and the parliamentarians would discuss and amend the committee report as needed. This report would be used as the basis for adjusting, if needed, the agency’s proposal.

This process could also easily incorporate a review of the revised proposal. For Parliament, it’s up to the government to accept or reject the committee’s recommendations, so this would likely rarely happen, but it’s a logical addition to the Waterfront Toronto-Sidewalk Labs review.

Anyway, that’s what you’d likely see when the system is working: proposal; public consultations; report on the proposal with suggested amendments; final proposal; brief review; final decision.

What not to do

What you would not see is:

  • the committee (i.e., Waterfront Toronto) issuing a de facto preliminary report days after the agency proposal had been submitted, and before the consultations had started.
  • the agency (i.e., Sidewalk Labs) flatly contradicting the committee’s opinion as expressed in said unorthodox preliminary report.
  • the agency conducting its own, post-submission de facto hearings, especially under a name (in this case, Sidewalk Toronto) that will appear to some as if the hearings are being held by the committee.
  • public consultations held before anybody had had a realistic opportunity to analyze the report.
  • a final committee report based on a draft proposal and rushed, inadequate public consultations.
  • a substantive round of consultations, post-committee-report and post-final-draft, in which the public would have to assess both the committee report’s adequacy and the agency’s final proposal.

Of course, nothing about this Quayside/Eastern Waterfront development project is normal. As originally conceived, Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs were/are the co-developers of this project. In this scenario, it would make sense for the two to take their proposal to the public and then modify it based on public and government consultations.

This fundamental dysfunction, in which one partner to the project is seeking the veneer of impartiality and the other can’t stop running public-relations plays, is driving this broken process.

And so we have an ill-advised preliminary report and rushed formal consultations, and Sidewalk Labs holding its own de facto consultations and publicly challenging its partner/overseer.

It’s a mess, but it’s the kind of mess you’d expect when you muddy the distinction between regulator and regulated with absolutely no regard for basic principles of good governance and accountability. To my eyes it’s yet another indication that this entire project is fundamentally unworkable.

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Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Bonus entry 2: On poorly designed consultations, conflicts of interest, cheating on the test, and getting to know your business partner

Posted on July 19, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries available here

A quick follow-up to Tuesday’s post regarding the, shall we say, haphazard consultation process Waterfront Toronto has convened around Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan. Way back then, some 48 hours ago, I was concerned about the ineffectiveness of holding two weeks of consultations in the depths of summer, which would be used to shape some indeterminate Fall consultations.

Such short consultations on such a comprehensive report, which this series will get to eventually (promise!) and which is almost custom-designed not to be read or understood, seems a sure-fire way to ensure that the only responses you’ll get are rushed analyses from people with the ability to invest the week or so needed to ingest the report, or superficial and/or self-interested takes from people who haven’t done their homework.

Ah, those bygone, innocent times.

Now, thanks to James McLeod’s excellent and mind-boggling article in yesterday’s National Post, my initial bafflement and concern has been upgraded to incredulousness. Here’s the current iteration of Waterfront Toronto’s plan– only parts of which, it cannot be emphasized enough, were included in either its webpage or in the pages of its Note to Reader dealing with public consultations, as best as I can figure, but who knows? Waterfront Toronto is either making this up as they go along or not bothering to communicate their plans precisely with the public:

  • July 25: Waterfront Toronto concludes its in-person consultations.
  • July 31: Last chance to submit responses to its online surveys for inclusion in its September report.
  • September: Waterfront Toronto publishes its response to the MIDP “pulling together criticisms and concerns based on public commentary and responses from the various levels of government.”
  • Next step: Sidewalk Labs responds to Waterfront Toronto’s report with a final MIDP
  • Then: Waterfront Toronto holds another round of public consultations.
  • And finally: Waterfront Toronto performs “an assessment on the final document, and make a recommendation to the board of directors.”

If anything, this process is worse than the one briefly set out in the Note to Reader,  even without commenting on the wildly optimistic deadlines of late 2019/early 2020 they’ve set for themselves.

The Note to Reader made it sound like these summer hearings were basically a public temperature-taking, with the more in-depth consultations to be held in the Fall. In that plan, the biggest problem was that Waterfront Toronto would “include a report on the public feedback during Round One” (p. 47).

Now, it turns out that these rushed, wholly inadequate two-week consultations will feed into Waterfront Toronto’s actual response to the MIDP. The Round Two consultations will actually be focused not only yet another version of the MIDP, but will also have to address whether or not Waterfront Toronto’s response to the draft MIDP was adequate. Which means we will have to go through this entire nonsense again, times two.

This process is absolutely bonkers. If one were actually interested in legitimate, informative public consultation, the consultations would begin in September. This would allow both the public and Waterfront Toronto (which admits has not yet had enough time “to work through and consider the Draft MIDP” (Note to Reader, p. 47)) to take enough time out of their holidays to digest this index-deficient one-thousand-five-hundred-page, four-volume report. Consultations would be extensive, with several sub-rounds of meetings on each part of the report.

Only then, based on Waterfront Toronto’s analysis and public input, would Waterfront Toronto issue its report. Sidewalk Labs would then respond, and Waterfront Toronto could hold a brief second round of hearings addressing the specific changes Sidewalk Labs proposed. Then, based on all that, its Board could decide whether or not to proceed.

This is not that complicated.

Instead, we currently have a process that minimizes both the quality and quantity of up-front public input, and that effectively forces those of us who are deeply engaged in the process, most of whom also have lives outside of this bureaucratic rollercoaster, to double the amount of time we’re devoting to a file whose parameters seem to change on a daily basis. After all, why should I waste my time rushing to finish this unreadable monstrosity in the next seven days, and then spend a day filling out Waterfront Toronto’s survey if there is going to be a second round of consultations?

I’ve been spending most of my working days for the past couple of weeks on Sidewalk Labs-related work, and I’m almost certainly not going to be finished by July 31.

Even Bianca Wylie, who has devoted more time than any other non-Sidewalk Labs/Waterfront Toronto person to this project, is still working her way through the report (according to her tweets). If, 12 days from the consultation deadline, this project’s most attentive critic is still working her way through it, what hope do other Torontonians have of being able to come up with a reasoned opinion by the end of the month?

On a personal note, I fear that this project is turning me into Tristram Shandy.

Waterfront Toronto’s secret judgment criteria

As an added bonus, Waterfront Toronto apparently will not be releasing the criteria it will be using to evaluate the MIDP because, in the words of Waterfront Toronto senior vice-president for project delivery Julius Gombos, “it would be giving away the examination papers to the class before we had the test.”

Which makes absolutely no sense, in any way. This isn’t about testing whether Sidewalk Labs has been paying attention in class; it’s about ensuring that they are delivering what Waterfront Toronto, the customer, is ordering. You should want Sidewalk Labs to see the answers.

It’s also about accountability. Beyond Sidewalk Labs, you should want the public to know how you’re evaluating its proposal, so that we can tell if Waterfront Toronto is asking the right questions. And also to ensure that everything is being done on the up-and-up because, to be blunt, Waterfront Toronto does not have a lot of credibility when it comes to this project.

Partner or oversight agency? Waterfront Toronto’s already made its choice

More news from McLeod’s article: If only boneheaded scheduling decisions were the worst of Waterfront Toronto’s missteps. It also faces a fatal legitimacy-challenging conflict of interest:

Originally Waterfront Toronto worked cooperatively with Sidewalk Labs on research and generating ideas for the new neighbourhood, but last year the federal-provincial-municipal agency repositioned itself as an oversight agency, assessing the MIDP.

Here’s the thing. Waterfront Toronto can’t simply “reposition[ ] itself as an oversight agency.” The Plan Development Agreement (which I’ll cover in Monday’s post, so, spoilers), signed by Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs on July 31 of last year, commits the two organizations to deep cooperation, including the joint preparation of the MIDP.

When in the “last year” did Waterfront Toronto make the decision to alter the nature of its relationship with Sidewalk Labs? I’ve been following this story pretty clearly and I don’t recall hearing about it. As far as I know, the Plan Development Agreement – again, which is not even a year old – was never amended or superseded.

And even beyond this legalese, this “close contractual relationship,” as McLeod calls it, emerged from the incredibly tight relationship that was apparent from the moment this project was announced. Recall that Will Fleissig, the former Waterfront Toronto CEO who oversaw the RFP and choice of Sidewalk Labs, was forced out by the Waterfront Toronto Board in July 2018 in part because of “his oversight of a decision to allow Sidewalk Labs personnel to temporarily occupy office space in the Waterfront Toronto headquarters.”

Legally, the two are joined. They have a deep, intertwined history, by design. These conflicts of interest are insoluble, meaning Waterfront Toronto cannot act as an independent arbiter of the MIDP. This relationship was never on the table.

I can’t help but think that some Waterfront Toronto employees know all this, that these consultation contortions are being driven by the realization that the original Request for Proposals, conducted under a previous CEO, was fatally flawed. The RFP has placed Waterfront Toronto in an untenable governance situation, opening a Pandora’s Box that previous leadership perhaps thought they could control. As much as anything else, inertia, rather than basic good governance principles, seems to be driving this very flawed process forward.

Inertia carries the day

In fact, it’s hard to read one final amazing (in a bad way) revelation in McLeod’s article as anything other than an exercise in path-dependent damage control. Apparently Waterfront Toronto is tracking Google’s “corporate conduct.”

(Note: the article refers to Alphabet, which is formally Google and Sidewalk Labs’ parent company, but for all practical purposes, Alphabet is Google.)

Kristina Verner, vice-president of innovation, sustainability and prosperity at Waterfront Toronto, said that the public agency has been keeping tabs on Alphabet’s corporate conduct.

“Certainly, Sidewalk itself is a relatively new company; that being said, it is a child of Alphabet,” Verner said.

“All of the infractions, all of the violations that have been reported over the last few years, and before then, we actually have a tracker where we’ve been documenting all of that, so we have our eyes fully open as well.”

Verner said that tracking Alphabet’s corporate behaviour is important in order to have a clear sense of who they’re dealing with “when we discuss what the partnership looks like, and the ethical underpinning of it.”

To which one can only say, how could Waterfront Toronto not possibly already have “a clear sense” (McLeod’s paraphrasing of Verner) about what type of company Google is? It’s one of the biggest companies on the planet! A quick Yahoo! search reveals this 2012 Wired article, titled “Google is Evil.” Or how about “Top 10 Ways Google Does Evil,” published mere weeks before Sidewalk Labs officially won the RFP?

And that’s just general Google bad behaviour. Much more relevant for Waterfront Toronto is Google’s behaviour toward a couple of other acquisitions. DeepMind Health (a UK health AI company), and Nest (smart appliances) were initially treated as Google sister companies before being absorbed into Google itself, raising privacy and data-governance concerns.

Given everything we know, any responsible analysis has to assume that Sidewalk Labs is Google.

It strains credulity to think that anyone at Waterfront Toronto in 2017 would not have been aware about the type of company Google is.

So, the question for Waterfront Toronto is, given “all of the infractions, all of the violations” that you have been tracking, given all that we know about Google, why do you think that they can be trusted to develop Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront?

It’s a question that should’ve been asked in 2017, but better late than never.

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Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Entry 5: Enter the gondola! Every Sidewalk Labs promise to Toronto in its Project Vision document, and the one thing they won’t do

Posted on July 19, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries available here

The fun thing about vision statements, particularly those written by tech companies, is that they’re not necessarily constrained by reality. Think Elon Musk’s Hyperloop vision. As Jalopnik’s Aaron Gordon noted, “in a mere two years we’ve gone from a futuristic vision of electric skates zooming around a variety of vehicles in a network of underground tunnels to—and I cannot stress this enough—a very small, paved tunnel that can fit one (1) car.”

Overpromise, underdeliver.

Best to keep this in mind when reading things like the Vision Statement from Sidewalk Labs – a company that has yet to do almost any of the things it has promised Toronto.

But what promises! Below is a list of the promises made by Sidewalk Labs in their Project Vision document. I might’ve missed a few over the document’s 196 pages; I didn’t mention some types of promises, such as to partner with a particular company to achieve a stated goal/promise; and there is a bit of overlap among some of them. That said, it’s pretty clear that a whole lot of imagineering went into this document.

These promises are the hooks that Sidewalk Labs is using to convince the public that their Quayside and (if all goes according to plan) eastern waterfront plan is just awesome. Heated sidewalks! Timber skyscrapers! Some of the proposals are far-fetched (as one engineering professor told me, self-driving cars are five years away, and will be for the foreseeable future), while others may not be.

At the end of the day, these promises, while bright and shiny, are merely a sideshow to the main issue: who will set the rules – who will be the effective government – in Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront. Failure is a fundamental part of innovation. And if you want to build an innovation lab, you have to expect that a lot of your ideas will fail. Or that business conditions will change, rendering your previously fantastic idea unprofitable. This last point is particularly important if a smart city is being implemented by a for-profit company.

What’s more, in the software industry (Google’s home base), overpromising and underdelivering is a huge part of the business model. Most of these promises are vapourware – products that Sidewalk Labs would like to develop but that don’t currently exist and may never exist. That’s par for the course.

But that’s also why the question of who will be setting the rules is so important. Anybody can come up with brilliant, futuristic ideas. Turning the keys to the city, including rule-setting and de facto taxation powers, over to a foreign, for-profit company with no experience in running a city? That’s something else entirely.

But we’ll get back to the governance issues in later posts. In the meantime, here is an incomplete list of Sidewalk Labs’ promises, and one thing they don’t want to do. Enterprising journalists might want to check out this list and determine which proposals have a chance at success, which ones don’t, and exactly would be required (in terms of technology and regulations) to make them work. Evaluating whether Sidewalk Labs is making credible promises, on a proposal-by-proposal basis, would go a long way to injecting some substance into the Quayside debate.

Also, I want a gondola. Seriously – it had better be in the ultimate Master Innovation and Development Plan. #teamgondola

“THIS IMAGE IS FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES ONLY AND DOES NOT REFLECT ANY PLANNING PRODUCT”: What Sidewalk Labs promises to do for Quayside and the Eastern Waterfront…

(Illustration label, Appendix, p. 111)

Sidewalk Labs finds a catchphrase and makes a promise

Quayside will be “the world’s first neighbourhood built from the internet up” (p. 15)

A Neighbourhood from the Internet Up (Appendix title)

Building new neighbourhoods from the internet up is a remarkable opportunity to embed emerging digital capabilities into core infrastructure from the start. (p. 12)

A neighbourhood from the internet up combines the advantages of a global city with a close-knit community. (p. 17)

AT THE HEART OF SIDEWALK’S APPROACH to building a neighbourhood from the internet up is viewing it as a platform that integrates the physical environment with digital technology, creating the core conditions for urban innovation. (p. 18)

In this way, the public realm in a neighbourhood from the internet up will be a throwback to cities past. (p. 24)

The public realm in a neighbourhood from the internet up will not be confined to one area. (p. 25)

UTILITIES IN A NEIGHBOURHOOD FROM THE INTERNET UP will be off the streets and easily accessible, housed in a system of utility channels that prevent old infrastructure and messy road work from impeding innovation. (p. 28)

Sidewalk’s approach to making Quayside the first neighbourhood from the internet up centres around five planning goals … (p. 42)

An enormous benefit of building a neighbourhood from the internet up is that needed sensing technology can be built in from the start. (p. 68)

The vision thing

When people look around Quayside, they might see a retail shop turning into artist housing as part of a flexible building pilot. Or a self-driving shuttle dropping off passengers during a test ride. Or a community group using a digital kiosk to provide feedback on a local planning discussion. Or a new urban innovation institute, home to a campus of entrepreneurs itching to solve the toughest problems facing cities. (p. 15)

Several things will make this project globally significant. First, the firsts: the things that have never been done. The Eastern Waterfront will be the first district where the only vehicles are shared and self-driving, where buildings have no static use, where streets are never dug up. (p. 16)

Nowhere else will mobility innovation meet streets designed for it. Nowhere else will housing be more affordable based not on policy alone but on how things are built. And nowhere else will all this innovation exist in a single place. (p. 16)

Economic development

Sidewalk will work with local institutions such as the University of Toronto and Ryerson University to establish an urban innovation institute, bringing together academia, industry, government, and entrepreneurs to address the growth challenges facing cities. This applied research institute can create a talent pipeline and a real-time knowledge-exchange with pioneering companies, just as Stanford does with digital startups in Silicon Valley, and Cornell Tech does with engineers in New York. (p. 31)

The urban innovation institute “will support cross-discipline, graduate-level degree programs, a broad range of faculty research with areas of deep specialty, such as application of artificial intelligence, and research and curriculum with potential reach into policy, governance, finance, and other relevant disciplines.” (Appendix, p. 70)

…the cluster will extend beyond core mobility products. New companies in areas like financial services, operations, infrastructure, technology, and energy will gather or emerge to provide related services. Insurance companies might use the data-rich environment to explore new underwriting models. Cleantech companies might deploy new types of charging stations for self-driving electric vehicles. (p. 31)

Sidewalk will partner with large tech employers and local institutions to establish an advanced skills training program—a target identified in the recent federal budget—where workers can develop high-demand skillsets for the digital economy. (p. 31)

Sidewalk will work with the Waterfront Toronto Employment Initiative to identify talent from the surrounding neighbourhoods for technology training programs, as well as broader employment opportunities created by the cluster. (p. 31)

by offering programs geared toward school children, the training effort can inspire the next generation of technology entrepreneurs in addition to training today’s workforce. (p. 31)

once this living laboratory expands to the scale of the Eastern Waterfront, Toronto will become the urban innovation anchor for the world, generating new economic activity from unexpected places. (p. 31)

Sidewalk estimates that, at full build, the Quayside neighborhood will house more than 5,500 jobs and generate more than 50 million CAD of annual property taxes. (p. 32)

depending on the scope of the development program agreed upon by Sidewalk and Waterfront Toronto for the Eastern Waterfront, its impact on jobs and tax generation when fully built could be ten times that of Quayside. (p. 32)

Sidewalk will explore ways for early-stage companies to deploy innovations to “alpha” communities of early adopters who opt in, leading to faster testing and iteration of new urban innovations. (p. 33)

Sidewalk will also look to provide early-stage companies with makerspace to test new materials or manufacturing capabilities … (pp. 33-34)

Sidewalk will create opportunities for marquee North American VCs (and their talent networks) to participate directly in the funding of innovations. (p. 34)

In Quayside, Sidewalk’s team will scan the marketplace and engage relevant early-stage companies. (p. 34)

Sidewalk will provide a co-working space for students, entrepreneurs, and academics who want to advance the state of the art in urban technology. (Appendix, p. 70)

Sidewalk will engage local manufacturers on circular economy concepts, devising pilot projects where appropriate, if it is determined to be a priority by Waterfront Toronto in the context of the overall project. (Technical Appendix, p. 168)

Sidewalk will explore approaches to tagging reusable components, if it is determined to be a priority by Waterfront Toronto in the context of the overall project. (Technical Appendix, p. 169)

At the Urban Innovation Institute:

A dedicated staff will nurture the developer community and make connections between groups. A dedicated technical staff deeply versed in the details of the digital layer will be able to advise on its use, help new developers get up to speed, debug issues, and take lessons from this process back to the platform development team to effect improvements to the platform and APIs themselves. (Appendix, p. 70)

Energy and the environment: Climate change

In Toronto, deploying similar innovations, Sidewalk believes it is feasible for Quayside to approach carbon-neutrality, and for the Eastern Waterfront to realize Waterfront Toronto’s climate-positive goal. (p. 32)

Through the microgrid, “enabling the Eastern Waterfront to export clean thermal energy to downtown neighbourhoods and achieve Waterfront Toronto’s climate-positive ambition.” (p. 21)

Energy and the environment: Energy production

a thermal grid that taps multiple existing sources of energy for circulation and reuse, making it possible to heat and cool buildings without fossil fuels (p. 18)

capture enough renewable energy through an advanced microgrid to meet Waterfront Toronto’s goals for onsite power generation. (p. 18)

realize Waterfront Toronto’s target of 10 percent onsite power generation using roof and façade photovoltaics, as well as battery storage. Between these efforts, Sidewalk expects to reduce draw from the Toronto Hydro electric grid by 75 percent per capita versus existing conditions. (p. 22)

Sidewalk will seek to pilot in Quayside, and scale up across the Eastern Waterfront, a multi-source district heating and cooling system called the thermal grid. Unlike systems that only rely on a single source, the thermal grid will tap and export multiple sources of waste or free heat and cool in the area: geothermal, waste heat from sewers and the Portlands Energy Centre, deep lake cooling, and the capture and reuse of waste heat and cool from within the buildings themselves. (p. 23)

Sidewalk will pilot a thermal grid in Quayside using waste heat from building and ground sources, but tapping the large sources of waste heat and Lake Ontario cooling will require the scale of the Eastern Waterfront to be economical. (p. 24)

Energy and the environment: Housing

adopt Passive House building standards that go beyond LEED to manage the thermal load that is the largest cause of energy demand in buildings.” (p. 18)

A cluster of Passive House buildings at Quayside will climb the learning curve and make it possible for the Eastern Waterfront to be entirely Passive House at no incremental cost. (p. 21)

To reduce construction waste, Sidewalk will experiment with more eco-friendly building materials, such as tall timber. (p. 18)

Energy and the environment: Waste disposal

Sidewalk will implement the smart disposal system in Quayside, including macerators in kitchens, smart chutes with PAYT capability for inorganic waste, a robot-powered waste movement system, and an onsite anaerobic digester at either the neighbourhood or the building scale. (Appendix, p. 96)

The waste-disposal details:

  • pilot a smart disposal chain in multifamily buildings that consists of sensor-enabled waste separation for recycling and onsite anaerobic digestion for composting, dramatically reducing landfill waste. (p. 18)

  • a robotic sorting system that diverts more than 90 percent of waste without the hassle of manual separation. (p. 21) Robots will transport solid waste underground and out of sight. (p. 21)

  • Sidewalk will deploy a digitally enabled smart chute system that will help pay-as-you-throw waste regimes succeed in multifamily buildings by making it possible to differentiate between recyclables and trash. (p. 22)

  • handle organic waste through a separate system culminating in an onsite anaerobic digester. Such a system will require minimal additional effort from users but will achieve vastly better outcomes— at a minimum, a 90 percent landfill diversion in household waste. (p. 22)

Energy and the environment: Water disposal

“an intuitive purple-pipe pilot will help tenants reuse greywater.” (p. 18) “While Sidewalk will explore onsite rainwater capture and treatment for potable uses, the Ashbridges Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant could easily supply the entire Eastern Waterfront (including Quayside) with nonpotable water” (p. 24). The system would work “indoors as well as outdoors, … so residents and workers become familiar with the idea of not using drinking water for all domestic purposes.” (p. 22)

Energy and the environment: Bio…

Sidewalk would be pleased to work with Waterfront Toronto toward a formal biophilia plan, if it is determined to be a priority by Waterfront Toronto toward a formal biophilia plan, if it is determined to be a priority by Waterfront Toronto in the context of the overall project. (Technical Appendix, p. 171)

Sidewalk has a track record of working with advanced, healthy, bio-based materials, and is eager to work A2-A Innovation Category) with Waterfront Toronto towards a strategy for their use. (Technical Appendix, p. 171)

Heated sidewalks

retractable canopies in public spaces and heated bike and pedestrian paths to melt snow. (p. 19)

Housing

In Quayside, Sidewalk plans to deliver modular buildings using advanced manufacturing to save time and money during construction. (p. 18)

Sidewalk will also demonstrate a flexible building typology, Loft, with a strong shell and minimalistic interior that makes it quick and easy to convert building uses. (p. 18)

In its Quayside iteration, a Loft pilot could contain parking space that transitions to other uses once shared mobility reduces private car use. (p. 27)

Sidewalk has also been experimenting with more sustainable building materials, including mycelium insulation and tall timber skeletons, and intends to pilot such structures in Quayside as a first step to adoption in the Eastern Waterfront. (p. 22)

Sidewalk proposes to make Quayside a living laboratory for housing policy innovation that delivers a mixed-occupancy community that mirrors Toronto’s socioeconomic diversity. (p. 27)

From a business perspective, flexible building design and modular construction methodologies reduced barriers to entering a market, with 12.5 percent savings on commercial fit-out costs. (p. 33)

Sidewalk will also pursue models of partial [housing] ownership that have proven to be successful in Toronto and abroad. (Appendix, p. 126)

Sidewalk is exploring potential materials innovations in Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), a standard construction material. (Appendix, p. 112)

Infrastructure

Connectivity will be ubiquitous in Quayside, consisting of high-speed wired communications over fibre and copper; high bandwidth wireless communications over Wi-Fi and cellular technologies; and long- range, low-bandwidth connectivity using low-power wide-area network technologies. (p. 24)

Sidewalk will deploy a shared wired and wireless backbone that creates seamless coverage and service competition. Each access point will offer wireless connectivity via current and emerging standards, including (1) Wi-Fi (2) LTE and (3) LoRa (long-range, low-power radio), leveraging software-defined radios to optimize coverage and throughput. (Appendix, p. 68)

Quayside will have multiple overlapping communications networks—an opportunity to evaluate relative value. (Appendix, p. 70)

Sidewalk will combine cloud software, sensors, and controls into a new ‘active stormwater management’ system that will reduce the size and cost of future stormwater infrastructure needed in the Eastern Waterfront. (Technical Appendix, p. 170)

At district scale:

a system of utility channels to accommodate all networked utilities. These will provide space for electric wires, telecom conduits, and water and district heating pipes, as well as space for small-scale robots to travel between building basements and under walkable streets. The channels will enable the fast provision of new types of utilities as they emerge, and will make it easy to maintain systems without disruptive utility work. Finally, the robot lanes provide the network that will allow a new type of urban freight system to emerge, beginning with solid waste handling. (p. 23)

Public spaces

a public realm management system, enabled by sensor arrays, that monitors air quality, asset conditions, and usage, helping managers respond quickly to emerging needs, from broken benches to overflowing waste bins. (to “enable tests of reservable outdoor spaces for short-term uses, such as pop-up shops”) (p. 19)

a next-gen bazaar, a tech-enabled makerspace with activity stalls that can be refreshed quickly. (p. 19)

a series of blue “water rooms”—from floating theatres to homes—will create new life on the lake. (p. 21)

Sidewalk’s analysis suggests that managing wind, sun, and precipitation can double the number of daylight hours when it is comfortable to be outside (see inset graphic). (p. 28)

Sidewalk will pilot flexible space allocations using embedded LED lights, enabling a temporary bike lane to become a pedestrian laneway on demand, for instance. (p. 28)

a dynamic range of local, independent, and diverse amenities to activate the public realm, support residents and workers, attract visitors, and contribute to high-quality placemaking. … provid[ing] radical flexibility at much lower cost, attracting the most innovative amenity concepts from across Toronto and North America. Critically, it will lower the barrier for new entrants and enable the community gathering places that have become increasingly important in the digital age. (p. 29)

Sidewalk believes the Eastern Waterfront can aspire toward the 51 percent green space coverage found in one feasibility study site—though even half that would represent a significant improvement over the 13 percent of land currently dedicated to green space in greater Toronto. (p. 33)

Sidewalk will endeavour to offer residents garden space within the site to invigorate the community. (Technical Appendix, p. 164)

Sidewalk will work with Waterfront Toronto to create a proposed set of standards for local food procurement and employment within the site. (Technical Appendix, p. 163)

Sidewalk would be enthusiastic about including food start-ups as part of the start-up ecosystem Sidewalk – hopes to foster at Quayside and on the Eastern Waterfront. (Technical Appendix, p. 164)

Sidewalk will explore ways to encourage the sale of “uglies” in the site, and will seek to gather and redistribute useful waste in all forms as part of a holistic waste management program. (Technical Appendix, p. 164)

Social cohesion

a neighbourhood assistant tool to facilitate social cooperation and public feedback. (pp. 19-20)

Quayside residents will be able to use the neighbourhood assistant for maintenance or sanitation requests, for instance, or to report an issue with their local playground. (p. 30)

Sidewalk expects to meaningfully increase volunteer rates over the Toronto average. (p. 33)

Social services and quality of life

Sidewalk’s Care Lab is actively developing digital tools to integrate primary care and social services for city residents. (p. 20)

integrate primary care and social services data to deliver more proactive healthcare to city residents. (p. 30)

Sidewalk will work with local providers to build a digital social service tool that can enable more personalized care. (p. 30)

In Sidewalk’s feasibility studies, … Sidewalk achieved a projected 100 Walkability score, … Walking, cycling, and shared electric vehicles cut harmful transportation emissions by a projected 67 percent compared with the surrounding metro area. Advances in telehealth and the expansion of hyper-local pop-up clinics made access to healthcare more convenient. …  Sidewalk expects similar targets to be achievable on the Eastern Waterfront. (p. 33)

Based on its feasibility studies, Sidewalk expects Torontonians to reduce cost of living by 10 percent or more in a revitalized Eastern Waterfront, with a large share of savings coming from the 1,400 CAD per month families spend on transportation. (p. 32)

Standards-setting

Sidewalk seeks to explore the effectiveness of different types of building controls, which are among the most potent ways to reduce energy consumption, but which still lack standardization and scale. (p. 22)

New predictive modelling techniques and real-time monitoring can enable a shift to an outcome-based building code. (p. 27)

Transportation

A mobility system as convenient as private cars at much lower cost. (p. 19)

a self-driving transit shuttle, a strategy identified in the Quayside Draft Vision Document. (p. 19)

An adaptive traffic light pilot (being incubated by Sidewalk’s Semaphore Lab) will use sensing technology to detect pedestrians and cyclists and prioritize their safe movement through congested intersections. (p. 19)

A managed parking pilot (being developed by Sidewalk’s portfolio company Flow) will direct cars to available parking, reducing the emissions and congestion caused by circling. (p. 19)

A mobility-as-a- service platform will help users take advantage of all mobility options, and will facilitate an on-demand shared ride system. (p. 19)

When a mobility-as-a-service pilot in Quayside scales across the Eastern Waterfront, it not only enables families to abandon auto-ownership without sacrificing convenience,

it also combines with self-driving shuttles to turn every corner into a transit stop. (p. 21)

“an urban freight transit system, using robots to make deliveries via utility channels.” (p. 19) “an internal delivery system to all businesses and residents in Quayside, and will seek to expand a successful system to the entire Eastern Waterfront.” (p. 29)

“Across the waterfront, the streets will restrict conventional vehicles, with a mobility network primarily serving pedestrians, cyclists, and taxibot transit.” (p. 21) “with a target operational date of summer 2018.” (Appendix, p. 154; emphasis added, target missed)

For visitors who have no good driving alternative, Sidewalk is developing parking technology to make fast curbside drop-offs and pick-ups easy. (p. 28)

Through these efforts, Sidewalk expects Quayside to achieve a world- class level of car-free urban mobility, with ownership rates of less than 20 percent among Quayside residents— lower than most of downtown Toronto. That rate will save families thousands of dollars a year, reduce the neighbourhood’s carbon footprint, and cut the number of necessary parking spaces in half, opening more space for the critical elements of a complete community: affordable housing, the public realm, and local amenities. (pp. 28-29)

reinvent urban mobility using the most revolutionary technology development in transportation since the jet engine: the self-driving vehicle. (p. 29)

Some single-person self- driving vehicles might eventually be integrated into an elevated transport system, such as a gondola.” (p. 29; emphasis added, because who wouldn’t want a gondola?)

On the Eastern Waterfront, Sidewalk will pilot a personal rapid transit skyway system. It will combine overhead transport with lightweight vehicles and structures, and technology to make services personalizable. This could take the form of individually dispatchable gondolas, self-driving pods … that might be able to travel on land and connect at tower-launching stations to aerial skyway cables or guideways. Advances in battery and material technology might also make it possible for lightweight overhead ramps to carry small-scale, self-driving vehicles as well as bicycles. (Appendix, p. 152)

a new urban traffic system for the Eastern Waterfront called the Ground Traffic Control System. Building on the adaptive traffic signals and parking technology tested in Quayside, as well as onboard navigation in self-driving vehicles, GTCS will optimize routes to balance individual and system efficiency, dramatically enhancing the performance of urban streets. (p. 29)

On the Eastern Waterfront, Sidewalk estimates a substantial increase from the 10 percent of trips taken by foot or bike in Toronto today, and a sizeable reduction in the city’s 66-minute average daily commute. (p. 32)

The street grid will be designed specifically for pedestrians, cyclists, and shared, self-driving vehicles. And the neighbourhood will immediately be open for controlled pilots of self-driving cars, including a shuttle between Quayside and Cherry Beach. (Appendix, p. 144)

While the majority of Quayside’s mobility needs will be met by Sidewalk’s suite of land-based solutions, ferries will offer valuable service to the larger Eastern Waterfront site. … New high-speed ferry vessels would be smaller and meet current damage stability criteria set by Transport Canada. (Appendix, p. 153)

Sidewalk’s app will ensure that users are not locked into one interface for all of their trips to and from Quayside. (Appendix, p. 142)

Incremental changes can make the Parliament and Cherry Street underpasses more attractive, but Sidewalk also envisions a significant investment to create a visible, attractive, and iconic link to the waterfront. (p. 28)

… and one can’t/won’t

Waterfront Toronto request: “Invest 2% of annual profit in sustainable food R&D fund”

Sidewalk Labs response: “At this time, Sidewalk is unable to make specific commitments to a sustainable food R&D fund, which will depend on the nature of the financial partnership between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk, however Sidewalk is interested in working with WT to support sustainable food practices. (Technical Appendix, p. 164)

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Liveblogging Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan, Entry 4: Sidewalk Labs’ Project Vision

Posted on July 19, 2019 by bhaggart

Previous Master Innovation and Development Plan liveblog entries available here

Reading Sidewalk Labs’ Project Vision document – essentially an extended excerpt from its submission to Waterfront Toronto’s Request for Proposals – alongside Waterfront Toronto’s RFP brought to mind several thoughts.

  1. Sidewalk Labs is responding to the questions it was asked.

This doesn’t necessarily make Sidewalk Labs’ plan a good one, but it does demonstrate that its plans did not come out of the blue. To the extent that Sidewalk Labs’ plan is flawed, Waterfront Toronto deserves a significant amount of blame for opening the gate to a proposal like this in the first place.

  1. Sidewalk Labs (and by extension Waterfront Toronto) did not play fair when releasing their Project Vision document.

In the letter that accompanied the release of Sidewalk Labs’ “Project Vision” Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff claimed: “We’ve decided to release the vision we laid out in our response, both in the interest of transparency and to start what promises to be a history-making public conversation.”

As part of the proposal, Waterfront Toronto required that applicants submit a “Project Vision and Business Implementation Plan,” not to exceed 25 pages. Sidewalk Labs released the first 19 pages of this document, covering the Project Vision part of the document:

A1. Vision

A2. Sustainability & Innovation Submission

A3. Complete Communities Submission

A4. Economic Development & Prosperity Submission Requirements

These sections, as I’ll detail in my next post, mainly amount to a whole bunch of promises centered on cool-sounding vapourware.

Unfortunately, the meat of these proposals, mainly how these cool-sounding projects would be organized and run, was covered in the very next section, A5. Approach to Business Case and Financial Requirements, which is not included.

Here’s some of what’s in that excluded section (quoting from the RFP):

Legal Structure Approach: Describe how you would approach the following:
i. Roles and Responsibilities: Provide an initial proposal of roles and responsibilities for Waterfront Toronto and the Partner, understanding that Waterfront Toronto intends to remain an active partner and investor in this and future phases of the Project through to its completion.
ii. Legal Structures & Documents: Describe required legal structure and documents required to implement the partnership.
iii. Risks & Benefits: Propose how risks and benefits will be shared. How will you create an assessment tool to allocate risks between Waterfront Toronto and the Partner?
iv. Intellectual Property: Provide a preliminary framework for a potential management approach for Intellectual Property introduced to or developed through the Project, and any revenue sharing between Waterfront Toronto and the Partner.
v. “Off-Ramps”: How could the venture be unwound in the event that the Project is not achieving its goals?
vi. “On-Ramps”: How could new partners/participants be included in the Project? Are there any ownership/equity considerations?

As a result, there is almost nothing in the vision statement on the key question of data governance, which makes it impossible for an outsider to evaluate seriously their vision document. Instead it’s all awesome coolness, from a Google company, a company that has a poor record on follow-through on its big projects (hi, Google Fiber!) and killing off socially useful but profit-challenged products (I’m still upset about Google’s euthanasia of late, great Google Reader).

And my handy Preview search function tells me that intellectual property is not mentioned a single time, including in the 172-page appendices (Sidewalk Labs does love to pad its documents).

  1. To get the contract, Sidewalk Labs promised the moon, leaning heavily on its Google connection to make the case that it can deliver, even without any track record.

Seriously, they really promised the (vapourware) moon. They promised so many things that I decided to detail every single promise in their vision statement in my next post. Spoiler: they made a lot of promises.

  1. This whole exercise should’ve been conducted within government and not outsourced to a for-profit corporation.

Sidewalk Labs’ “success metrics” make this point. The most interesting thing about them is their banality. Why did Waterfront Toronto need an outside company to tell it that “cost of living (with 11 subsets around rent, transportation, and more), carbon emissions, walkability, park access, job growth, civic participation, and time saved commuting” (p. 17) should be important measurements? Although “smart cities” and “data” sound intimidating, they’re not rocket science. A city, no matter how “smart,” still involves people living in and using spaces, and moving from Point A to Point B. If a development organization can’t figure these things out, we have a problem.

  1. Scope overreach

While Waterfront Toronto was relatively up-front that the goal was to establish Quayside and then scale up (somehow) to the entire eastern waterfront, Sidewalk Labs’ Vision document seems to make clear that most of their (many, many, many) promises could only come true if they were implemented on the scale of the eastern waterfront. In their defence, Sidewalk Labs has been (relatively) consistent on this point (if you plow through all of these documents). And given that, according to the Ontario Auditor General’s report, Waterfront Toronto has been looking for a way to better involve itself in the wider waterfront development, Sidewalk Labs’ insistence that so much of its awesome stuff could only work at the scale of the waterfront, could be seen as being a means to this end. In other words, what looks to the outside world as problematic scope overreach might be seen by Waterfront Toronto as a feature, not a bug.

  1. Sidewalk Labs’ “standards layer” represents a bid for it to become a central governing body of Quayside (etc.). It also goes far beyond what the RFP asked for.

Among the ocean of promises and hype in this document, Sidewalk Labs’ discussion of how it approaches both regulation and working with relevant government authorities is most illuminating.

In Sidewalk Labs’ version of the smart city, the city – Quayside and the Eastern Waterfront – is the platform. And so, when Sidewalk Labs says it needs to set the “standards level,” “the rules for residents, administrators, and developers using and building atop the platform” (p. 18) it’s effectively asking to co-govern Quayside and the Eastern Waterfront. Sidewalk Labs wants to set the building codes to fit its view on what is best for… all Torontonians? Efficiency? Development? Equity? In Sidewalk Labs’ world, the notion that there could be conflicting and equally legitimate opinions on such issues doesn’t arise. Instead, it’s uncontroversially assumed that Sidewalk Labs will set the rules, and these will objectively be the best ones possible. There are no politics in  the city of Sidewalk Labs’ dreams.

Accomplishing all of this will require a high level of central planning and standardization, no matter the language of flexibility found in this document. Consider modular, “flexible” buildings, a key element of Sidewalk Labs’ plan. For these to work, they require, as Sidewalk Labs recognizes, that all the buildings be “interchangeable.” As a result, “this interchangeability [in buildings] requires a high degree of standardization, including dimensions, basic services provided in each building, and the interior components themselves.” (Appendix, p. 118)

In short, “highly flexible” buildings of the type promised by Sidewalk Labs will only be flexible within the parameters set by Sidewalk Labs. This isn’t Jane Jacobs-style urban innovation: it’s central planning on a Soviet scale.

My completely uninformed prediction: We’re going to end up with ugly same-looking building blocks.

And talk of working with other government authorities brings us to …

  1. Proof, pudding, eating

On situations in which Sidewalk Labs’ plans touch the responsibilities of other governments or agencies: “In all cases, the best strategy is to start conversations early and recognize the perspectives and interests of potential partners. Sidewalk will work with these entities to develop approaches that meet their fundamental needs while also creating the flexibility necessary to innovate.” (p. 26)

I’ll guess we’ll see the extent to which Sidewalk Labs’ MIDP takes into account the “fundamental needs” of other organizations.

Next post, Sidewalk Labs’ promises to Toronto. It’s going to be a long one.

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