Sidewalk Labs’ walk on the Quayside is over

It was supposed to be a calling card for Toronto’s Waterfront. Using high technology and big data to help cut through the bureaucracy and reveal the neighbourhood of the future. Now it’s done, just another project that disappeared like so much other vaporware.

Sidewalk Labs, a division of Alphabet and sister company of Google, arrived in Toronto with a raft of ideas and plans to help create a new neighbourhood called Quayside on this city’s Port Lands, a vast stretch of land on the east end of the city that is being redeveloped on the waterfront.

With several controversies, criticisms and communications issues between some of the stakeholders involved with the project, after two and half years of trying, Sidewalks Labs has decided to pull the plug on the project, citing economic upheaval and uncertainty over Toronto’s real estate market. Critics contend that Sidewalk always had their eyes on a bigger prize and made a number of missteps that may have led to this outcome.

To discuss why a project that arrived with such fanfare is leaving with a thud, Raju Mudhar is joined on This Matters by David Rider, the Star’s City Hall bureau chief, who along with his team, has been following this saga since it began.