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Comment by theCricketer | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiousity and so we can all concretely imagine how Sidewalk Labs plans to transform cities, can someone explain what are the speicific changes and associated benefits in this new kind of city? It mentions, autonomous transit, ride sharing, cheaper housing (how?). Can someone paint a fuller picture of what will be new and how it will be beneficial.

I'm not skeptical at all, in fact I'm very hopeful. I just want to be able to picture the new kind of city more concretely.

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Personally I'm interested in seeing the privacy impact assessment if there is an actual proposal. This isn't Google doing it out of some utopian goodness of their heart. Everything in those 12 blocks will be logged, analyzed, and sold to advertisers.

Yeah I mean I get why people in Toronto are excited, but not a single person is thinking of privacy implications. It grosses me out.

If an artificial town could be self sustaining, a lot of the benefits you want explained might just happen just by not having legacy stuff. E.g. the roads, and road rules could designed with new forms of transport in mind. Housing might (initially!) be cheaper because zoning requirements don't force prices up.

There's wishful thinking in all of the above, but I think that is concentrated in the wish that such a town could get off the ground at all. But about the only kind of artificial town that I find plausible is when a state wants to build a new capital -- and that will immediately be a gravy train for parasites who want to crank up the costs.

What do any of these things have to do with building "from the internet up"?

Spoiler: 12 acres is about the size of two city blocks, and much smaller than a typical college campus or suburban mall. This page has a map of the area they were bidding over: http://waterfrontoronto.ca/nbe/portal/waterfront/Home/waterf...

That's certainly more than enough land to build something interesting in. Otherwise, that area would just go to another boring condominium development. But the only autonomous transit is going to be elevators and the inflamed fantasies of journalists who don't check all the primary sources.

Now, if there was a bid for doing something interesting with Ontario Place, that would be a discussion.

The easiest way of making those things happen is a company town. The problem is that it's not financially sustainable, which becomes a problem if the company cuts spending or goes under (which has happened to a number of other company towns).

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