Sidewalk Labs adding final touches to its smart city plans: Report

Alphabets subsidiary Sidewalk’s plans of solving urban problems to build a smart city aren’t a secret anymore. Now, there is yet another report revealing how serious this division of Alphabet is to materialise the plans. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Sidewalk Labs is busy adding ‘final touches on a proposal to get into the business of developing giant new districts of housing, offices and retail within existing cities’. Sidewalk CEO Daniel Doctoroff along with some staff and consultants is said to be running around to put things in place and put forth the proposal of a smart city that he aims to build from the scratch. Imagine a place where you travel in self-driving cars, have access to Wi-Fi throughout, live in smarter homes that follow your commands with a single tap or swipe and so on. Needless to say, he had already hinted about these plans of creating a smart city from scratch back in February. Talking about the features that this smart city could probably include, TheVerge report points out at LinkNYC, the public Wi-Fi hubs seen around New York, dedicated self-driving lanes, and so on. Sidewalks was created to re-imagine cities with technology. In a previous report , the smart city vision of Sidewalk labs includes high speed, cheap internet access to all residents and cities built for large number of hybrid self driving cars. Congestion of vehicles would be managed by mobility applications. High cost of home ownership would be mitigated by using new materials and innovative ownership models. Renewable energy systems can be used to reduce the carbon footprint of fossil fuels.