[EdTsft]

I'm a Torontonian and I was looking forward to the project. I'm sad to see it cancelled. (It's a big city with many opinions, I don't think you can fairly claim that quote about "thousands of Torontonians" is "simply not true" from a sample size of dozens, the author is not even claiming all those people supported the Quayside project specifically).

Sure, some parts of the project looked like tech for tech's sake but I was excited about the urban design plans and architecture. And who knows, maybe some of the tech-y things would turn out to be good too. That's what experiments are for, and this wasn't a very large scale or risky one when compared to the size of the city so it's worth it to me to try new things even if many of the ideas don't work out. As for data issues, it seemed like the city and Waterfront Toronto were not afraid to exercise a lot of control on that front so Sidewalk Labs wasn't going to be able to do whatever they wanted, a lot of effort was going into ensuring it was in the public interest. This latest news supports the idea that the city was uncompromising in supporting what they see as the public interest - even to the extent that Sidewalk labs gives up entirely.