Sidewalk Labs’s chief executive officer says it’s too “premature” to abandon any ideas it unveiled Thursday for a high-tech Toronto community it hopes to build, despite the concepts being met with fierce criticism.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Dan Doctoroff indicated his Alphabet-backed company was open to tweaking ideas ?including funding a waterfront light rail transit line and underground infrastructure in exchange for a portion of development fees and property taxes typically funnelled towards the city ? for a swath of the waterfront it hopes to develop and calls Quayside.
Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff. Photo by Bloomberg New Energy Finance via Flickr Commons.
“Inevitably we are going to be adjusting things as we move forward. We have never said it is our way or this doesn’t work for us,” Doctoroff said. “We have adjusted significantly and we will continue to do that.” Doctoroff said infrastructure Sidewalk is considering funding “would otherwise be infinancable” and added “if we are prepared to do that when no one else is, we need to get paid back.”
Documents that Sidewalk made public this week show the company touting its idea as a way to get light rail transit line along the waterfront built “years, if not decades, sooner than it would otherwise,” though Sidewalk plans to pass off the operation of the transit line to a public agency.
The same documents show Sidewal...