FX.co ★ Google plans to build the city of the future

“We want to supercharge existing efforts in areas such as housing, energy, transportation and government to solve real problems that city-dwellers face every day,” Google CEO Larry Page declared in the press release announcing Sidewalk Labs, which will operate as a separate company and be led by Dan Doctoroff, the former CEO of Bloomberg LP and served as deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding for the City of New York in the Bloomberg administration.

Among the problems of city life that Page believes could be fixed: better public transport, less pollution, more parks and green spaces, safer biking paths and a shorter commute.

To Daniel Doctoroff, cities are more than just aggregations of people and buildings. They're opportunities for innovations that can improve the quality of urban life for everyone—citizens, governments, and businesses alike. Dan Doctoroff is inspired by this project, and in an interview for the media he has reported that "his views on the future of cities are much more radical than just ideas about combining urbanization and technology." Doctoroff believes that the main task that must be solved is the operational collection of street information. Urban analytics will exclude various accidents in urban systems.

The developers of the system have the task of instantly turning the visual information into a program signal: the cameras will be engaged in transferring codes to the data processing centers, according to their indicators, the system will be able to determine which failures have occurred in the city's infrastructure. Google X Lab will turn a "heavy" picture into "easy" code. It is planned that the first micro cameras will be installed in taxi cars and public transport management services.

Another version of the introduction of computer intelligence in urban planning is the urban planning system. The task of Google is an accessible interface for all, which is able to provide answers to questions related to the latest changes in the city as a whole to all interested participants of this movement: investors, developers, cultural projects, and so on.

One more direction of the project is the creation of unmanned vehicles. Experts believed that Google will aim primarily at the mass private market. However, the company said that one of the activities of Sidewalk Labs is the creation of an unmanned public transport system. It is specified that the quality of guglomobiles is already high, but they still can not move under the downpour and over snow-covered territories. The company plans to correct the shortcomings by 2020.