On the one hand, Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project embraces beloved Silicon Valley concepts like data crunching and constant iteration. It promises a tabula rasa, returning to “first principles” to query what city dwellers really need to be happy, wealthy, and wise. Should there be on-street parking? More public squares? Affordable housing made of wood? Self-driving shuttles? The Toronto team pledges to test, collect data, and adapt, over and over again.

The key is staying open to what the future holds. “We don’t know what’s going to happen with the autonomous vehicles—nobody does,” said Willa Ng, a traffic engineer and mobility lead with the company. “But as they’re coming, as they’re adapting and training on the streets out there today, we think this offers us the opportunity to design the streets we want to see and make the autonomous vehicles toe a new line and meet a new standard.” (Fortunately for Sidewalk Labs, its sister company Waymo is the putative leader in self-driving tech, and should be able to share some intel.)

On the other hand, this idea of claiming streets for people, not vehicles, isn’t new. It’s the way things worked before the car muscled in. Even back in the 1960s and ’70s, “living street” movements in the Netherlands and elsewhere promoted a return to wide spaces, free of dictatorial lane markings.

“People lose responsibility when you give them their own space on the road,” says Nidhi Gulati, who runs transportation initiatives at the Project for Public Spaces, a New York-based nonprofit that promotes the community-led rethinking of public spaces. “They don’t think they need to be looking out for other people on other modes. They start thinking of other cars as cars and bicycles as bicycles, but not people as people.” Indeed, research suggests that streets with more vegetation, narrower lanes, and elements like traffic circles are safer, because drivers must pay more attention to the ever-changing road.

More recently, cities have been leading projects to reclaim—or liberate—public space. New York kicked cars out of much of Times Square. Pittsburgh closed roads and widened sidewalks in Market Square. At the microscale, community activists have used planters, tires, and even plungers to urge citizens rethink the streetscape.

This concept, though, can make municipal traffic engineers (and their lawyers) nervous. After all, a mad swirl of people and scooters and cars may look dangerous, even if it isn’t. That’s why city planners get attached to curb cuts, which they think of as vital design cues keeping people and vehicles apart. Plus, installing and then maintaining ultra-flexible concrete pavers, like the kind Sidewalk Labs is envisioning, is more expensive than just laying down asphalt, so it's difficult for cities to justify, cost-wise.

But Alphabet has money, it has the flexibility, and now it has some cool-looking tech to go with it. “I’m sometimes skeptical that technology is needed for things like that, when you can do it really simply, and cities have been doing similar things for a long time,” says Eran Ben-Joseph, who heads up MIT’s Urban Studies and Planning Department and has studied flexible street space in the US and abroad. (His colleagues are collaborating with Sidewalk Labs on this project.)

“But changing perceptions and experimenting with something new—it’s pushing it in the right direction,” he says. “Maybe not new. Something old.”

1Correction appended, 8/20/18, 2:00 PM EDT: This story has been updated to clarify that Sidewalk Labs collaborated with Carlo Ratti Associati, not Carlo Ratti's lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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