Portland scuppers "Smart City" mobility analytics plan

A plan to track mobility patterns of how people move throughout the urban area of Portland, Oregon, was stopped due to concerns about data quality, transparency, and privacy.

Portland Metro had planned to use mobile tracking data to inform decision-making about the planning of bike lanes, road repairs and bus services. 

According to reports, Portland Metro decided to pull out largely because as a series of disputes with Google's Sidewalk Labs spin-off Replica over data quality, transparency and privacy. 

Conversely, Replica says it was unwilling to share data to the level of detail requested by the city.

In 2020, a Sidewalks Lab project to build a smart city in a disused waterfront area of Toronto also fell apart with an independent review panel criticising the plan as 'tech for tech's sake' and some of the proposed elements deemed 'irrelevant or unnecessary'.