Last week, Alphabet’s “urban innovation” arm, Sidewalk Labs, announced a new side-project called Coord.
The goal: to build out a cloud-based platform that serves as the “connective tissue” for a city’s transportation services (think everything from ridesharing to bike sharing to public transit).
Coord aims to collect an immense amount of local data on things like cities’ tolls, transit routes, parking spaces, and curb traffic, create a repository for it all, then sell it to transit-oriented companies.
In essence, they want to create a central hub to simplify transportation options in cities, and simplify the task of navigating multiple apps for public transit, ridesharing, and bike sharing.
And, it’s part of a growing trend of big-tech trying to sell cities their own data and act as “urban operating systems.”
As Wired writes, Coord envisions turning cities into “high-tech, digital playgrounds,” where everything is connected and symbiotic.
They’re not alone in this quest: Ford is already selling its Transportation Mobility Cloud (an operating system for transport), Amazon, Siemens, and IBM all have internal “Smart City” departments, and Bill Gates has invested $80m in building a futuristic city of his own in Arizona.
In other words, they won’t rest until you can have an intelligent conversation with your parking meter.