00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Welcome everybody. It’s the 28th of June 2023, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D podcast on the 15th of September same year. With us today is Paris Marx, tech critic and author of the book “Road to nowhere: What Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation”. He’s also the host of the podcast “Tech won’t save us”. Welcome, Paris.

00:00:32 Paris Marx

Thanks so much for having me.

00:00:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Let’s start with your book. You talk about transportation, you talk about Elon Musk, you talk about the way Silicon Valley is trying to reshape the future of transport. And I find it interesting or fascinating for two reasons. One is that in the book you go in depth not just about the current state of the transportation industry and the situation going on in Silicon Valley, but you also start with the, let’s call it the history of transport. When the first cars came into power, so to say.

And basically, you talk about the hijacking of the public sphere of the public streets that were back then divided between different, let’s call them interest groups like the pedestrians, salesman and so forth and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the following question. Can history tell us something about the current state of the future in the area of transportation?



00:01:54 Paris Marx

Oh, absolutely. You know, there was one way to approach the book where, you know, all I did was look at what happened in the past 10 or 15 years. As the tech industry kind of, you know, founded Uber and released ideas for self-driving cars and hyper-loops and all these sorts of things and just assessed why they were not going to address the problems in our transportation system.

But I thought, you know, one of the things that Silicon Valley does really well is it makes sure that people don’t think about the history, that they only think about the present, and in particular the future and they don’t look back at what has happened in the past, but part of the reason that these tech billionaires and these tech companies are putting out ideas for transportation in the present is that there are a lot of problems in our transportation system that come of our over reliance on cars.

I would argue, you know, that is a big piece of this and so it felt wrong then to write a book about transportation and about what the tech industry is proposing for transportation and not to go back to, you know, the kind of moment when the car emerges to look at the ideas around the car then and how that played out, how the car became such a dominant part of the transportation system.

Because I think that that helps to kind of demystify the system that we have right now in terms of transportation. But also to question whether you know ideas for transportation that are really based around the car, as many of Silicon Valley’s ideas are, are really going to solve these fundamental problems like, you know, the amount of people who are injured or die because of cars. The amount of time that people spend stuck in traffic, the emissions that come from cars, you know, and all of these other questions that come along with it.

So those are real issues that we do need to address, but is it going to be addressed by, you know, some new technology released by some, some American tech companies, or do we need to look at a much deeper level and I think that going into the history tells us that, yes, like we need to, we need to look much deeper than just the technology that we’re flying on.

00:04:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And if you had to answer a question about where did things start to go wrong in, in the past for, let’s say the general area of of transportation, what was key moment or what were some of the key moments that got us where we are today with cars; not enough roads, not enough infrastructure to support the transportation system that is currently in place?

00:04:35 Paris Marx

Hmm, it’s a difficult question because I would say it happens over a long period of time, right? But and obviously I should also say that, I look in particular at the American context in particular because you know that you know Silicon Valley is rooted in the United States, the United States has this really long history of car dependency and kind of, you know, pushing the car as this object of of freedom and modernity and things like that.

So I look a bit less at the European context in the book, though, I know that obviously the car has been very influential in shaping European transportation as well. They’re probably not to the same degree as what happened in North America, where I am based.

And so I think that for me there are, you know, a number of moments that we could point to as very important moments in this kind of transformation of the transport system.

You know, we can go back to when the car starts to emerge in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and, you know, I think a lot of people forget that in that moment, it wasn’t obvious that the car we were going to use to get around was going to be one within internal combustion engine that was reliant on fossil fuels.

But at the time, you know, there were also electric cars in that moment and for a while it looked like they might actually be kind of, you know, the form of vehicle that became mass transportation instead of the internal combustion engine and there were even cars at the time that were powered by steam power, because that was, you know, a very common form of kind of, you know, mobility or creating energy or whatnot in that. So I think that that’s one important moment.

But then I think if you kind of fast forward a few decades as the car starts to become more common in you know North American cities, but European cities as well, what you really see is kind of a conflict, right? On one hand, you have cars that are becoming more common on the street, but you also have a street car that is designed around a different way of getting around the city, right?

It’s designed around people who are walking, who are taking bicycles, who are taking the streetcar, who are taking horse drawn carriages, all things that move relatively slowly within the streets of cities. And then you’re moving toward the car, which slowly kind of gets faster, can kind of maneuver more in a more agile way, I guess. And what happens is that more people start to die and be injured because of automobiles, right? In particular, children and young women.

And that creates a backlash in cities in the United States through the 1910s to about the 30S and so in that moment the question is really, you know, are we going to allow this car, this, this form of transportation, to become entrenched in the city or are we going to take regulatory measures to restrict how fast cars can go to restrict, you know, how much space they can take up to restrict, you know, how much they can actually use the roads when there’s all these other people who are trying to use them as well, and what we ultimately see as, as you said, is that there’s a kind of wide range of interest groups that see that they are going to profit from the car becoming a form of mass transportation.

And so they all kind of work together to make sure that regulations don’t stifle the growth of the automobile and that ultimately, in the decades that follow, whether it’s through the 1930s as the US government is trying to kind of, you know, take programs to recover from the Great Depression or in the post war period in particular.

After the late 1940s, into the 1950s and 60s, as there’s a big kind of infrastructure building program. And in that moment, you know, the push is really to build a lot of suburban housing, a lot of highway infrastructure or a lot of road infrastructure. And at the same time, there’s not the kind of investment put into the rail network or into public transportation or things like that. The focus is really to get people to drive cars, to use cars and to reshape the transportation system around that.

00:08:34 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And jumping ahead into, let’s say, today’s atmosphere, where are we regarding the current, let’s say state of the future of transportation, the self-driving cars, the electric cars… Things you described happening in the past I could draw some parallels with same or similar things happeni