Why is it difficult to imagine better transportation systems?: A review of “Road to Nowhere”
by Jacob Pleasants
Our transportation systems are broken. On this point, most people are likely to agree. The vehicles we use to get around have enormous negative impacts on the environment and cause unacceptable numbers of deaths every year. What’s worse, our transportation systems aren’t even very good at doing what they’re supposed to do. Traffic is terrible, fuel prices are rising, public transportation is inconvenient or non-existent, and it’s not getting any better. Clearly, transportation is an area in need of disruptive technological innovation! Electric vehicles, ride sharing, autonomous vehicles, e-scooters, underground tunnels… these are the ways of the transportation future, courtesy of tech innovators like Tesla, Google, Uber, and their ilk.
Or so Silicon Valley would like us to believe.
However, the veneer seems to have worn off many of the supposed “solutions” that these companies have developed. In the past few years, as negative consequences have become more evident, governments and the media have become a little less credulous and a bit more skeptical of Silicon Valley-style infrastructure solutions. And yet, there remain some underlying flaws in the ways that most people think about transportation problems and the solutions being offered. We can agree that ride-hailing apps are not going to solve traffic congestion, but maybe the “real” breakthrough technological innovation is just around the corner. Autonomous electric cars will be the real game-changer, right?
Paris Marx thinks otherwise. Their goal in Road to Nowhere is to convince you that Silicon Valley will never be the source of solutions to our transportation woes. The problem is not with the specific technologies that they have developed, though there are plenty of issues with those. The real problem is that Silicon Valley operates from a fundamentally faulty worldview. Marx describes that worldview in detail, shows how it has manifested and undermined a variety of ill-fated Silicon Valley “solutions,” and urges us to fundamentally reconsider how we think about transportation.
Marx, Paris (2022). Road to nowhere: What Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation. Verso.
Purchase from publisher. 272 pages
. ISBN-13 : 978-1839765889.
Review by Jacob Pleasants
I will freely admit that I am a sympathetic audience for these arguments; Marx did not need to do a whole lot of convincing to get me on board. Having acknowledged that bias, I will nevertheless affirm that the research in this book is solid, and that Marx makes their case with plenty of nuance. There is a part of me that wanted more references and more endnotes… but this is not an academic book, nor is it meant to be, and that’s probably a good thing. As a book for a general audience, Road to Nowhere is very accessible and enjoyable (as well as informative) book to read. For listeners to Marx’s podcast (Tech Won’t Save Us), their narrative voice will be familiar and welcome. \
Although the core arguments in Road to Nowhere were not new to me, I still found that I got a great deal out of reading the book. Takedowns of Silicon Valley are always fun, but Road to Nowhere offers more than that. Marx’s analyses offer insights that are thought-provoking and that have implications that extend beyond the cases at hand.
Below, I give an overview of Marx’s arguments and highlight what I think are some of their most valuable insights and contributions. There aren’t exactly “spoilers” in there, but if you like the element of surprise (or if you just don’t feel like reading a bunch more text), I’ll leave you with a very brief “grand summary” of the critical points:
*Transportation technologies must be considered in an appropriate context
-Their relationship to all manner of social, technical, and political systems
-Their history, which reveals their non-inevitability as well as alternatives-not-taken
*Silicon Valley imbues its technologies with a certain set of values
-They address only the kinds of problems that Silicon Valley people can perceive
-They only provide solutions for Silicon Valley people
*Any true solution to our transportation problems must challenge the supremacy of the automobile
-In shaping our society around personal automobiles, we have created a fundamentally unsustainable approach to transportation
-Personal automobiles are not inevitable; many alternatives exist
An In-Depth Look at the Arguments
Marx begins by exploring the historical development of our current transportation infrastructure, which is utterly dominated by the personal automobile. In recounting key parts of that history, they emphasize several important points: the system we currently have was not inevitable; the system we currently have was strongly shaped by a relatively small number of influential people; and the system was created to serve the interests of the decision-makers. These are essential points because they put the arguments of the tech “innovators” into an appropriate context.
Marx follows up this history of the automobile with a bit of Silicon Valley history to further put into context the tech-centric proposals being made. They unveil and critique important aspects of the mythology surrounding “disruptive technology.” Technologists often tell a story of plucky inventors whose revolutionary ideas gain purchase in a “free market,” where the best ideas inevitably rise to the surface, transform industries, and generally make things better for everyone. Missing from this account is how many of those innovative ideas originate from government-backed research, how the supposedly “free” marketplace of ideas is anything but, and how the adoption of certain technologies over others is the result of the alignment of interests and values rather than “objective” measures of success. Among other things, we must always remember that Silicon Valley is motivated by profits as much as (if not more than) any desire to improve our infrastructure.
With these opening chapters, Marx prepares us to examine a set of specific cases (electric cars, ride-hailing, autonomous vehicles, e-scooters, and more) armed with new analytical tools. Getting into the specifics of any one of these tech “innovations” can be dangerous, because it’s easy to get swept up in the details of the case and lose sight of the bigger picture. The many promises of the tech companies (less congestion, lower environmental impacts, safer roads) have, of course, failed to materialize. And in scrutinizing each example, there are any number of case-specific reasons for those failures. Ride-hailing, for instance, causes more traffic because people are taking an Uber when they would otherwise have taken mass transit. But if you get too caught up in those case-specific details, you can miss the deeper reasons for the failure, and thus wind up in no better position to engage more thoughtfully in the next one that inevitably comes along.
Marx works hard to avoid that trap. While engaging with the specific issues of each particular case (Are electric cars really so good for the environment? Why is the sidewalk littered with e-scooters?), they also keep bringing us back to the same core questions. Whose interests were these innovations intended to serve? Whose interests are ignored by these tech entrepreneurs? What are the myths and assumption about our transportation system that undergird and undermine these supposed “solutions”? By raising these questions, they reveal how the tech “solutions” being peddled by the industry are hardly “innovative” and repeatedly fall into the same conceptual traps. The most central trap is that, for all their talk of “disruption,” the tech industry never questions the utter supremacy of the automobile.
“When we look more broadly at the tech industry’s transport solutions, we find that their refusal to contend with the challenges that arise from the dominance of automobiles is a common problem.”
A second pervasive problem is that the tech “visionaries” tend to project the problems they perceive in their own privileged lives onto everyone else. The “solutions” they develop are, predictably, solutions only for other privileged people like themselves.
“After reviewing how [the Boring Company’s Loop system] developed, it is impossible to conclude anything other than its plan was never to solve congestion for everyone, but for one person in particular: Elon Musk.”
Finally, there’s the issue that the “solutions” inevitably involve economic extraction of some kind. Silicon Valley companies need to be profitable, and so they are very fond of proposals that involve rentals and monetary transactions in which they can serve as middlemen. As modes of transport go, walking is truly anathema to this mentality. It’s pretty tough to extract rents or data from someone walking somewhere. Perhaps not impossible, but in the meantime, Silicon Valley would prefer you not walk anywhere. Get on an e-scooter instead, please!
If there is one critique that I have of the book, it is that – at times – the bigger-picture points I have just described fade to the background as the details of the specific cases are described. Alas, it really is far too easy to get swept away in the absurdities of Uber, Musk’s Boring Company, or e-scooters.
But the “big picture” critique does come through, especially in the final chapters, and this is truly where Marx’s contributions shine forth. Specific takedowns of any one of the technologies that they examine already exist. Same for histories of the automobile or of Silicon Valley culture. What Marx does is put together those existing pieces into an incisive and insightful whole.
Silicon Valley definitely won’t save us. So, what will? Embedded in Marx’s critique is also a hopeful vision of an alternative:
“The technologies unleashed by Silicon Valley are not neutral. They contain within them the worldviews of the people who develop them; and when they go unquestioned, we allow those very people to make important decisions about how and for whom our society should operate without any democratic deliberation. When we assume that technology can only develop in one way, we accept the power of the people who control that process, but there is no guarantee that their ideal world is one that truly works for everyone.”
The solution, then, is to wrest decision-making control from Silicon Valley and put it into the hands of communities. Marx is not naïve about this. They recognize that people with vested interests in the status quo (the “NIMBY” contingent) often seize control of democratic processes. Marginalized voices will need to be elevated in order for this to work.
But it will take more than just more democratic decision-making. Marx identifies a need for more imaginative thought leadership when it comes to transportation. The supremacy of the personal automobile is not inevitable, and Marx points to examples (primarily European cities) where things have actually played out differently. Invoking some wonderful language and insights from the great Ursula K. Le Guin, Marx calls on us to re-imagine how we could design cities and communities that lean on walking, biking, and mass transit. We don’t need to abandon cars entirely, but we must abandon their centrality. Doing this will require us to rethink not just the technologies, but much broader social, technical, and political systems. We need to deconstruct the way that we have designed our society around cars and reconstruct it around modes of transportation that better serve our values. If we lack the imagination to do so, then we’re going to be stuck with the “solutions” fed to us by Silicon Valley.
Question and Answer
In this Q&A, Jacob shares a question and answer with Paris Marx (learn more abour Paris at their website https://parismarx.com/). Paris not only authored “Road to Nowhere,” but also hosts the popular Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.
JP: One of your major points in the book is that when we look at proposals that come from tech companies, we very much need to think about those proposals in an appropriate context (historical, social, political, economic). It seems to me that the key idea is that by looking at those contexts, we can get a better handle on the values that underlie the technology being put forth. I actually have a couple of questions for you about this idea, because it’s such an important one.
First, paying attention to context and to values is not something that most people normally do. It seems to require a sort of “coming-to-consciousness.” Does that describe your own experience? Did you have your own “coming-to-consciousness” when it comes to thinking critically about technology? If so, what were some of the pivotal moments and key people on that journey?
PM: I think it would be fair to say that I did, and certainly it was a process that happened over a number of years. But key to that process was paying attention to what tech companies were doing in cities, particularly with plans to change the transport system and proposals for future “smart” cities, hence the book that I wrote. I could see how Uber was not delivering on the grand promises it made to improve how everyone got around and the distraction provided by autonomous vehicles as its timelines kept getting further and further delayed. Those observations and the research I did on that aspect of tech served as an entry point to a broader critique of the tech industry and the ideology that underpins it, which is now foundational to the work I do to critically interrogate the industry, its leaders, and the many promises made by companies in the space.
JP: Obviously, it would be great if everyone just read your book. But let’s imagine we’re dealing with someone who is not likely to just pick it up on their own. Maybe a friend, coworker, family member who isn’t necessarily against your ideas, but hasn’t really given a lot of this stuff very much thought and employs a healthy degree of skepticism. What do you think are some effective ways of beginning to raise someone’s awareness of the bigger picture issues that you address? How would you begin the conversation with a person like this? (I’m thinking about this as sort of “prep-work” to prepare someone to not only pick up your book but be mentally prepared to receive the perspectives you develop)
PM: It’s a big question because I really think it depends on the angle through which you’re approaching the topic. If we’re broadly talking about the topic of transportation, I’d probably start with the more general frustrations that people feel about the car-dominated transport system — things like the time people spend stuck in traffic and the cost of owning a vehicle — then use those to discuss more fundamental problems and why the solutions of tech companies aren’t going to solve them. But really, I think there are many ways into the conversation depending on what the person in particular is interested in and knowing how to approach the topic based on that, so it’s hard to give a concrete answer.
JP: You address issues that obviously have great social significance. As an educator, my thinking naturally goes toward: how are we preparing our young people to think about these issues? I think it’s plain that, by and large, we have not educated the public in a way that prepares them to think about our transportation system in particularly productive ways. Of course, that isn’t to say that we haven’t taught them something about our transportation system, because I think we definitely have. It’s more that what we have taught probably isn’t very accurate, and that there is much we haven’t taught that we probably should. I’d like your take on this.
When it comes to transportation technologies in particular and technology more generally, what do you see as some of the most problematic ideas that are taught to people in our society? (Either through formal schooling or the “school of life”)
PM: Two immediately come to mind, though I’m sure there are many more. First, on the topic of transportation, is the idea that when we have traffic, all we need to do to solve that problem is to add more roads, and in particular new highway lanes. This seems like an obvious solution — add more space and all those cars will have more room — but there’s a pretty solid body of evidence right now that that’s not the way it works, and that actually road expansions are incredibly expensive and often do little to nothing to relieve traffic congestion because they just incentivize more people to drive on those routes. The way to reduce traffic is to get people out of cars.
Second, thinking about the tech industry, is to think that technology is directly linked to progress — that as new technologies are created, society is getting better. But that’s not a guarantee, and I would hope that the past decade or so has made that clear, though I think for many it hasn’t sunk in yet. Technologies designed and deployed to increase the profits and social control of the companies behind them are not inherently better for the world, but can make our lives far worse in many ways, whether it’s making our means of communication more toxic, tracking everything we do, taking more control over our workplaces (if not eliminating jobs altogether), or placing digital barriers or prices in places they didn’t previously exist.
JP: Let’s imagine that a very forward-thinking high school has decided to really rethink how they teach students about our transportation system. And they have decided to come to you, Paris Marx, as an expert consultant to help them decide what they ought to be teaching. So, you’ve got the power! What should this school be teaching its students about transportation technologies?
PM: That’s a tough one! I think the key should be equipping students to think critically about transportation and technology so they’d not so easily duped by the marketing and PR of auto and tech companies. For me, an important way to do that (as I do in the book) is to look at the history of those industries and systems to dispel the myths they rely on — where Silicon Valley came from, how reliant it was on public funding, where its tech determinism and entrepreneurial narratives came from, but also how the transportation system we have today — one that’s dominated by automobiles — came to be and the problems it created.