At 9:58 pm on March 18, an Uber test vehicle was driving its usual route in Tempe, Arizona when it struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she crossed the road with her bike. A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board showed the system detected Herzberg six seconds before impact, but couldn’t classify her, presumably because of her bike. Despite the sensors onboard the vehicle, the system didn’t determine it should brake until 1.3 seconds before impact—but that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Uber’s self-driving team had disabled emergency braking and failed to install a way for it to alert the safety driver, who was at her phone. The safety driver made a mistake, but the ultimate failures that cost Herzberg her life were with the self-driving system and the Uber team working on it. Documents obtained by the New York Times showed the group was cutting corners to make progress so they could impress CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.
Self-driving cars are just one of the many technologies that companies hope to unleash on the city in the coming years, as their pursuit of monopoly forces them to constantly search for new markets. Their colonization effort is defined by bold claims, big visions, and sleek marketing campaigns to convince urban residents that the future on offer is the one they _should_ want, and even if they don’t, that future—regardless of whether the fine-tuned, attractive visuals come to fruition—is arriving full speed ahead.
The list of products and services tech companies have created to gain a foothold in urban space is long, but a few stand out; ride-hailing services, pioneered by Uber, were supposed to improve the taxi experience, replace car ownership, and drastically reduce traffic; self-driving cars were another step down that path, ditching the driver and giving people more time to look at their phones en route to their destination; the Boring Company was a magically cheap way of building tunnels for individual cars so people wouldn’t have to use transit; and now dockless bikes and scooters—often referred to by the Venture Capital-friendly ‘micro-mobility’ moniker—are also going to revolutionize transportation. What has become apparent about all of these big ideas is how spectacularly they’ve failed to live up to the futures they were supposed to usher in.
The integration of technology to extract data from everything that occurs in urban space is supposed to yield major improvements to quality of life, yet the promise remains elusive despite the constant creep of surveillance technologies. And there’s a good reason for this that eludes the numbers-obsessed engineers and software developers of Silicon Valley: their visions of the future are constrained by their own social position and experience of the world. Despite all of its rhetoric about diversity and inclusion, the tech industry is still dominated by cisgender, straight, white men with college degrees and good salaries. A 2018 analysis by Reveal News of the 177 largest Bay Area tech companies found the median racial breakdown was 76.3 percent white, 18.2 percent Asian, 1.3 percent Latino, and a damning 0 percent black. But that doesn’t capture the whole picture, as women and minorities were significantly overrepresented in administrative and support roles within the companies; their numbers fell off the higher up the ladder the investigation went, for all but white women.
Tech’s lack of diversity, especially in positions of power, limits the perspectives of those able to provide meaningful input on the products and services that companies have under development. Even if the composition of the workforce was different, it may not make much of a difference because decision-making power isn’t widely distributed.
In _Capitalist Realism_, the late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher explained that the neoliberal capitalist system limits our ability to imagine alternatives to the social and economic constructs in which we live. It creates a “pervasive _atmosphere_, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.” As a result, envisioning and enacting alternative economic systems or forms of social organization that do not rely on wage labor, profit maximization, and the control of the economy by a small, wealthy elite, become near impossible. As the saying attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek goes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Systemic limits on our imagination are not simply the purview of radical theorists. Jarrett Walker, a well-known American transport consultant and humanities Ph.D, has applied a similar concept to the transport sector. He coined the term ‘elite projection’ to describe “the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole,” but there’s a flaw in their approach: since elites are always a small (yet powerful) minority, “planning a city or transport network around the preferences of a minority routinely yields an outcome that doesn’t work for the majority.” Walker emphasizes that moving people through densely packed urban space is a problem of “geometry, not engineering, and _technology never changes geometry_.” But so many tech companies, blinded by the hubris of ‘innovation,’ think tech is the panacea.
Take Uber and Lyft. They long claimed they would reduce traffic congestion and car ownership, but a growing body of research, including work by Bruce Schaller, Gregory D. Erhardt, Regina Clewlow, and a number of other researchers, shows the exact opposite: ride-hailing services increase congestion, transport emissions, have little effect on vehicle ownership, and reduce transit ridership, in part because more congestion makes bus services worse. These effects have become so hard to deny that Uber and Lyft released a joint analysis in August acknowledging their responsibility for a significant amount of vehicle miles in six major U.S. cities.
These effects are made even worse when you consider the ridership. In January, the Pew Research Center released a study of ride-hailing users that showed they’re overwhelmingly young, urban and college-educated with incomes above $75,000—meaning they’re a relatively well-off group that presumably has a number of transport options. But Uber’s rise has negatively affected low-income people by making transit services less reliable and diverting political attention from real transport solutions to tech’s latest misleading fantasy.
Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber until he resigned in disgrace in 2017, admitted in a Code Conference interview from 2014, that his ultimate goal was to automate drivers—a statement he later had to distance himself from as drivers became angry that their futures meant so little to the company. Kalanick saw self-driving vehicles as the evolution of the ride-hailing model. For years, it was common for tech visionaries to excitedly describe utopian urban futures where we would all take our own self-driving pods everywhere we needed to go, replacing driving, transit, cycling, and walking (there’s nothing that tech executives hate more than the idea of having to walk a few minutes to their destination). Autonomous vehicles would abolish vehicle ownership, free up parking lots for development, and get rid of millions of driving jobs, for which they presented a basic income below the poverty line as a reasonable replacement. But, as the industry now admits, all of those big ideas were, at the very least, decades premature, and that’s all because of what precipitated in March 2018.
In the aftermath of the fateful Uber crash, a steady stream of executives admitted their previously aggressive self-driving timelines were overoptimistic. Waymo CEO John Krafcik told the D.Live tech conference in November 2018 that “autonomy will always have constraints,” and that the self-driving car that can navigate any conditions at any time in any weather will never exist. Then, in March, Volkswagen’s head of commercial vehicles, Thomas Sedran, said autonomous vehicles would take at least five more years, but even then, they will not “happen globally” because they’ll require constantly updated high-definition digital maps, the latest mobile infrastructure, and near-perfect road markings. He compared the challenge of self-driving technology to conducting “a manned mission to Mars.” GM pushed back its planned deployment of self-driving vehicles in 2019 to an indefinite point in the future, and Ford CEO Jim Hackett admitted the company “overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles.” Argo AI’s Bryan Salesky, whose company has taken investments from Ford and VW, says self-driving cars that can drive anywhere are “way in the future,” because even though he thinks they’re 80 percent of the way here, that final 20 percent will be much more difficult than what’s been solved thus far.
That might make it seem as though the whole industry has woken up to the challenge that exists to rolling out self-driving vehicles, and that the big promises that were supposed to be realized by their rollout in the early 2020s, are now decades away. But there’s one person who hasn’t yet accepted reality: none other than Elon Musk.
The Tesla billionaire’s wrong-headed approach is central to Silicon Valley’s views on transportation, which have largely embraced an electric, autonomous version of the automobile that doesn’t address the fundamental problems with auto-oriented development. Musk still pushes the fiction that self-driving cars are right around the corner, even though he keeps missing his own timelines. In April, he claimed Tesla’s self-driving software wouldn’t require human supervision by the end of 2019. If Musk really tries to make us believe he’s solved self-driving technology, we should all be terrified. Autopilot, the Tesla assisted-driving system, has already claimed several lives, and unleashing it on a larger scale could cause that number to soar.
But Musk hasn’t stopped at misleading people about autonomous driving. In 2016, he set out on a new project to construct a system of tunnels beneath the streets of Los Angeles—and any other city that will let him drill—with the Boring Company, a venture to reduce the cost of tunnel-boring infrastructure. According to Musk, a massive network of tunnels beneath the streets will be an affordable end to traffic, once and for all.
It became immediately clear that the project was little more than a scheme for Musk to get himself out of traffic. His first proposed tunnel in Los Angeles just so happened to run along Interstate 405, from Musk’s house to SpaceX headquarters, and the proposal got progressively worse as Musk had to take it from concept to reality. Originally, vehicles were supposed to ride through the tunnels on large platforms called ‘skates,’ which included an enclosed space for pedestrians and cyclists. Now, after a number of revisions, the skates are gone altogether and replaced with Tesla vehicles that need special wheel attachments. The prototype unveiled in December 2018 was slammed by the press. After promising an autonomous Tesla on a skate going 150 miles per hour, journalists were treated to a human-driven Tesla topping out at 53 miles per hour as it rolled along concrete shelves. Laura Nelson of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it was “so uneven in places that it felt like riding on a dirt road.”
For decades, cities have been trying to add new thoroughfares as a solution to congestion, with little success. Studies show new roads simply create more traffic. The tunnels are little more than new roads that have been shifted underground. Musk refuses to accept that the entrance and exit points to his tunnels will become massive bottlenecks. The only way for systematic traffic reduction is to move people into more efficient modes of transportation—a reality that some in Silicon Valley may be finally accepting, with a caveat.
For the past few years, dockless bikes and scooters have rapidly proliferated in cities around the world. The micro-mobility trend isn’t limited to startups, but also Uber, Lyft, and Ford. The attention paid to the services helped kick off a much-needed conversation about whether automobiles, in any form, were appropriate for urban areas that continue to grow and densify. It also helped illustrate the massive divide that exists in many large cities. In cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where homelessness has reached unprecedented levels, encampments on sidewalks are destroyed and people humiliated, as city governments have allowed rents to soar and public supports to erode. Conversely, tech-owned bikes and scooters are littered on sidewalks, become literal heaps, and block pedestrian traffic. In essence, pieces of metal take precedence over human lives.
The financials on these services, similar to ride-hailing companies, are questionable as well. Bird and Lime Scooter say their new models need to be in the fleet for six months to turn a profit, but publicly available data from Louisville, Kentucky between August to December 2018, puts their average lifespan at 28.8 days, while in Los Angeles, from January to April 2019, the lifespan is 126 days. Despite executives’ claims that scooters last longer, the companies running bike and scooter services have been raising prices, rendering them more expensive compared to public bike-sharing options. As tech leaders prioritize control of the transport system above its efficiency, they can’t accept that their solutions may not actually be the best option. This is clearly the case for micro-mobility. Competition adds no benefit in this space, and with a recession seemingly on the horizon, some of these money-losing companies may soon find their venture capitalist funders aren’t as free with their cash. Then, public bike-sharing services will need to decide whether they take over and offer a service that includes bikes, e-bikes, and scooters with easy-to-access docks. However, they may also realize that scooters simply don’t work in a rental fleet, and that’s okay. City governments, as part of a larger strategy to reduce car use, should provide subsidies for the purchase of bikes, e-bikes, and possibly even scooters as they expand their networks of bike lanes.
The past decade of tech experimentation in transportation has proven that the visionaries of Silicon Valley don’t really know what they’re doing when it comes to equitably and efficiently moving large numbers of people through urban space. Where their solutions have been implemented, as with ride-hailing and micro-mobility services, they have failed to find a sustainable business model, increased congestion and emissions, and proven their bigger ideas of self-driving cars and an underground, autonomous highway system is far more difficult to execute than initially envisioned.
Tech billionaires are not going to define the future of equitable transportation. Their solutions are insufficient for the festering wound of automobility, which is baked into the American psyche. A city for everyone does not depend on monopolistic digital platforms that care only about power and eventual profit. Rather, cities require us to put the needs of the least powerful ahead of the most powerful to decommodify and reorient housing around community; reinvigorate the social bonds destroyed by decades of neoliberal capitalism; and tackle the scourge of the automobile in exchange for cheap, frequent transit services, a comprehensive network of bike lanes, and communities where friends, work, and necessities are within walking distance. Billionaires like Musk, Kalanick, and Khosrowshahi will never allow that to happen. Cities must be for the many, not the few.
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