- Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk by James Wilt
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk, James Wilt cuts through the whiz-bang hype surrounding the tech industry's predatory targeting of transportation services, while consistently pointing the way forward towards a positive vision of well-funded and accessible public transportation services. His argument is divided into three main parts. First, Wilt provides the historical background necessary to understand the crisis facing public transportation, and discusses the political economy of the tech-finance-transportation nexus that makes up the balance of forces today. With this context established, Wilt proceeds to survey a range of topics that directly relate to public transportation: climate, economic and racial inequality, safety and congestion, accessibility, privacy and surveillance, rural and intercity service, as well as labour unions. Wilt concludes by proposing a vision for public transportation that prioritizes people over profit, and offers suggestions for organizing towards this goal.
Wilt's brief history of the advent of car culture in North America is useful in that it denaturalizes the now-ubiquitous role of the automobile, illustrating its present role as the result of a range of industry-led campaigns and public policy decisions. At the turn of the 20th century, the automobile industry had to push out existing transportation systems like streetcars or trains. The dangerous new automobiles also had to tackle the problem of people continuing to walk about city streets (a long-standing human impulse) through the invention of jaywalking, a crime meant to shame pedestrians and blame victims of automobile accidents. By the 1950s mortgage-financing policies pushing suburbanization – combined with enormous public subsidies in the form of the interstate highway system – built the infrastructure that would slice up urban space and dominate transportation for the foreseeable future. Most damaging of all, this infrastructural lock-in of car dependence made public transportation alternatives all the more difficult.
The neoliberal turn meant rolling austerity for cities and their public transportation budgets. While the projects that do eventually succeed in getting built are often subject to the conditions of public-private-partnerships, Wilt explains that these P3s employ voodoo economics to initially appear less costly, while the back-loaded long-term financial costs end [End Page 203] up being absorbed by the public purse. Altogether, this historical trajectory has left public transportation systems in an emaciated state of what is in effect longterm disinvestment. Piecemeal projects that do proceed are themselves part of urban gentrification strategies, where increasing transportation amenities help boost property values and push lower-income residents out (who need the service the most), all while initiating further rounds of real-estate speculation.
It is into this arena that the tech giants step in, claiming a technological fix for our public transportation woes. Wilt points out how ridesharing tech giants are propelled primarily by a willingness to burn vast pools of venture capital while aggressively lobbying to avoid taxes and labour regulations that apply to other transportation modes. Public transit ridership is being eroded by unprofitable ridesharing services that subsidize rides with ample venture capital and circumventions of labour regulations. Wilt's analysis of the particulars of the transportation industry echo the insights of other works assessing the broader dynamics of post-2008-bailout capitalism, such as Nick Srnicek's Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).
The technical fixes orbit three so-called "revolutions" in transportation: electrification, largely in the form of Electric Vehicles (evs); sharing or pooling, which relates to the platforms and apps that govern their use; and automation or self-driving vehicles, where machine intellect takes the drivers' seat.
What follows is a thorough debunking of the tech industry's claim to inherit the future of human transportation. Through a critical discussion on a number of fronts – environmental impacts, equity, safety, among others – Wilt pokes hole after hole into the mirage of technological...