Skepticism for an Auto-Dependent Future

Muizz Akhtar interviews Paris Marx, author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, about the future of transportation in the United States.

The interview ranges from the necessity of owning a car in the United States, the limitations of automobile technology in solving transportation, urban planning, and mobility problems, and the politics of emerging transportation technology. A few choice quotes delivered by Marx in the interview:

We’re kind of stuck in this bind, where we’re dependent on these automobiles, where the cost of using them is increasing, where the number of deaths on the road continues to rise every year. If we do a mass transition to electric vehicles, as it’s being pushed by these companies, and also by the governments, I think that we’re going to find that that doesn’t solve the climate problem of the transportation system to the degree that we’re being sold right now.

And

There’s this move into the city — there’s this desire to go beyond what’s just happening on your computer and to integrate the internet itself into so many other parts of the world. The idea is that this will make things better, this will improve things. But I think, especially now more than a decade on from that, it’s time for a reckoning of reassessment and to recenter ourselves, especially post-pandemic. How do we think about technology in the tech industry now? And how do we ensure we don’t get caught up in these promises, again, in a really uncritical way?

More at the source article below.