Twenty one years later General Motors would handout badges at the 1940 World Fair in New York declaring the same thing: “I’ve seen the future.”
The futures they envisaged couldn’t have been more different. The one thing they had in common was that things were about to get ugly.
Paris Marx, author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, opens his book with an account of the General Motor Futurama exihibit at the World Fair.
Jeremy Rose caught up with Marx by Zoom last week, and began by asking him to explain why he begins the book with a discription of the General Motors’ exhibit at the 1940 World Fair.
Paris Marx: The book, in many ways, is about visions for the future of transportation, particularly the visions that the tech companies have put out there over the past 15 years or so.
A lot of the ideas that come from the tech companies are quite divorced from the history of transportation, or even the fundamentals of transportation as we understand them.
So I thought one thing I could do with the book was to not only look at those visions, and deconstruct them, but to contrast them with the emergence of the automobile, and how we imagined that future was actually going to look, when it was originally presented, versus what it has become, and what we’re stuck with today.
And that quote that you mention comes from a pin handed out at the World Fair in New York in 1940. It comes at a moment where people aren’t feeling that optimistic – things haven’t being going very well.
{During the depression 15,000 North Americans, inspired by the picture painted by the likes of Steffens, emigrated to communist Russia.}
The idea is that General Motors is presenting is this vision for what the future could be in 1960.
The vision that they lay out is one where there are these big freeways, these large roads in urban centres, and we live in these tall apartment buildings, that are positioned between multi-lane roads with a separate pedestrian infrastructure, elevated above the roadway. Because you don’t want the pedestrians to be in the way of all the cars, right?
Then it extends into the rural fringes, with the sorts of suburban houses we’re familiar with today. One of the innovations that they tout is that once you leave the city in your car you’re not going to have to drive it because it will be propelled by a system that is built into the roads and the highways, that will be able to guide the car by itself. It’s a very early vision of kind of autonomous driving.
This is what General Motors and other auto companies are putting out there more than eight decades ago.
Notably, I think, this vision is based on an earlier vision of the future called the Shell Oil City of the Future or something like that. The General Motors’ vision was really a repackaging of the oil company’s ideas.
And of course these interests are all embedded with one another. Millions of people see the exhibition and it shapes what people think the future of transportation, the future of cities, the future of mobility is going to look like. And ultimately it influences public policy.
The war against cars
Jeremy Rose: One of things that surprised me in the book was the existence of a very strong anti-car movement in the USA in the early 20th Century.
Absolutely. That was really fascinating to me as well because if you think about the car, and the position that the car has in society today, it’s really difficult to think back to a moment where that would have been a reality.
People might be aware of isolated protests about the building of highways but most people won’t know about the resistance to cars pushing people off the streets.
People were used to getting around in a different way. Especially in cities. Things were built and designed so that people were relatively close together, because the didn’t have cars or other ways of propelling themselves at high speeds.
People got around by walking, by taking bikes, by taking the streetcar system. And it was the streetcar system that allowed a bit more kind of moving out of the centre of the city. Obviously people were using horses and horse drawn carriages and things like that, too.
But because all these systems went at relatively slow speeds, they interacted with one another, and they could kind of navigate this road space together. That’s not to say that everything was perfect. But that was how it worked. And then the car arrived and it went a lot faster everything changed.
What ended up happening is that the number of deaths on the roads started to escalate really rapidly. And because cars were owned and controlled by the wealthy, the majority – the working classes and in particular women and children – were the ones being killed the most often.
That created this backlash, that you mentioned, where people said: “this form of mobility is not working. For me, it’s actually making things more dangerous. We need to stop this.”
Ringing bells for the casualties
And there were very popular campaigns against the car. People would ring the bells on churches and fire halls when people were killed.
Now, of course, as we know, they were not successful because the car did become entrenched and take off. And that was largely because of the power of car and fossil fuel industries.
When streetcars were king
Pedestrians weren’t the only casualty of the motorcar. You talk about this extraordinary network of street cars in the US…
I feel like people forget that there were vast networks of street cars in many cities. Some cities, like Toronto, still has its streetcars because they fought to keep them. But in many cities, the streetcars were ripped up. The streetcars were a competitor to the automobile. But as the car became more entrenched the automotive interests, the car makers, the suppliers, and the the oil companies saw that the streetcars were holding them back.
The streetcars provided an alternative that was really comprehensive and went to many other parts of the city.
A lot of the old streetcar networks were run by private companies, and not by the state or municipal government. That created a lot of challenges for them. And in at one case, a number of these interests came together and bought up some of these streetcar lines in the United States, and shut them down and replaced them with a bus system.
And of course, once you take away the rails, then it becomes much easier to reshape a bus network and make cuts to services. Buses get stuck in traffic, so one of the main advantages of public transport – its relative speed – disappears.
Getting rid of the streetcars was part of a larger concerted campaign to encourage automobile ownership. Part of that is driven by the car companies but it’s important to note as well, that the state and the government were very much implicated in that transition as well.
Especially in the post war period, there was a big push to build out the suburbs, to get people buying cars, to get people buying consumer goods, it was a whole kind of change to the way that people live.
It was a way to encourage economic growth, job creation, and all these other things that were tied up in that. It was a whole remaking of the way that we live in order to encourage capitalist expansion in the post war period.
The ever expanding highways
And encourage capitalist consumption they did. And the more cars that were sold the bigger the highways had to get. You mention the Katy Highway in your book. Tell us about that?
As traffic congestion becomes a reality of life in North American cities, and cities around the world, the way to cope with that, if you’re not going to offer alternatives, like better public transit systems, is to keep expanding the highway system.
For a long time, this is the conventional wisdom, this is how you approach the problem.
But for decades now studies have shown that when you add more lanes to highways you don’t actually reduce traffic – you actually make it worse.
Because once you make those investments in the roadways, you encourage more people to drive on them. So sure, you expand the number of lanes but then people fill them up again.
The Katy Freeway is an example of that in Texas. I believe in the end they made more than 20 lanes and when that was completed it didn’t solve the problem, in fact traffic got worse.
If you want people to drive less, if you want to reduce traffic, you need to give people real alternatives to get around. But there’s a real industrial interest, and to a certain degree political interest, in ensuring that doesn’t happens.
And there’s a growing right-wing political movement to defend the car at all costs. It’s become a culture war issue. The car companies love that because as long as we’re still driving cars, they’re still making money.
Is subsidising EVs a good idea?
Let’s bring the conversation into the present. You’re back in New Zealand for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. One of the things our government is very proud of is the clean car discount. There’s been a big increase in the number of EVs being sold – no doubt in part to the $8500 subsidy on offer. What are your thoughts on EVs?
It’s difficult, right? It requires a nuanced conversation that too often, our political discussions are not ready for and are not open to.
I would always preface this by saying that I think that electric vehicles have an important place in ensuring that we do reduce the emissions in the transport system. And I think that there will be part of our communities, especially after a century, of basically building for automobiles, that will remain somewhat car dependent.
But with that said, we also need to recognise that the electric vehicle is not a silver bullet, to solving these problems.
It does reduce the lifecycle emissions of a vehicle, in most cases, If you’re buying an electric car, and replacing your internal combustion vehicle, and replacing all those kilometres then the lifecycle emissions are going to be lower.
The problem so far is that with a lot of these electric cars that are being sold, they’re being targeted more to high income individuals. In some cases, they’re not buying them as a replacement, so they’re not driving it all the time. And that means that they’re not getting the environmental benefit that we would expect. Teslas are marketed as luxury vehicles. They’re not Toyotas.
Because with an electric vehicle, a lot of the emissions actually come from the production process, and from creating the battery that goes into the car itself, because these cars have really large batteries that require a lot of mining, you know, to go into them right to put the components together, basically. And so what we see there is that if they’re not kind of driven a lot, then you’re not getting the environmental benefit that comes with it.
Trickle down green-economcs
The argument that Labour and Green MPs made when introducing the bill was that the benefits will trickle down when the Teslas are on sold….
It’s definitely possible. But there’s a quality control issue. If it’s a Toyota and you’re reselling that you know it’s going to keep going for a really long time. The problem with Teslas is that’s not the case.
The batteries in these vehicles can be very expensive. And so they’re not built to last. And if they don’t last a long period of time, it’s very costly to replace that battery later.
And the types of electric vehicle we’ve kind embraced in North America, Australia, parts of Europe, and New Zealand is these larger vehicles with really large batteries.
They have a really long range. But that also means that they have a bigger environmental footprint.
So my response to efforts to promote electric vehicle production and use is that, yes, this is an important way that we address the issue of climate change and the issue of emissions in the transport system. But it cannot be our sole and primary way to try to address that problem. We know that reliance on cars and automobiles has many more detrimental effects than just the contribution to climate change. We know that they kill and injure a lot of people, we know that they make it so that people need to drive really long distances to get anywhere to visit anyone to access the services that they need.
We know that it’s really costly for people to buy and own a vehicle and to maintain a vehicle. So there are many other reasons to want to move away from that. And that means that if we want to look more comprehensively at this problem, if we do want to address the problem of emissions in the transport system, it’s yes, replace internal combustion vehicles with electric cars where we can, but there must be a lot more effort put into giving people those alternatives that were taken away from them a long time ago.
Making serious investments in public transportation, making serious investments in cycling infrastructure, looking at the way that we plan our communities, so that we can ensure that people aren’t living these great distances away that are designed for car ownership, and are living in communities that are built so you can access the types of things that you need on a day to day basis, or you have good kinds of transit connections and things like that. So you can reach those things more easily.
The environmental and human costs of green technologies
You mentioned the environmental impacts of EVs and in your book you touch on the humanitarian impacts of the mining required for the batteries. The rubber boom that followed the invention of the bicycle led directly to Belgium’s grotesque crimes against humanity in the Congo. And now the cobalt needed for EV batteries has been implicated in yet more crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
That’s true. Batteries have a significant amount of mined materials that go into them. Some automakers are attempting to reduce the amount of cobalt because the majority of the supply comes from the DRC where we know that there’s child labor, and there’s a whole load of other kinds of abuses.
But cobalt isn’t the only concern. We have lithium, a lot of that comes from Australia right now, but a significant amount is going to be coming from Latin America in the future. Mining lithium requires huge amounts of water and the areas where lithium is found are very dry. So the communities lose access to fresh water.
The batteries are also reliant on nickel. A lot of that nickel is coming from Indonesia – where there have been absolutely terrible environmental consequences from mining. It’s not just environmental consequences. There are a ton of health impacts on the workers and those living near the mines.
I’m not saying fossil fuels aren’t a problem. Fossil fuels are a serious problem. But what I’m saying and what I’m concerned about is that because we have this strong desire to move away from fossil fuel production, that we’re just going to accept the creation of this vast new infrastructure of extraction and environmental harm, to create all of these electric cars so that automakers and mining companies can make profits, instead of looking at how we can actually reduce transport emissions and emissions more broadly.
And to see how we can do that in a in a better way that does not require as much extraction. I think that we can do a lot better.
You’re from Canada, you’ve visited cities around the world, how does Auckland compare in terms of public transport?
I would say that there’s a lot of opportunity for what could be done in public transportation in Auckland and in New Zealand more broadly.
It’s really unfortunate that proposals for transit improvements and transit projects, such as light rail, just keep being delayed or brought back to the drawing board.
We are in a climate crisis and these communities are very dependent on cars, and there’s a lot of opportunity to improve public transit to get more people using that rather than having to drive.
This is a sort of silly question: Is Paris Marx your real name?
It is, sort of. I’m gonna slightly not answer this one. Because I love leaving it as kind of an open question. I think it’s actually really fun. Because one thing that that I’ve noticed is that if you go on Google, and you type my name in, the first kind of autocomplete suggestion is Paris, Marx’s real name. So people are wondering and are curious. And I think it’s fun to kind of leave that question out there.
Paris by bike
The reason I ask is because it’s kind of perfect isn’t? it I mean you’re promoting anti-capitalist ideas and have a vision of urban transportation that’s being pioneered in Paris. Would you describe yourself as anti-capitalist?
Absolutely, I would. I’m definitely opposed to the capitalist system. And as much as we can move away from that, I welcome that.
I think it’s really interesting to see what is going on in Paris. And to see how that kind of kicks off conversations around what we can actually do in cities, and how we can approach kind of thinking about urban planning and mobility.
You end the book with the suggestion that we need to move away from the sort of hyper-capitalism we’re living in to an economy with more shared resources. Have you seen any initiatives recently that have excited you in that respect?
It’s a good question. In the first year of the pandemic there was a lot of discussion about what it might mean for the future of cities. In a lot of North American cities we saw roads closed – or we might say opened up to pedestrians – so they could spread out and have a lot more space. There was sidewalk dining and that sort of thing
I think for a lot of people that kind of changed their perceptions of how streets could be used, how space in cities could be used, and how we could think about these things differently.
And I think that there’s probably been a bit of disappointment, that that that legacy hasn’t resulted in more kind of change that we were expecting or hoping to see in that moment.
But I don’t think that means that things, you know, are completely lost, right? We have been having a lot of conversations about what our city should look like, and how things change if people are working from home and what public transportation systems need to look like to respond to that, and whether we need to make more investments in cycling infrastructure.
I think it’s been really fascinating and heartening to see, in a city like Paris, for example, where within two years of the pandemic happening, there was this massive boom in bike usage, because they started to rapidly close a bunch of streets and expand cycle lanes.
So there’s probably not one big thing that I would point to, but I think it’s hopeful to see that these things keep moving forward. And what’s really necessary to do those things is to have more investments in cycling, public transit and making cities pedestrian friendly.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The interview was edited for length and sense.
Paris Marx tour dates:
- Dark Room, 336 Asaph St, Christchurch, Wednesday 22 March, 7:00 pm.
- University Bookshop, 378 Great King St, Dunedin, Tuesday 23 March, 5:30 pm.
- Bedlam & Squalor, level 1, 18 Garrett St, Wellington, Tuesday 28 March, 6:30 pm.
- Time Out Bookshop, Auckland, 432 Mount Eden Road, Thursday 20 March, 6pm
- SEO Powered Content & PR Distribution. Get Amplified Today.
- Platoblockchain. Web3 Metaverse Intelligence. Knowledge Amplified. Access Here.
- Source: https://www.carbonnews.co.nz/story.asp?storyID=27255
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