Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?

Public Transit in the Age Google, Uber, and Elon Musk

James Wilt

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771134491
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Transportation & Navigation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Public transportation is in crisis. Through an assessment of the history of automobility in North America, the "three revolutions" in automotive transportation, as well as the current work of committed people advocating for a different way forward, James Wilt imagines what public transit should look like in order to be green and equitable. Wilt considers environment and climate change, economic and racial inequality, urban density, accessibility and safety, work and labour unions, privacy and control of personal data, as well as the importance of public and democratic decision-making.

Based on interviews with more than forty experts, including community activists, academics, transit planners, authors, and journalists, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? explores our ability to exert power over how cities are built and for whom.

Part One
Depot

Chapter 1
Off the rails

A brief history of automotive domination

The combination of chronic underfunding, capitalist planning, and political bias toward the automobile has sabotaged transit at almost every step.

The Battle for the Streets

It was the shot heard round the world—for transit experts, at least. “I think public transport is painful. It sucks,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk opined at a 2017 convention. “Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time. It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”1

Criticism of Musk’s comments was swift and damning. Transit planner Jarrett Walker tweeted that the billionaire’s “hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford,” while Rich Sampson of the Community Transportation Association of America quipped: “When you’re white, wealthy & emotionally estranged, you view everyone else as an inconvenience at best and a threat at worst.”2 In response, Musk tweeted at Walker: “You’re an idiot,” clarifying a few hours later that he “meant to say ‘sanctimonious idiot.’”3

The online fireworks weren’t only entertaining—but also instructive in how automobile dominance is justified and defended by its proponents. Musk’s anti-transit comments contained an age-old myth of a “love affair with the automobile” that has been weaponized for a century.

There is nothing inevitable about widespread automobility. Contrary to elite opinions, the daily deluge of car commercials, and the implications of every related political announcement—to fund a new road, expand a highway, or offer electric vehicle subsidies—there is no such thing as an inherent “love affair with the automobile” that needs to continue. What we think of as car culture, and increasingly as truck and SUV culture, is the product of a century-long onslaught of corporate lobbying, propaganda, and mythmaking, along with massive state subsidies that produced the infrastructure required for suburbanization and automobile dominance. It has largely worked. By and large, transit systems in North America are underused, dilapidated, and overpriced.

Some urbanist explanations of this ideological coup revolve around the alleged conspiracy of National City Lines between 1938 and 1950, in which General Motors, Firestone Tires, Standard Oil of California, and other companies that were invested in automotive dominance bought up and destroyed complex networks of electric streetcars in cities across the U.S. and Canada. There is some truth to the story, which found a popular retelling in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In 1949, participating companies were convicted for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act via National City Lines’ monopoly over diesel bus sales and products, which further entrenched automobiles as the basic form of transportation. Functional streetcar systems were replaced by buses, which eventually lost out to cars. But while the so-called GM streetcar conspiracy is a particularly memorable example of how automotive and oil interests collaborate to pursue profit, the story of how car dominance came to be is considerably longer and more complex. As argued by Australian writer Jeff Sparrow about the so-called conspiracy: “In many ways that missed the bigger point: simply, streetcars, trains and other transport systems required state support to be viable, and that support increasingly went to automobiles.”4 Let’s review some of that history’s highlights (and lowlights).

The first Model T was sold in 1908, and the first U.S. federal road program was inaugurated in 1916.5 Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, told me that by the 1920s cars were viewed by much of the public as extremely dangerous, understood as forcing pedestrians off streets, crowding curbs, delaying streetcars, taking up excess space by sitting idle, and failing to serve a large portion of the people in a dense city. Judges, juries, and newspaper editorial pages blamed the car every time one killed a pedestrian on the street.

Dan Albert, author of Are We There Yet?: The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless, observed: “The upper classes used automotive violence to drive the working classes and urban poor from the streets—relatively wide open spaces in dense urban neighborhoods. Vigilantes responded with attacks on the millionaire motorists who raced through working class neighborhoods.”6

The automobile was seen as a clear threat to the peace and safety of urban residents. As a result, municipal engineers took a series of steps to limit private car use. Those included banning curb parking, designing intersections and signal timing in a way that deliberately delayed traffic, and encouraging pedestrians to cross the street anywhere they liked. In their early era, North American cities were explicitly designed for the pedestrian and the streetcar.

“That status quo just terrified people who wanted to sell cars,” Norton says. “People were actually not buying very many cars in cities.” The automotive industry then realized that “the obvious solution lies only in a radical redefinition of our conception of what a city street is for.”

A concerted propaganda campaign by the automotive industry ensued. When a pedestrian was killed, the industry worked to ensure the victim was subject to public blame. Norton says that huge efforts were poured into a “campaign of organized ridicule against people who walk in streets,” including collaborating with local police departments to physically pick up jaywalkers and carry them to the curb in order to embarrass them into never repeating the “crime.” When cars collided, auto interests called for wider roads to improve safety rather than slowing down traffic.

In 1932, the National Highway Users Conference was officially inaugurated by General Motors, the American Automobile Association, and other interests.7 Every safety issue that arose was solved in a way that didn’t slow or restrict cars.

“It was a really substantially successful effort to create a car-dependent city,” Norton says. “And the car-dependent city became self-perpetuating: to survive in the car-dependent city, you have to get a car. And once you have a car, now your interests do align to some degree with the proponents of the car-dependent city because they’re the people who say, ‘If you’re stuck in traffic, we’ll get you another lane.’”

Private companies that were contracted by cities to provide streetcar service, sometimes along with electricity and road paving, began to fail en masse.8 Throughout the twentieth century, many major transit systems were taken over by municipalities. The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 divided the previously close relationship between the transit industry and electric utilities, and the rise of suburbs, highways, and automobile dominance further undermined the financial viability of private transit operators. Yet even after being taken over, many transit systems were losing out to automobility in state support.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933, premised on mass consumption of cheap energy, played a major part in this process. Matthew Huber, author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, told me that prior to World War II, American workers didn’t have high enough wages or the public infrastructure to consume in a way that created sufficient demand for capitalism to expand. The Wagner Act of 1935 dramatically altered those conditions by guaranteeing the rights of labourers to organize into unions and collectively bargain without fear of being fired. Higher wages for white workers combined with a massive mobilization of public resources to create the capacity for widespread private car ownership and highly segregated single-family suburban living. The GI Bill of 1944 further entrenched this trajectory by offering very low- interest mortgages for new suburban homes to returning white soldiers while systematically denying them to Black soldiers through bureaucratic restrictions, v...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Dedication
• Introduction: The slow bleed
• Part One: Depot
• Part Two: Departure
• Part Three: Destination
• Acknowledgements
• Interviews
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright