Tech Isn’t Fixing the Crisis on Our Streets

Paris Marx is joined by David Zipper to discuss how Silicon Valley pitched new technologies as the fix for a whole range of transport problems, and how that really just distracted us from solutions while allowing issues like  road deaths, emissions, and traffic to get even worse.

David Zipper is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government and a contributing writer at Bloomberg CityLab. You can find his articles and sign up for his newsletter at DavidZipper.com and follow him on Twitter at @DavidZipper.

• David wrote about why traffic safety is getting worse in the US, and compared it to Canada, Finland, France, and Japan. He also wrote about the history of self-driving cars, the danger posed to pedestrians on the roads, the problem with infotainment systems, and what’s wrong with positioning car tech as the solution to our problems.
• Paris wrote about how Elon Musk designed the Hyperloop to try to get California’s high-speed line canceled.
• AAA puts the annual cost of car ownership in the US at over $10,000 a year in 2022. In Canada, CAA put it at $8600 to $13,000 a year in 2017 — a number that is surely even higher now.
• Peter Norton wrote about how the auto industry took over US roads in the early 1900s in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.

• Why We Need a War on Cars w/ Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear
• Silicon Valley Doesn’t Know What Makes a Good City w/ Joanne McNeil
• Is Tesla Still a Car Company? w/ Ed Niedermeyer
• Protesting Tesla Can Hurt Elon Musk w/ Ed Niedermeyer