Moving On: Shawn Selway Reviews James Wilt's Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk
What Matters Now
In 1897, Ontario appointed a Provincial Instructor in road-making within the Department of Agriculture. This was an itinerant consulting engineer, whose services were available on request to municipal and township governments. In his first annual report, A.W. Campbell laid out the dream of easy travel year-round beyond the end of the rails:
The dullness and isolation of farm life will be overcome by good roads, and they will thereby tend to elevate and bring about a better citizenship. “How can we relieve the congested condition our cities?” “How can we keep our boy on the farm?” are questions demanding an early solution. By making the farm profitable, by giving to energy and ambition sufficient business opportunities on the farm, these problems will be solved, and one of the most important factors in the solution is “Good Roads.”
James Wilt. Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk. Between the Lines. $27.95 293 pp., ISBN 9781771134484
The taxpayer resisted for a time, but after 1900 things moved quickly. A Provincial Improvement Act allocated $1 million to assist municipalities and county councils in paying for public works, including roads. The Provincial Instructor took to the rails with a Good Roads Train, a demonstration project involving the sending of a crew and machinery from town to town to construct a mile of free road in each.
In the cities, littered with horse droppings and horse corpses, considerations of sanitation, efficiency, and the desire to maintain progressive appearances led to asphalting the roads, because asphalt was best for rubber-tired bicycles and the cars that soon succeeded them. During the 1920s, private automobiles came to prominence in a system shared with local electric rail networks; and here we are, in the earthly paradise bequeathed us by our farseeing foremothers and fathers. Well.
During the second half of the century it became clear that the car was following the usual trajectory of technical innovation from personal liberation to mass serfdom and a renewed drive for freedom in the form of more and better technical means, which engender new problems. Currently dying to be reborn is the transportation industry, where incumbents and new entrants attempt to overcome the obsolescence of the single-owner/user vehicle while battling each other to rule the new era.
James Wilt’s book is meant to counter industry combatants’ efforts to perpetuate the unfreedoms of personal and private automobility, while they also target public transit for elimination. Built around the “three revolutions” of ride-hailing, electrification, and autonomization, these “businesses” – actually money-burning pilot projects – are promoted as offering a return to the lost liberty and mobility of yesteryear. Wilt is not buying it, for many reasons, among them the fact that
. . . fundamentally, the crisis of urban transportation boils down to a spatial argument . . . Private motor vehicles can only transport between 600 to 1600 people per hour. On-street bus lanes can move between 4,000 and 8,000 people. A dedicated light rail or bus rapid transit can serve between 10,000 and 25,000 people per hour – or a full 15 times what motor vehicles can in the best-case scenario.
Wilt begins by describing how the private automobile has come to dominate North American travel choices, and for public transit to be devalued. He explains how poor transit has now become a factor in the disinvestment phase of the gentrification cycle, setting the stage for the reinvestment/displacement phase that follows, usually with the benefit of a shot of public money for new transportation infrastructure. Next he lays out the strategies, and details some of the tactics used by private automobility promoters, before moving on to a comprehensive survey of the key issues: environmental impacts, the climate emergency, income inequality, safety and the allocation of space, the mobility needs of disabled people and the elderly, surveillance, and the particulars of transportation in rural areas.
In each case Wilt works through the specifics of the car-pusher’s claims, then assesses the parallel shortcomings or advantages of mass public transit, and affirms public transit’s potential superiority. This judgment is partly based on his belief that transit can be extensively reshaped and improved by public pressure, through both political processes and direct action.
After a heroic march through the facts collected from forty interviews and enough books and articles to generate sixty pages of end notes, Wilt concludes with a chapter on what it would take to make public transit a truly viable alternative to the car-bound future that Google, Uber, Ford, Tesla and the rest are trying to sell.
The answer of course is deep structural change, requiring public policy brought to bear on many components of the situation at once. But Wilt scants his treatment of land use planning, which is surely the crucial element here, and this reader was left wishing for more discussion of the difficulties of structural change, whether attempted through public policy or the strategies of private capital. The struggle for public transit is highly asymmetrical, as Wilt shows in abundant detail. Except in wartime, when both the state and capital pools come under threat, it is impossible to obtain public policies broad enough or intensive enough to effect structural change. The climate emergency? Nope. It threatens the existence of neither the state nor individual accumulations of capital, and therefore elicits no adequate response. A global pandemic? As of April, it is too soon to tell.
In fact, it may be the case that structural change can occur only indirectly – either as the unintended consequence of technical innovation (as in the music industry from 1995 to 2003, when the successive eruption of MP3 compression, peer-to-peer file sharing, and BitTorrent trackers overwhelmed rights holders), or in response to crises arising abruptly from nature or from the inherent contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. This suggests that our best hope may be sudden self-reinforcing events that can be opportunities for alert minorities to make change. In short, the road to public transit primacy, if there is one, is probably a lot twistier and rockier than Wilt seems to think – or is letting on.
Shawn Selway is the principal of Pragmata Historic Machinery Conservation and the author of Nobody Here Will Harm You, a book about mass medical evacuations from the Eastern Arctic during the sixties of the last century.