Chapter 4
Greenwashing the Electric Vehicle
Electric vehicles have been positioned as the climate-friendly alternative to traditional automobiles, but this narrative ignores crucial environmental and social realities. The electric vehicle was actually a competitor to internal combustion engines in the early 1900s, with organizations like the Electric Vehicle and Central Station Association forming in 1909. However, they failed to effectively partner with vehicle makers before Henry Ford's gas-powered Model T made combustion engines more affordable.
Despite being quieter, smoother, and easier to start, electric vehicles couldn't compete with internal combustion engines, which were perceived as more masculine due to their speed, gear-shifting, and maintenance requirements. Electric vehicles nearly disappeared by the 1920s, only surviving in commercial trucking.
Environmental concerns in the 1960s and the 1973 oil shock prompted renewed interest in electric vehicles. However, it wasn't until the 1990s that major automakers gave them serious attention. Environmental documentaries like "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Who Killed the Electric Car?" promoted individual consumption choices like buying electric vehicles as climate solutions, while shifting responsibility away from governments and corporations.
These narratives ignore that electric vehicles only appear "green" by focusing narrowly on tailpipe emissions while ignoring supply chain harms. In 2019, Tesla, Apple, Google, Dell, and Microsoft faced a lawsuit from families in the Democratic Republic of Congo for allegedly enabling child labor in cobalt mines. Cobalt mining in the DRC causes severe environmental contamination and exploits approximately 40,000 children under fifteen.
Electric vehicle batteries require numerous minerals including aluminum, copper, manganese, rare earth elements, cobalt, lithium, nickel, and graphite. Demand could increase over 4,000% by 2040, potentially exceeding existing reserves. With minimal recycling of these materials-less than a few percent of lithium is currently recycled-extraction pressures will intensify.
The shift to a "green" economy risks perpetuating neocolonial relationships between the Global North and South through increased mineral extraction. Companies are making sustainability promises, but political scientist Thea Riofrancos argues these are primarily greenwashing efforts to appease environmentally conscious consumers while capitalizing on the unprecedented opportunity to convert the global automobile fleet to battery power.
Norway leads in electric vehicle adoption because of comprehensive government incentives, but these benefits disproportionately go to relatively well-off people. In America, the federal tax credit benefits early adopters-typically wealthy consumers. Larger electric vehicles like Tesla's Cybertruck require bigger batteries and more extracted materials, while still producing harmful particulate matter from tire wear and road dust. One Nordic expert noted that subsidies for a single Tesla Model X owner in 2016 could have provided 30,000 trips on Oslo's public transit system.
Chapter 5
Uber's Assault on Cities and Labor
In 1914, as electric vehicles declined and internal combustion engines grew in popularity, a new transportation option emerged during an economic recession: jitneys. These were primarily used Ford Model Ts that operated flexible routes with variable fares. Despite appearances of entrepreneurial innovation, few drivers actually made profits due to vehicle costs, depreciation, and maintenance.
In a 2016 TED talk, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick reframed the jitney story to position Uber as the modern solution to a missed historical opportunity. He claimed jitneys were an innovative service destroyed by "the trolley guys, the existing transportation monopoly," suggesting regulation killed a shared mobility future in favor of personal vehicle ownership. This narrative deliberately omitted jitneys' downsides: exploitation of precarious labor, traffic accidents, and lost tax revenue.
Uber executives portrayed taxi regulations as cronyism designed to benefit monopolists, but this narrative ignored why those regulations were established. During the Great Depression, unemployed workers flooded into taxi driving, nearly doubling the number of taxis from 84,000 to 150,000 by 1932. This oversupply created serious problems: increased congestion, "rate wars" that slashed prices, and plummeting driver incomes. By the late 1930s, local governments intervened by capping taxi numbers, regulating fares, and mandating safety standards.
Despite promises of reduced congestion, research shows Uber has dramatically worsened traffic. In San Francisco, traffic congestion increased 62% between 2010-2016, with ride-hailing identified as "the biggest factor." Each mile of personal vehicle travel replaced by ride-hailing requires 2.8 miles of driving for private rides. Studies in Boston found 54% of ride-hailing trips would otherwise have been made by transit, cycling, or walking.
Ride-hailing services have undermined public transit by causing buses to get stuck in increased traffic and drawing riders away from transit systems. Studies of 22 US cities showed that each year Uber or Lyft operated, bus and heavy rail ridership declined. This modal shift increases environmental impact, with Uber trips creating 69% more pollution when accounting for trips that would have used more efficient modes.
Ride-hailing companies successfully disrupted the taxi industry by classifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees. Until the 1970s, taxi drivers were typically unionized employees with health insurance and benefits, but companies gradually shifted to a leasing model where drivers became contractors. When Uber launched, it evaded these remaining protections by claiming to merely facilitate relationships through an app while offloading all costs and risks to drivers.
Taxi drivers suffered catastrophic financial consequences when ride-hailing companies entered their markets. Many had taken on enormous debts to purchase medallions. When Uber and Lyft arrived, drivers couldn't compete with artificially subsidized fares while still servicing these debts. In 2018 alone, eight drivers in New York City committed suicide, including Douglas Schifter, who described his profession as "the new slavery" where executives "get their bonuses" while drivers were "becoming homeless and hungry."
Uber's growth strategy mimicked Amazon's approach of prioritizing expansion over immediate profits, but without Amazon's crucial advantage: economies of scale. While Amazon could reduce costs as it grew through more efficient logistics, Uber couldn't replicate these savings because 85% of urban car service costs come from drivers, vehicles, and fuel-expenses that don't decrease with scale. This explains its persistent massive losses-$6.77 billion in 2020.
When facing regulatory threats at the local level, Uber deployed massive lobbying operations targeting state lawmakers to override local laws with more permissive state-wide regulations. The company even developed technological tools like "Greyball" to actively evade enforcement, showing authorities a fake interface with phantom cars to continue operating illegally in places like Portland, Oregon even after being banned.
Chapter 6
Self-Driving Cars Did Not Deliver
Google's entry into transportation technology through its experimental Google X division represented Silicon Valley's ambition to revolutionize mobility through autonomous vehicles. In 2012, Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined California Governor Jerry Brown to sign legislation accelerating self-driving car testing, confidently predicting these vehicles would be far safer than human drivers while reducing congestion, improving efficiency, and better serving transportation-disadvantaged populations.
Sergey Brin confidently predicted in 2012 that ordinary people would experience self-driving cars "within five years." By 2014, the autonomous vehicle hype accelerated. Elon Musk began developing Tesla's Autopilot system, traditional automakers like Toyota and Nissan joined the race, and Uber's Travis Kalanick revealed plans to eventually replace human drivers, telling Kara Swisher that "the reason Uber could be expensive is you're paying for the other dude in the car."
At the 2014 Code Conference, Brin unveiled the "Firefly" prototype-a pod-like vehicle without steering wheel or pedals. The tech media played a crucial role legitimizing these visions, with conference co-founder Kara Swisher appearing in a promotional video calling the Firefly "delightful" and "conceptually where things are going."
By mid-2010s, Silicon Valley and major automakers had convinced much of the media and public that ubiquitous autonomous vehicles were just years away. Yet this wasn't the first time such promises had been made. In the 1920s and 1930s, "phantom autos" amazed audiences across America. General Motors' Futurama exhibition at the 1939 World's Fair featured automated highways with radio-controlled vehicles supposedly arriving by 1960.
The pursuit of autonomous vehicles continued through the decades with various technological approaches. In the 1950s, RCA tested "electronic chauffeurs" using wires buried in pavement to guide vehicles. By 1977, Japan's Tsukuba Mechanical created a vehicle using cameras to detect street markings at 20 mph, while German engineer Ernst Dickmanns demonstrated VaMoRs in the 1980s, using cameras and microprocessors to achieve 60 mph on the Autobahn.
Military funding continued into the 2000s, with DARPA organizing a series of autonomous vehicle challenges offering substantial monetary prizes. These challenges coincided with Silicon Valley's explosive growth, attracting tech giants looking to expand beyond their core businesses.
By 2009, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page approved a driverless car project led by Sebastian Thrun, with Anthony Levandowski handling hardware. Problems emerged immediately. Levandowski embodied the "move fast and break things" mentality, prioritizing market speed over safety. In 2011, he disabled safety protocols limiting vehicles to pre-approved routes. During a demonstration ride, Levandowski's autonomous Prius encountered a merging Toyota Camry. The software failed to yield, forcing the Camry onto the shoulder, where it "pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median."
Rather than showing contrition, Levandowski circulated video of the incident as "an invaluable source of data." Former Google executives later revealed over a dozen crashes in the project's early years, with at least three being serious-information that remained hidden while Brin publicly touted the vehicles' safety.
The autonomous vehicle vision requires more than just technological advancement-it demands a fundamental reshaping of streets and social norms, much like the automobile did a century ago. As autonomous vehicle timelines repeatedly failed, industry insiders began admitting that pedestrian behavior would need modification to accommodate these vehicles. The New York Times reported fears that "if pedestrians know they'll never be run over, jaywalking could explode, grinding traffic to a halt."
On March 18, 2018, the autonomous vehicle hype bubble burst when an Uber self-driving car struck and killed 44-year-old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. The autonomous driving system failed catastrophically-cycling between classifying her as a vehicle, bicycle, or unknown object-and included a one-second delay before taking evasive action. The crash occurred in an area hostile to pedestrians-designed at automobile scale with long distances, unprotected bike lanes, and confusing pedestrian infrastructure.
Chapter 7
Making New Roads for Cars
At the turn of the millennium, Houston poured nearly $3 billion into expanding the congested Katy Freeway from eight lanes to twenty-three. Despite becoming one of the world's widest highways, the benefits didn't materialize-within a few years, 85 percent of commuters had longer travel times. Similarly, Los Angeles spent $1.6 billion adding a carpool lane to Interstate 405, only to see travel times increase by 50 percent between 2015 and 2019.
In 2011, economists Duranton and Turner published research showing a causal relationship between new roads and increased driving-what they called "the fundamental law of road congestion." When cities increase highway or road capacity, driving increases proportionally on highways and slightly less on major urban roads. This "induced demand" means new roads incentivize more driving and longer commutes, perpetuating a cycle where traffic problems worsen despite expansion.
Traffic frustrates wealthy tech executives who feel their valuable time is being wasted. Yet as Jarrett Walker observes, they typically aren't transport experts and believe narrowly focused ideas serving their exclusive interests can scale for everyone. Unwilling to give up private, enclosed transportation to sit alongside "plebs" on public transit, their attachment to automobiles constrains their proposed solutions and dooms them to failure from the outset.
On December 17, 2016, a traffic-frustrated Elon Musk tweeted about building tunnel boring machines to solve traffic. By 2017, he was constructing a test tunnel in Hawthorne, initially claiming he'd build 10-30 layers of tunnels beneath Los Angeles. Musk framed the problem as cities having "3D buildings with 2D roads," while dismissing public transit as "a pain in the ass" where "there's like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer."
When unveiled in December 2018, the test tunnel reached only 53mph and felt "like riding on a dirt road." The car "skates" originally promised disappeared, replaced by Tesla vehicles with guide wheels-technology critics noted was similar to century-old rollercoaster designs. Most Boring Company projects failed to materialize, but Las Vegas built a disappointing 1.7-mile convention center tunnel where human-driven Teslas reached just 35mph-far from the autonomous high-speed system promised.
The dream of flying cars dates back to at least 1924, when Popular Science predicted they'd arrive within twenty years. In 2016, Uber launched its Elevate division with a white paper outlining plans for "Uber Air" by 2023. Echoing Musk's tunnel rhetoric, Uber executives claimed cities needed "three-dimensional" transportation, ignoring existing subway systems. Their promotional materials revealed the service would primarily benefit wealthy commuters escaping traffic congestion that Uber itself had worsened.
When Uber launched "Uber Copter" between Manhattan and JFK Airport in 2019 as a precursor, journalists found it saved just 14 minutes compared to transit while costing $213 more. By December 2020, Uber's flying car vision collapsed, with the company paying another firm to take Uber Elevate off its hands. Like the Boring Company's tunnels, these "solutions" merely offered wealthy people ways to opt out of problems affecting everyone else.
Chapter 8
The Coming Fight for the Sidewalk
Before automobiles transformed urban mobility, the bicycle sparked its own transportation revolution. In 1885, John Kemp Starley invented the Rover safety bicycle with similarly sized wheels, which became vastly more popular when fitted with pneumatic tires. The 1890s bicycle boom challenged social norms as prices dropped, making bicycles accessible to middle and working classes. Young people gained independence, but women particularly benefited from newfound mobility freedom. Susan B. Anthony declared in 1896 that "bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."
On March 28, 2018, San Franciscans woke to find Bird's electric scooters scattered across their sidewalks without warning or city permission. Initially described as fun "electrified versions of the kind little kids ride," public sentiment quickly soured. Within days, local papers reported scooters had "descended" and "invaded" sidewalks, creating hazards for pedestrians and wheelchair users.
After enduring Uber's disruption, tech-driven gentrification, and countless startup experiments, San Francisco residents recognized these micromobility companies weren't simply offering a new service-they were claiming scarce public space. Their opposition wasn't merely resistance to change but a fight against powerful corporate interests appropriating the little pedestrian space that remained after automobiles had claimed the streets.
Jump's transformation under Uber ownership illustrates Silicon Valley's problematic approach to urban mobility. Founded in 2010 as Social Bicycles (SoBi), the company initially partnered with city governments on carefully planned bikeshare systems. After Uber acquired Jump, this careful approach was abandoned for aggressive expansion. When Uber replaced Jump's sturdy locks with flimsy cables, theft soared. Parts shortages left bikes unrepaired, and the operation hemorrhaged $60 million quarterly until Uber offloaded it to Lime in May 2020.
Micromobility's venture capital-backed model quickly revealed fundamental flaws. In Louisville, Bird's scooters lasted an average of just 28.8 days before requiring replacement. Despite sustainability claims, researchers at North Carolina State University found dockless e-scooters produced 65 percent higher emissions than the transportation they replaced.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed micromobility's limitations. While cities built record numbers of bike lanes and bicycle ownership surged worldwide, micromobility services were pulled from streets. People recognized that owning their own bicycle or e-bike made more economic and environmental sense than paying for expensive rentals.
As micromobility companies fought for sidewalk space, delivery robot startups like Starship Technologies and Marble began claiming these public pathways as business infrastructure. Starship's co-founder brazenly described sidewalks as "barely used" infrastructure, while their spokesperson envisioned "thousands and thousands of robots" on sidewalks worldwide.
These robots created accessibility nightmares. Emily Ackerman, a wheelchair user, found herself stranded in traffic when a Starship robot blocked her curb cut. Haben Girma, a deaf-blind person, encountered a robot that confused her guide dog and blocked her path. Despite claiming to help disabled people, Starship's app wasn't even compatible with iPhone's VoiceOver screen reader.
By 2021, Pennsylvania joined other states in classifying delivery robots as "pedestrians," allowing them to weigh 550 pounds and travel at 12 mph on sidewalks-much faster than actual pedestrians. The legislation prevented local governments from setting stricter regulations, repeating the pattern seen with ride-hailing services.
Chapter 9
Toward a Better Transport Future
The 1973 oil embargo caused soaring prices and limited supplies, leading to significant changes in how Americans used automobiles. This presented a rare opportunity for the United States to rethink energy use and community planning. President Carter installed solar panels on the White House and invested in renewable energy. But rather than learning from these changes, US corporate interests doubled down on automobiles and fossil fuels.
Europe took a different path. When automobile adoption increased in Europe, so did road deaths. In the Netherlands, 3,300 people were killed annually by cars by 1971, including 400 children. Groups like "Stop de Kindermoord" (Stop the Child Murder) formed to oppose car-centric development. After the oil crisis, the Dutch government promoted energy conservation, even implementing car-free Sundays. By the 1980s, Dutch cities were promoting bicycle use with dedicated lanes and street redesigns to reduce vehicle speeds.
Ursula K. Le Guin criticized how common narratives focus on masculine heroes with "sticks and spears and swords" while ignoring the essential feminine role of the carer or gatherer with her carrier bag. She advocated for a broader definition of technology as "the active human interface with the material world"-how societies cook food, clothe themselves, build structures, and power their activities. This expansive conception allows us to embrace mundane but proven technologies like bicycles, buses, and trains that can improve lives more equitably than the elite visions offered by tech industry "visionaries."
After 2015 elections in Oslo, a left-wing coalition government aimed to reduce emissions by banning private vehicles from the city center. Despite fierce opposition, they removed all 650 on-street parking spaces, replacing them with cycle lanes, bike parking, seating areas, play spaces, and social areas. Similarly, in 2016, Paris pedestrianized a highway along the Seine that carried 43,000 vehicles daily. This was part of a larger transformation that began under Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoe in 2001, who rejected congestion pricing in favor of physical changes: shifting road space to buses, bikes, and sidewalks; introducing bikeshare; giving buses dedicated lanes; and cutting automobile use by 20%.
Building better cities requires challenging Silicon Valley's technological visions while opposing capitalist control of urban infrastructure. Modern corporate culture has become parasitic, worsening as digital rentier services expand into more aspects of our lives. We must take housing, transport, and other essential services out of the market altogether, running them as democratically accountable public services.
Cities must halt transportation marketization and commodification, including congestion pricing. Instead, they should focus on altering physical environments and providing services that encourage shifts from driving to public transit, cycling, or walking. This requires significantly improving transit services, effectively redirecting massive automobile subsidies toward collective mobility and building dense communities around it.
Residents must participate in transit planning to ensure changes address their needs. Service must become more frequent and extend to underserved neighborhoods. Transit must be recast from a backstop for marginalized groups to the center of urban transportation. Agencies need proper shelters, truly accessible stations, and fare-free service to ensure equitable access.
The comprehensive public transportation system I envision requires the state to take an active role in planning and operation, prioritizing people's mobility rights over corporate profits. Just as governments created agencies, provided subsidies, rewrote tax codes, changed laws, and spent trillions on infrastructure for automobility, a similar commitment is needed to reorient our transportation system away from cars.
Technology's role should be to empower workers and facilitate collective solutions to social problems, not replace workers or make their lives more precarious. This means changing how data is produced and governed while reversing the transfer of power from workers to algorithms. We must avoid Tim Maughan's scenario where complex algorithmic systems effectively remove human control from supply chains and financial markets. Instead, we should use technology where it serves us while ensuring power remains with a democratic public.
While the state's role in coordinating this future is essential, it won't act without an organized public wielding collective power to demand change. We already see this worldwide: transit activists fighting for fare-free transit and better service, housing activists opposing gentrification and demanding public housing, and climate activists imagining equitable, sustainable futures through movements like the Green New Deal, Extinction Rebellion, and School Strike for Climate.
Chapter 10
The Real Futures That Tech Is Building
On October 17, 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt announced that Sidewalk Labs, a Google sister company, would build a city "from the internet up" on Toronto's waterfront. Trudeau promised "smarter, greener, more inclusive cities" by using technology for public good, revealing they'd been discussing the project for years-raising questions about the public tendering process's impartiality.
The promised consultation process proved to be merely a sales pitch. Within a year, high-profile resignations began, including Saadia Muzaffar of TechGirls Canada from Waterfront Toronto's advisory board, who criticized the lack of proper public meetings and protection of public interest. Ontario's former privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian also resigned over concerns about data collection practices.
Despite being pitched as benefiting Toronto residents, Sidewalk Labs planned to integrate its technologies into the city's infrastructure, making government and residents dependent on them permanently. Their vision document revealed plans to control urban systems through a "digital layer" interfacing with public services and community spaces-controlled by the company, not local government.
In February 2019, citizens launched Block Sidewalk, demanding the project be halted after leaked documents revealed Sidewalk wanted to control a larger waterfront area. Bianca Wylie, dubbed "Jane Jacobs of the smart city," called the process "thoroughly anti-democratic" for prioritizing corporate vision over resident needs.
On May 7, 2020, Sidewalk Labs finally canceled the project. Toronto's victory paralleled similar resistance elsewhere: Apple canceled prominent stores in Stockholm and Melbourne after public opposition, Google abandoned a Berlin campus over gentrification concerns, and Amazon withdrew plans for a New York headquarters following outrage over $3 billion in subsidies.
During the pandemic's first wave, cities worldwide experienced different urban possibilities-streets opened for walking and cycling, outdoor dining flourished, bicycle demand surged, and air pollution plummeted. Some cities maintained these changes while others rushed to restore car dominance.
Throughout the twentieth century, cities were reconstructed to facilitate economic expansion through car dependency, suburbanization, and mass consumption. Today's efforts to track urban activity, replace humans with AI, and mediate experiences through apps serve the same profit motive but for tech companies. We need cities built for residents that improve quality of life rather than implementing billionaires' gimmicks. Technology should serve the public, not shape lives to increase corporate power and profits.
Building better cities ultimately requires challenging capitalism's structures that prioritize profit over people. We can create transportation systems that empower communities, facilitate social connections, and reduce environmental impact-but only by altering social and economic relations to ensure planning serves community needs rather than financial returns.
