Road to Nowhere
Road to Nowhere
What Silicon Valley Gets
Wrong about the Future
of Transportation
Paris Marx
First published by Verso 2022
Paris Marx, 2022
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-588-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-591-9 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-590-2 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Jacques and Christina
Contents
I have seen the future.
From April 30, 1939, to October 27, 1940, five million people walked through the doors of General Motors Futurama exhibition at the New York Worlds Fair. As they left, they were each given a pin inscribed with those five wordsand they believed it.
Coming out of the depths of the Great Depression, people had lost their hope for the future. Poverty was a widespread reality, and there was no time to think about grandiose visions of a transformed society when every day was a struggle just to put food on the table. The Worlds Fair, and in particular the Futurama, was an attempt to change that.
When guests entered the General Motors pavilion, they entered the world of 1960one of wealth and opportunity beyond many of their imaginations. It was a world where wide expressways ran through cities peppered with tall skyscrapers and surrounded by vast parks. Slums had been leveled to make way for the future, and pedestrians used new elevated walkways that allowed them to get around without slowing the flow of vehicle traffic.
The expressways extended out from gleaming cities into the vast suburban expanses of single-family homes filled with all manner of new consumer goods and appliances that families would enjoy in 1960. As these new neighborhoods continued into the rural fringes, one discovered an agricultural landscape transformed by mechanization and the application of new scientific techniquesand the entire trip could be made without manually steering at all, as ones vehicle was guided by radio control signals embedded in the highways.
It is no surprise that people were awed by the world on display. But who did this vision of the future actually serve? General Motors and the other companies at the Worlds Fair did not go and ask the people of the United States what kind of lives they wanted to lead. Instead, what was dreamed up internally served a different set of goalsone they successfully sold to the public through their grand exhibitions.
Industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes was behind the General Motors pavilion, but many of its key details came from a project he had developed several years earlier: the Shell Oil City of Tomorrow, which was also an auto-oriented vision of the future with wide urban expressways and tall skyscrapers. After the Worlds Fair, Geddes was sought out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to advise his administration on transportation policy and on the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, effectively ensuring aspects of his planthe same one he had been paid by oil and automotive companies to developbecame public policy.
While the Worlds Fair had plenty of companies showing off new technologies, what ultimately drove the remaking of society along the lines imagined by those corporate interests was not the simple fact that those new inventions existed. Rather, the convergence of the public and private sectors around a plan for a vast transportation infrastructure for automobiles enabled a new way of life that generated economic expansion and large corporate profits.
When we look back at the Futurama, it is wrong to say that the exhibition, or Bel Geddes himself, correctly predicted a lot of what was to come. The suburban, auto-oriented future offered market opportunities for automotive companies, property developers, and consumer goods manufacturersto name just a few. Their combined influence, paired with a brilliant marketing campaign, was enough to get political leaders to respond to their demands and direct significant resources into realizing their vision of the future. The corporations didnt predict a car-centric, consumerist futurethey made it a reality.
But that vision, designed to give US consumersor at least some of themhope for the future, conveniently ignored the drawbacks. Highways tore through cities, displacing poor and often Black communities. Wider roads accommodated more vehicles, but the promised pedestrian infrastructure never materialized. Skyscrapers were erected in cities, but the green space was paved so people could park their vehicles. The use of cars exploded, but the radio signals to guide them without human drivers never made it beyond a few pilot programs.
More than eighty years later, we can see the folly in the grand plan laid out in the Futurama. We built communities that are located far from workplaces, retail centers, and key services, which often require people to drive long distances. For many residents, suburban neighborhoods are not idyllic communities, but places that breed loneliness as they are cut off from others.
Our dependence on automobiles causes us to waste long periods of time in traffic, which also brings the risk of a whole host of adverse health conditions. All those vehicles, the inefficient nature of suburban living, and the mass consumption of goods have significantly contributed to the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten the future of every being on the planet. And as we quickly cycled through low-quality goods, we also littered the lands and oceans with our trash. But it is not just the environment that has been affected.
The death toll of the automobile is astronomical. In the United States alone, 3.7 million people have been killed by motor vehicles since 1899. That does not count the millions more who were injured, or all the people who died prematurely from air pollution spewing from tailpipes; nor all those who continue to die every day in cities and towns around the world because they are hit by a motor vehicle. Those details conveniently never made it into the Futurama. They would have spoiled the fantasy.
As the current climate crisis escalates and the contradictions of our real transportation system become too great to continue ignoring, there are growing calls for change. People are demanding better public transit, more infrastructure for bicycles, and communities that have the services they rely on within walking distance. But the distribution of power within the economy has shifted, and in the past several decades new industries have accumulated the powerand the capitalto unleash their own grand visions for the future. The modern tech industry is chief among them.
After restructuring how we communicate with one another, entertain ourselves, buy consumer goods, and far more, the companies that have prospered as the internet expanded to every corner of the globe are now setting their sights on the physical environment, with a particular focus on the transportation system. While they are called technology companies, what they mean by tech is a very narrow understanding of the concept. It refers only to the so-called high-tech industries that are on the cutting edge of technological development, seen most often in the digitization and automation of even more aspects of social and economic life.
