In her 1961 masterwork The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs noted that “everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles.” They seem to stretch and rend the fabric of social interaction, which requires a certain intimacy of scale and fluidity of movement. To make way for cars and all that comes with them, such as parking lots, gas stations, and major arteries, “city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot.” Neighborhoods that were once “marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support” are “casually disemboweled.”
The rise of the automobile is closely connected to the transformation of American cities in ways that Jacobs and many others (including myself) regret; this complaint is prominent in the “new urbanism.” But on Jacobs’s account, this connection isn’t entirely a causal one; “we blame automobiles for too much.” She finds a prior cause of the degradation of American cities in urban planning, the kind that seeks to optimize the city according to a plan hatched from on high, without a street-level understanding of what makes a place thrive. She offers a thought experiment in which the automobile had never been invented, but the modernist project is left otherwise undisturbed (think windswept plazas and high-rises, or model suburbs of socially detached, nuclear families). In that case, the automobile would have to be invented. “For people to live and work in such inconvenient cities, automobiles would be necessary to spare them from vacuity, danger and utter institutionalization.”
On Jacobs’s account, the connection between the automobile and the deadening of cities is not a straightforward one, rather it is “one of those jokes that history sometimes plays on progress.” She notes that the rise of the automobile in everyday transportation happened to correspond with a period during which the ideal of the “anti-city” was being worked up in architecture, as a sociological development, legislatively, and in the way cites are financed. She insists that “automobiles are hardly inherent destroyers of cities” and remarks that “the internal combustion engine, as it came on the scene, was potentially an excellent instrument for abetting city intensity, and at the same time for liberating cities from one of their noxious liabilities.”
She means the horse.
Recalling his boyhood in London in 1890, an English architect wrote in 1958 of the three- and four-story stables that dotted the city, like today’s parking garages. The chandeliers of upper-class homes were “encrusted with dead flies and, in late summer, veiled with jiving clouds of them.” Despite the “numerous corps” of boys darting around among wheels and hooves to clean up after the horses, the manure “flooded the streets with churnings of ‘pea soup’ that at times collected in pools over-brimming the kerbs.” Cart wheels would “fling sheets of such soup—where not intercepted by trousers or skirts—completely across the pavement, so that the frontages of the Strand throughout its length had an eighteen-inch plinth of mud-parge thus imposed upon it.” The clean-up crews who manned the “mud-carts,” ladling up the soupy mess, were “clothed as for Icelandic seas in thigh boots, oilskins collared to the chin, and sou’westers sealing in the back of the neck,” routinely splashing pedestrians in the course of their work.
And then there was the noise, “a thing beyond all imaginings” as iron-shoed horse hooves collided with cobble stones and “the deafening, side-drum tattoo” of wheels on these same cobbles, “jarring from the apex of one set to the next like sticks dragging along a fence,” plus “the creaking and groaning and chirping and rattling of vehicles, light and heavy, thus maltreated,” as well as the clanking of harnesses and all such horsey stuff. On top of all this, one had to endure the sound of other human beings trying to communicate over the din, “the shrieking and bellowings called for from those of God’s creatures who desired to impart information or proffer a request vocally.”1
For a given amount of horsepower, an automotive engine is cleaner and quieter, Jacobs points out. Further, “The power of mechanized vehicles, and their greater speed than horses, can make it easier to reconcile great concentrations of people with efficient movement of people and goods.” The problem, of course, is that there are simply too many cars, so they “work slothfully and idle much,” often progressing no faster than a horse.
And there is the rub. The explosion of automobile use in the twentieth century, and resulting congestion, is a complex story that can be told in a number of ways, but clearly it was not a simple consequence of consumer demand for automobiles in a free market. Rather, it was in significant measure a consequence of policy choices by public authorities. The construction of roads for automobiles was massively subsidized, at the expense of public transportation. According to James J. Flink, the public investment in street improvements to accommodate automobile traffic that American cities embarked on in the 1920s “antedated by a generation or more the motorization of the urban working class.” Flink interprets these investment priorities as a transfer of wealth, with working-class streetcar riders in effect being “taxed by city planners and politicians to make possible middle-class automobile use.”2 In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt embraced road building as a jobs program, with an eye also on the utility of highways for national defense (this at a time when Adolf Hitler was constructing his autobahn).3 Progressives embraced automobility as a government project well suited to the exercise of their enthusiasm for state-directed investment, rational planning, and national vigor in the tradition of Herbert Croly’s “New Nationalism,” which greatly influenced FDR. The Works Progress Administration, a key element of the New Deal, provided ten times as much funding for streets and highways as for public transportation.4 But it wasn’t until after the war, during the Eisenhower administration, that construction of the Interstate Highway System began. It was a project of Napoleonic ambition, undertaken in an era when the state enjoyed a level of prestige, credibility, and legitimacy that is hard for us to imagine in 2020. Such legitimacy, surely enhanced by success in war, permitted the use of Napoleonic methods as well. As Dan Albert relates, “Government experts laid out the system’s 41,000 miles of highways . . . . Government planners decided where to put the 1.6 billion metric tons of rock, sand, cement, and asphalt in the system. In the process, they scripted and supervised people’s movements, choosing where they could alight and escape. To do all of this they razed entire districts of homes and shops using eminent domain to condemn and take privately held land.”5
This history offers challenges to both automotive libertarians and anticar progressives. The motorization of America, and all the economic progress and social dynamism that came with it, was not simply an eruption of individual freedom, as expressed through consumer choice. It was to a significant extent an undertaking of the government. But by the same token, the congestion and sprawl that came with our overdependence on the automobile cannot be blamed on a mistaken libertarian faith that “the hidden hand” of the market will bend individual choices toward the collective good. On the contrary, our overdependence on cars was engineered by the state, energized by the same faith in central planning and sincere (if shortsighted) devotion to public felicity that has always been the pride of progressive governance.
These are lessons we do well to keep before us. To make this history pertinent to today’s situation, we need to recognize that initiatives of central planning now often come, not from the state, but from tech companies that aspire to quasi-governmental “platform” status. This fact scrambles certain of our intellectual habits and political reflexes, or ought to. Given how much our daily lives are nudged and steered into channels engineered by tech firms, one can no longer sensibly adopt a conceptual demarcation between “the private sector” and “government.” In this moment of ambiguity about the driverless future, various interests have recognized a brief window of vast opportunity—if they can advance a profitable interpretation of cars, roads, cities, and mobility itself that will come to seem the only reasonable one.
The Volvo Concept 26, a concept car, is named for the number of minutes of the average American commute (in each direction). Its cabin takes on different configurations, rearranging the furniture for a “drive” mode, “create” mode, and “relax” mode. The centrally mounted tablet moves with you as your seat recedes progressively farther from the car’s controls in each mode. The idea is that because you are not burdened with the drudgery of driving, you are freed up to be creative. In case there were any doubt, in the publicity photo we see a man who is obviously a creative: he has flowing, Lord Byron–like hair and holds what appears to be a small leather-bound volume of poetry in his lap, savoring these precious minutes to restore his creative spirit.
More likely, he will spend these minutes irritably sifting through offers of various products and services tailored to his creative lifestyle and to his intended destination, conveyed through the same tablet interface, each of which must be declined before the car will proceed on the route he had in mind initially. Has anyone bothered to ask why the world’s largest advertising firm—for that is what Google is—is making a massive investment in automobiles? By colonizing your commute—currently something you do, an actual activity in the tangible world that demands your attention—with yet another tether to the all-consuming logic of surveillance and profit, those precious fifty-two minutes of your attention are now available to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The patterns of your movements through the world will be made available to those who wish to know you more intimately—for the sake of developing a deep, proprietary science of steering your behavior. Self-driving cars must be understood as one more escalation in the war to claim and monetize every moment of life that might otherwise offer a bit of private head space.
GIVE ME SHELTER
According to the Pew Center, more than two-thirds of Americans sometimes sing in their cars while driving. Behind the wheel, we seem to feel released from social observation—as though we were in the shower! There is a subtler form of release as well, from a pressure that is harder to define. If your commute is going smoothly, it doesn’t take up much of your awareness, leaving you free to daydream or engage in other forms of useless reverie. This type of driving is not very demanding, yet you are absolved of all obligation to be doing something else. How often is that the case? On the weekend, you should be taking care of all those little items of life maintenance, and you could take up one of the festering mandates of self-improvement that hangs over you like a fatwa. In the proliferation of demands you may do nothing at all, but the day is poisoned with antsy avoidance, the “blah” of Sunday afternoon. In a society in which any moment of repose has to be justified against the ruthless logic of “opportunity costs,” commute driving is perhaps the only real Sabbath left to us. Traffic may be slow, but if it is flowing smoothly you are moving forward, and this seems to be enough to calm the time-guilt of modern life. Like the rosary, the near automaticity of this task requires just enough of your peripheral awareness, and bodily intervention, to give you the feeling that you are doing something necessary, and therefore you are left free.
In the voracious logic of today’s capitalism, it is just such moments that must be ferreted out and brought into the system. Consider the boost to GDP if your Sabbath in the car could be turned to productive activity! You should be answering emails, shopping, or plugging yourself into entertainments that will keep your imagination well integrated with the hive.
My point is that we may experience our car as a humanizing space, a space of shelter, despite the many frustrations of driving. (We will consider these frustrations at length in the chapter “Road Rage, Other Minds, and the Traffic Community.”) Pew conducted a survey of Americans’ attitudes toward the automobile in 2006. Attitudes have likely shifted in the meantime. But with that caveat, a few of the findings are worth quoting here:
When asked whether they like to drive or consider it a chore, 69% of drivers in the survey said the former, while 28% said the latter . . . .
Despite the growing hassles of traffic, many drivers have strong feelings of intimacy toward their cars—31%, for example, say they think of their car as having a personality. And despite the high price of gas, more than a quarter (27%) say they went driving “just for the fun of it” in the past week . . . .
Men and women are about equally likely to have done some driving just for the fun of it.6
THE FUTURISM BUSINESS
Driverless cars are going to happen in a big way, we are told, because it has been decided—by something called “the future.” It has become clear that the effort to develop driverless cars is not a response to consumer demand, but a top-down project that has to be sold to the public.7 There is nothing especially new about that; for a hundred years, the science of marketing has been in the business of creating new needs. And in this case the propaganda program rests on some claims that are plausible enough—about enhanced safety and a reduction in congestion. But the crucial element in getting the public on board with driverless cars has been the assertion of inevitability. This assertion can be made self-fulfilling through sheer dint of repetition, if one has sufficient control over the Narrative.
But it is just here, in the realm of narrative tending, that the push for driverless cars has turned out to be ill timed, as it happens to coincide with a slow-motion collapse of the public’s trust in Big Tech to serve as steward of our interests, and shepherd of the Future. Futurism is a genre of mythmaking that seeks to generate a feeling of inevitability around some desired outcome, a picture that is offered as though it were a prediction. This is a good way to attract investment. And reciprocally, the flow of investment dollars is a good way to attract public speechifiers (journalists, “thought leaders,” etc.) who will lend their voices to the chorus of inevitability. One must accept the future rather than “cling to the past” (which often means simply accepting the present—what presently exists—as perfectly adequate). Do you prefer to wallow in the comforting self-delusions of “nostalgia”?
We should notice that while driverless cars hold real potential to ease congestion, and thereby contribute to the common good, there has been no talk of treating as a public utility the infrastructure that will make driverless cars possible, nor of making their programming available for inspection. What is being proposed, as near as one can make it out through the fog of promotional language, is an “urban operating system” of mobility that would be owned by a cartel of IT companies, participation in which would not be optional in any meaningful sense.
The denizens of Silicon Valley are famously libertarian, according to their own self-understanding. But the “person” whose liberty they feel must be asserted against the state is that of the corporation. In December 2016, Uber defied administrative rulings by the California DMV, keeping its self-driving cars on the streets of San Francisco despite their registrations being revoked. The New York Times reports that “Uber has tended to barrel into new markets by flouting local laws, part of a combative approach to expand globally.” It does so “not only in the United States, but in many of the more than 70 countries in which the company operates.”8 In the mentality of corporate libertarianism, there is no concept of legitimate public authority as that which secures the interests of citizens against the power of monopoly capital.
The columnist John Harris asks, “If unprecedentedly cheap [driverless] taxi rides become the norm, what will be the fate of buses and trains? Won’t all those fleets of cars cause unbelievable congestion?”9 It is a reasonable question to ask.
According to Bruce Scaller, former deputy traffic commissioner at New York City’s Transportation Department, during the Uberization of the city between June 2013 and June 2017:
The number of taxi and for-hire vehicles increased by 59 percent, but the number of unoccupied vehicles increased by 81 percent, with each for-hire driver waiting 11 minutes between fares. During the afternoon rush, between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., 10,000 for-hire vehicles are trawling Manhattan. Taxis and other for-hire cars now account for more than half of daytime traffic on major avenues.
The conclusion: The only way Uber and its competitors can make each trip so convenient for its passengers is to flood the streets with empty cars. You may not wait standing on the street for a cab, but now you wait on the street in a black car, behind all of those other black cars.10
Of course, these rides will remain cheap only until the buses and trains disappear. Then the laws of monopoly pricing will take effect. That would appear to be the plan.11 And in fact municipal financing for public transportation has declined sharply; mass transit ridership is down, and its infrastructure is crumbling in many cities. Meanwhile, Uber continues to lose billions of dollars every year ($14 billion between 2014 and 2018).
If one allows oneself to become curious about this last fact, the story of Uber becomes quite interesting. In 2019, the transportation industry consultant Hubert Horan published a study of Uber’s economics and concluded that the firm has no hope of ever turning a profit. It “not only lacks powerful competitive advantages, but it is actually less efficient than the competitors it has been driving out of business.”12 It turns out, on closer inspection, that Uber never intended to turn a profit from driving people around in a competitive market. By having earlier investors massively subsidize rides through low fares, the firm aimed for “growth at all costs,” knowing that there are segments of the investment world that regard explosive growth as “the only important determinant of how start-up companies should be valued.” Once the firm went public, its business model was essentially that of a Ponzi scheme, made possible by diverting attention from the massive fare subsidies (supplied by investors) responsible for its growth. Horan writes that Uber is indeed an innovative company. But its innovation has little to do with “tech” or with finding efficiencies that had previously eluded the taxi industry. Rather, “Uber is the breakthrough case where the public perception of a large new company was entirely created using the types of manufactured narratives typically employed in partisan political campaigns. Narrative construction is perhaps Uber’s greatest competitive strength.” This narrative pitted heroic innovators versus corrupt regulators in the grip of outmoded ideas. (Let us take note of why taxis need to be regulated. As part of a city’s transportation infrastructure, they provide a public good that is difficult to realize on a pure market basis, as some of the benefits are “external” to the pairwise transaction between rider and driver.)13
The business and tech press was well snowed by Uber’s PR, according to which it was fighting on behalf of technological progress and economic freedom. The firm’s actual economics went unexamined. Uber did everything it could to signal that “its eventual marketplace dominance was inevitable, that competitive or regulatory resistance was futile, and that journalistic probing was pointless.” Meanwhile, its multi-billion-dollar fare subsidies “completely distorted marketplace price and service signals, leading to a massive misallocation of resources.”
One effect of such misallocation is city streets clogged with empty ride-share vehicles, which of course is the very condition that makes it possible to “press a button, get a car” almost instantly. This seems like magic, and we can only marvel at what technology might deliver next. In light of Horan’s analysis, one has to wonder: is Uber’s conspicuous interest in driverless cars really driven by a hope to replace low-wage drivers with autonomous vehicles? Why transfer the capital costs of Uber cars from immigrants who are often financially unsavvy, and get locked into ruthless auto-lease agreements, to the firm itself? One suspects, rather, that noisily associating with driverless cars helps to preserve Uber’s image as a “tech” company, rather than as an especially aggressive practitioner of labor and financial arbitrage.14 Beneath the cutting-edge hocus-pocus, Uber’s “driver-partners” appear to have entered a sharecropper economy from which it is difficult to exit.
Our task in this chapter was to survey some of the less-publicized business dynamics and public interests that we ought to keep in view at this moment, when our basic regime of mobility is up for grabs more than it has been since the dawn of the automobile a century ago. The next chapter takes a more intimate turn, and relates an experience of breaking down on the highway in the dead of night. It is a story of being ejected, unprepared, into the landscape and into the company of strangers, and having to rely on one’s wits. No phone, no GPS.
No flashlight.