Paris Marx targets the gnarled roots of our broken transportation infrastructure

Paris Marx is a technology writer. They’ve written for TIME magazine, WIRED, CBC News, Jacobin, and OneZero. They speak internationally on the future of transportation. They also host the award-winning podcast 'Tech Won't Save Us,' which offers a much-needed critical perspective on the history and future implications of Big Tech. Their book, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, was published by Verso Books in 2022. Our conversation mainly focuses on Road to Nowhere, why they wrote it in such an accessible way, the politics of communication in the context of a climate emergency, and what it says that we’re largely programmed to assume that technology—even technology that is produced for a profit by private multinational corporations—will save us. Paris’ book has a lot of answers, but doesn’t answer all the questions. I kinda push them to speak to some of the most problematic issues around public engagement and political mobilization. One of the really useful things about their approach is that it’s rooted in a sense that history is helpful if we look critically at the things we’ve been told are true about our car-centric infrastructure, and compare it with what a rigorous look at that history reveals. The history they offer is startling, in the sense that it shows a number of branching paths where our infrastructure could have looked very different if it wasn’t for powerful sites of capitalist production impinging on policy making in profound ways. There have been moments where massive amounts of public money was spent making a world that doesn’t work. We need to move in a radically different direction. There are nearly 1.5 billion vehicles on the planet. According to Marx, replacing them with more vehicles, this time around powered by batteries, is not a viable strategy. I ask them if we need to leverage the desire for disruptive change. What Paris says is really appealing to me: that “people are much more open to change than we give them credit for;” we are “incentivized to want to keep things as they are,” despite the dire ecological consequences, because the economic consequences of change are made so punitive. For this reason, “in the face of the climate crisis,” Paris points out that we have to push ourselves to understand the intertwined nature of “many seemingly separate struggles, over mobility, housing, health, community, and many others.” So, while the rate of vehicle collisions or pedestrian deaths might feel ordinary now, that doesn’t mean it has to be met with passive acceptance. What if we let it radicalize us again? Here in Halifax, we saw that process happen. A local activist named Steve MacKay organized a protest against political inaction and it was successful in getting traffic calming put on Robie Street. The data shows that vehicular deaths disproportionately occur in poor neighborhoods, and not enough is being done. If part of the problem is just acceptance, the answer might be refusal. Refusing to accept this absurd reality where, as Marx says in their book, “an estimated 1.3 million people are killed [globally] every year in road traffic crashes… more than 3,500 people every single day.” What would it mean to refuse that reality?