When the full name of the book is Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, the subtitle gives the inquisitive reader a good idea of what they’re in for: a tearing down of how silicon valley has arrogantly muscled their way into the transportation industry, often for the worse. Instead of a bright future with cheap and efficient and democratized transportation options, we got overpriced Ubers, underwhelming “self-driving” cars that still crash and take lives, and electric scooters that no one asked for haphazardly scattered on city sidewalks.
Yeah, the track record for a tech disruption in transportation in the 2010s had many lowlights.
My problem with Road to Nowhere, though, is that it’s really a book arguing against the automobile as the primary means of transportation and that it has shaped urban planning for the past 100 years negatively. The Silicon Valley part isn’t so much a bunch of tech bros corrupting transportation systems, but more that they’re amplifying the unequal tradeoffs made in promoting cars up to this point. That is, what the author wants are fewer roads and fewer cars, and Silicon Valley is a convenient punching bag in the current anti-tech zeitgeist. In a book that’s ostensibly about how Silicon Valley gets transportation wrong, it can’t help but throw in some jobs at AirBnb and WeWork, cause of course they can be lumped in with the rest of the bad actors in the space.
It’s puzzling because there is plenty of bad behaviors to chronicle in the past decade about how tech has tried its hand at improving how we move about. Uber famously fought city governments and engaged in all sorts of shady behaviors in its bid to expand 10 cities at a time; Tesla has overhyped and underdelivered on its Autopilot self-driving system for the better part of a decade; Bird and Lime dumped scooters into cities without permission, blocked sidewalks and polluted rivers. Plus, it turns out that many of these businesses—initially heavily subsidized by VC money—have been struggling to make real profits even as interest rates are rising. The book devotes its middle chapters to describing what happened with a critical lens; if it just did that, it’d be a cohesive albeit shorter work to summarize the wrongdoings of tech × transport.
But the author wants to nail the tech industry, so they start by outlining its history of libertarian ideals, and how it tends to build products for rich white dudes while underserving the less privileged. They helpfully define NIMBY1, en route to pointing out that maybe the motivation for creating the Boring Company was to drill a tunnel for Elon to get from his house to the SpaceX offices. They talk about the environmental costs of building EVs, even when the effects have been formally proven to be a substantial improvement over internal combustion vehicles.
The points feel disingenuous because the framing is so comically one-sided, and generously intermixed with anti-vehicle sentiment throughout. It’s fine to cite that building wider roads only induces more driving demand and that it has the nasty side effect of segregating neighborhoods, but that should warrant a discussion into governmental policies and political processes that drive these efforts, and not a detour back to the “tech is bad” narrative. The book even lists the various accomplishments around the world in building high-speed railroads, without bothering to mention that California’s High-Speed Rail is now estimated to be 6× its initial estimated costs and take at least 3× as long—in part because of, ironically, NIMBYism and arguing over potential environmental impact.
Road to Nowhere would be a more honest read if it started with the premise that we made some expensive societal tradeoffs by prioritizing the car in America, and looked at those ramifications across government, culture, and sure, modern technology. It’d also be more pragmatic: many of the suggestions of more walkable cities in the vein of the Parisian “15-minute city” would only be possible via government planning and execution, and it’d be more accurate—and fruitful—to examine the source of our lack of political will. Tech already has plenty of valid areas for criticism.
