About this episode
Paris Marx is joined by David Zipper to discuss how Silicon Valley pitched new technologies as the fix for a whole range of transport problems, and how that really just distracted us from solutions while allowing issues like road deaths, emissions, and traffic to get even worse. David Zipper is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government and a contributing writer at Bloomberg CityLab. You can find his articles and sign up for his newsletter at DavidZipper.com and follow him on Twitter at @DavidZipper . Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast ( @techwontsaveus ) and host Paris Marx ( @parismarx ) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon . The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network . Also mentioned in this episode: David wrote about why traffic safety is getting worse in the US , and compared it to Canada , Finland , France , and Japan . He also wrote about the history of self-driving cars , the danger posed to pedestrians on the roads, the problem with infotainment systems , and what’s wrong with positioning car tech as the solution to our problems . Paris wrote about how Elon Musk designed the Hyperloop to try to get California’s high-speed line canceled . AAA puts the annual cost of car ownership in the US at over $10,000 a year in 2022. In Canada, CAA put it at $8600 to $13,000 a year in 2017 — a number that is surely even higher now. Peter Norton wrote about how the auto industry took over US roads in the early 1900s in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City . Support the show