Tech Won't Save Us - Tech Isn’t Fixing the Crisis on Our Streets w/ David Zipper

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

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

Instead of starting with the technology solution, which seems to always, quote unquote, solution, by the way, that orientation always seems to get us in trouble when you start saying, like, how can we use Hyperloop? How can we use self-driving cars? Like, how can we use flying taxis? Instead, why don't we say, what are we trying to achieve societally? And what's the best way to go about doing that? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is David Zipper. David is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government.

He's also a contributing writer at Bloomberg City Lab and writes about transport, tech, and policy in a number of other publications. You can find all of his articles at davidzipper.com and sign up for his free newsletter there as well. In recent years, there have been a bunch of promises around how new technologies are going to improve the transportation system, increase safety, and reduce traffic, among many other things. But they've often not been able to follow through on those promises. Whether that's new technologies to manage the transportation system, whether that's new technologies to put in the car directly, this has been the way that we've been told we need to solve the problems in our transportation system. But they've largely led us in the wrong direction. I was so happy to have David Zipper on the show to discuss so much

of this because he writes about many angles of this discussion for many different publications. And I think that his writing is really essential to understanding many of the drivers behind this, but also how this focus on technology over policy and politics fails to solve these real problems. And even just to look at the more mundane technologies that could be improving things

rather than expecting the next big kind of revolution that is going to come from some Silicon Valley company or something like that. In this conversation, we talk about a whole load of different aspects of this, from autonomous vehicles to advanced driver assistance systems to infotainment systems and even more. And near the end, we even talk about some technologies that could be making a really positive difference and in some cases even are where they have been rolled out, but that hold much greater promise than those that are often being sold to us by car companies and tech companies. There are obviously real problems

on the street with the number of people who are dying, with the people who are being stuck in traffic for long periods of time, with the people who find it hard to get around because they don't have a car, and transit service and other alternatives are really terrible. And we need to address these problems, but getting distracted by technology and the prospect of new technologies that never arrive is not how we're going to get there.

And so I really hope you enjoy this conversation because I really enjoyed having the chat with David to dig into so many of these issues. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can join supporters like Mitch from Oakland by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.

David, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Very much looking forward to talking with you. Obviously, the listeners will know that, you know, transportation topics, transportation and technology come up quite a bit on the podcast because it's something that I am interested in. And I've been reading your work on these topics for quite a while now. So I'm very happy to speak with you today. And I'm hoping that to get us started, you can give us an idea of the problems that really exist on the roads today. Before we start talking about these tech solutions, what are these issues that people are often responding to, even in the tech industry, when they recognize that something needs to

change about the transport system, even if their solutions aren't always the best way to do it, what are the problems that are out there today? The problems with road transportation? Well, I think there are many. We could spend a long time talking about them, but I guess the buckets that I generally refer to would be climate. Road transportation is the biggest source of emissions in the United States. And I would not be surprised if you told me it was the same case in Canada, where I know you are at the moment.

Number two in Canada, second to oil and gas because of the oil sands. That would make sense too. Climate is a huge problem with our road transportation network. So is safety. This is one area where actually the U.S. is in a different trajectory than Canada. I wrote an article about this in CityLab. The U.S. just hit a 16-year high in annual traffic deaths in 2021, up to around 43,000 in a year. And what's really driving that growth is pedestrian and cyclist deaths. Cyclist deaths rose 44% in a decade in the U.S., and pedestrian deaths hit a 40-year high last year, which is just incredible in the United States. In countries like Canada and the European Union, things are not that bad. Usually, traffic deaths have been going down, and almost all these countries have been going down in the last 20 or 30 years.

Unlike in the United States, my country is uniquely terrible at road safety. Before some of your non-American listeners pat themselves on the back, be careful because some of the bad habits of American road transportation around safety are spreading. So we can talk maybe a little bit about that later. And then I would also reference equity, which is a little more nuanced related to road transportation. But when you design cities and design a society such that you really can only access a good job if you have a car, you're making it very difficult for those who have low incomes, who are often minorities, to be able to improve their wages. I think of a

really interesting study that was done by a guy named David King, a professor at Arizona State, who showed that if you're low income and you don't have a car in New York City, you don't really pay a wage penalty in terms of your ability to get a better job because in New York City, there's pretty good transit. However, if you're in Phoenix and you don't have a car, major penalty. You're going to have a really tough time getting a better paying job. And unfortunately in the United States, again, which is where I live and where a lot of my work focuses on,

we have a lot more Phoenixes than New Yorks, if you will, which is a huge problem in road transportation. So those are some of the issues I think about as being underlying our road safety world. Yeah, no, I think you've laid it out really well. And we could also look to traffic, the amount of time that people spend stuck in traffic, the health consequences that come with being stuck in cars all the time. There are a whole load of things that we can discuss. I think your point on equity is really important because I feel like it's a part of the

conversation that I feel like doesn't get looked at enough, right? We often don't consider what the consequences of building these cities that are so dependent on cars are on people's ability to access the services, the jobs that they need to access. And because auto transportation, auto ownership is so normalized and so many people own one, it's often hard to remember or to think past the difficulties that that presents to people, the people who can't afford to own a car, what it means for them, and even the people who own a car because they feel like they have no other choice. But then it's a massive expense for them and leaves them in a more precarious situation because they might have this car that doesn't work very well, that's kind

of old, that needs frequent maintenance. And so then there's always the risk that something's gonna happen to it and you're living paycheck to paycheck and it's just gonna put you further behind. Maybe you won't be able to fix it. It's a serious problem. No, it really is. And it's something that I think is a little hard to wrap your mind around

if like probably a lot of listeners, you don't have to worry about being able to afford a car. Most of us just can, who are gonna be able to listen to a podcast like this. But when you really can't, or you're really struggling to do so, I mean, one breakdown can set you into financial tailspin where you lose your job and you don't have the money you need to fix the car. And now you're unemployed and you can end up in really precarious positions. And meanwhile, cars are just getting more expensive. That's the other point, too. In the United States, monthly car payments just hit the average one, hit 700 U.S. dollars a month over the summer, an all-time record, which is a combination of automakers focusing on SUVs and trucks, which are more expensive and less so on sedans, which are less. In fact, companies like Ford don't make any sedans or offer any sedans in the US

at all anymore. And meanwhile, interest rates are rising after being low for very many years. So I actually wonder if there's a bit of a reckoning coming about the affordability of cars. The problem is in so much of at least North America, there's not really a great alternative after so many years of designing in car centric ways and providing such paltry transit access and bike lanes. I really worry what's going to happen if cars become much more expensive. And we still have generally failed in places like Dallas or Cleveland or what have you to be able to really provide strong access to jobs or just daily necessity trips. Yeah. And it's so important, right? Because I always get the Canadian and the American numbers mixed up here,

but the AAA and CAA in Canada, they often estimate the annual cost of car ownership. And it's something like the high single thousand dollars a year or even over 10,000 and into that range, depending on the type of car that you own, whether you own a sedan or a truck or an SUV or something like that. But that's a real huge expense for people, especially if you're thinking about people making minimum wage or a little bit over minimum wage or something like that. Like that can be as much as rent in some cases, and of course, rents have soared as well. So it just shows how difficult it is for a lot of people. And you mentioned before as well, you know, the safety piece of this, right? And you said that within kind of North America, Europe, these sorts of countries, the United States is really an

outlier in terms of safety and road deaths and, you know, the number of people who really get hurt on the road. Why is there such a huge difference in the United States versus other countries? And why is the United States going backwards instead of improving these things? Yeah, it's a really important question, and it's one that I wish more Americans asked. I don't even think most Americans who work in traffic safety are aware of just how bad the United States is when it comes to road safety. I've done a series in the last few months with CityLab looking at traffic safety outcomes in other countries, doing articles about France and Finland, Japan and Canada, your country, and the differences are stark. Basically, European countries and Japan are

between three and four times safer on a per capita basis when traveling than in the U.S. In other words, U.S. per capita death rates and crashes are three to four times higher than in those countries. And then people say, oh, well, you know, the U.S. is car focused and we're spacious, so it's not fair to compare the U.S. to Japan. Okay, we'll compare it to Canada. I mean, your country is pretty spacious and car focused, last I checked. And still, the average American is two and a half times as likely to die in a crash as the average Canadian. So your question is a fair one. Why is the U.S. so bad at this? And I've been trying to really wrap my mind around it with this series. By the time this podcast comes out, I will have published a culmination sort of looking

at some overall lessons. And also I should emphasize, too, the U.S. is trending in the wrong direction while the rest of the world, the developed world, is trending in the right direction. Americans are getting at an increasing risk of dying in a crash while those in other countries are getting safer. So what's really changed? Well, there's a few things that other countries have adopted that the U.S. has not. Some of it has to do with kind of just improvements in infrastructure, like roundabouts, which have had a huge impact on road safety in countries like France. In the U.S., outside of a few enclaves like Carmel, Indiana, they're pretty rare. You can look at car-free streets and low-speed urban streets, which are much more popular in Europe or in Japan and Canada in the last 20 years than they are in the United States.

And then I think something that's a little bit hidden, you have to actually understand the trends to see the impact it can have is the relative trends in train and public transportation ridership. Because, and I wrote about this as well, people don't necessarily think about it, but you're actually between 20 and 60 times safer taking a bus or a train on a given trip than you are driving. So robust transit systems and a lot of people taking transit or riding trains means you're going to have a lot fewer opportunities to crash. So when you look at the trends, it's pretty striking. Even before the pandemic, the U.S., unlike Europe, and I believe unlike Canada as well, saw a decline in transit trips, a mode

shift away from transit and toward driving, all else being equal, that's going to increase the risk of dying in a crash. And then you look at a country like Japan, where train ridership is through the roof because there's just such great networks. That's been a huge driver in the drop off in crashes there over the last 40 years. Japan's now at an all-time low in fatalities. And then the last point I'll make, and I have a feeling you'll want to talk a little bit more about this, in terms of why the U.S. has seen an uptick in crash fatalities that exceeds other countries. My country is obsessed increasingly with SUVs and trucks that are themselves growing

bigger and bigger i talked to a canadian who says well we have them too but they're generally a size smaller and in europe they're a lot smaller although they're growing and they're becoming more popular and the problem with large suvs and trucks and this is well documented they're terrible for safety of anybody who's not inside one, particularly pedestrians and cyclists because of the blind spots of these vehicles, both the A pillar, which is basically the piece of the frame between the windshield and the side door window. And because they're getting taller, you can't see people who might be in front, particularly a child or in a wheelchair. And because they're getting heavier, which creates more face in a

collision. And their height, their growing height means that the front end of the vehicle is more likely to strike a person's chest, their torso, which can be very deadly, as opposed to sort of hitting their legs, which a sedan is more likely to do, which is not good. It's not fun, but you're more likely to survive that if you're hitting your legs rather than in your chest and your head. So those are some of the reasons why I think the U.S. has seen a particularly bad performance in road safety over the last 20 to 30 years. Yeah. It's always surprising to me when I hear people say that like they feel more comfortable or like safer driving a truck or an SUV or something like that. Like I can get driving a truck for work purposes and you need to tow things and whatever. But like the

times that I've driven a big SUV, I felt terrified because I can't see everything around me that I feel like I need to be able to see in order to make sure that I'm not going to hit another vehicle or a person or something like that. It's personally, I find it terrifying, but I guess maybe you get used to it. I want to drill down on this point about the U.S. and Canada just for a second, because, you know, I certainly don't want to make it seem like Canada is like some traffic utopia or something like that, because it's far from it, right? Yeah, Americans do tend to fetishize Canada sometimes. Americans have a certain, you have no guns, everyone's healthy.

You're also friendly and nice. That's not true, really? Thank you very much. But no, not totally. But, you know, like people who do activism around transportation issues have certainly identified a ton of problems in Canadian cities. We're still very reliant on cars. There's still a lot of suburbia.

You know, our intercity rail system is terrible up here, like in the United States. And I believe transit ridership is a bit higher in major Canadian cities, but I don't know if it's so much higher than the United States. And, you know, when I would think of a Canadian city versus an American city, okay, we have some bilingual signage and stuff like that and whatnot. But, you know, in terms of what's like materially different, I can't think of things that are so different. So why would Canada be so much less or like there'd be so much less of a risk of dying in a crash than in the United States? I'll point to a couple things. And again, there's more information in this article that I wrote, I think it was in July, looking at Canada versus US.

One thing is that the price of gasoline is higher in Canada because of tax policies. And that has contributed toward people wanting to drive less. The average American drives a lot more. More driving means more chances to crash. This is my hypothesis. Perhaps some Canadians will educate me on this. But my sense is that the relatively high price of gasoline has contributed toward Canadian cities being a bit denser, which creates a sort of virtuous cycle with transit service.

When you have a denser city that's bigger, you get better transit service. You make it more easy to travel without relying on a car. And I can also say that, because I looked at the data here, Canada is a more mega-urbanized country than the United States, if you will. The percent of the population that resides in the three sort of megalopolises, if you will, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, is significantly higher than the percent of Americans who reside in the megalopolises of New York, LA, and Chicago. Even if you go further down, Canada is actually more urbanized despite all of the rural spaces that it has. The other point that I found really interesting, and to be honest, I didn't know about this, has to do less with the levels of

fatalities in Canada and the US, but the trends over the last 20 years. And something I will give Canada credit for, which the US has just not done. And this is not, as I understand it, as much national policy as provincial, but a lot of the provinces in the last 15 years shifted toward immediate and pretty serious punishments for people who are caught recklessly driving or driving under the influence, like your car is impounded immediately and the penalties have gotten stiffer and more automatic. And that has had a big impact from what I understand on people's willingness or acceptance of driving drunk or, which is like a third of traffic crashes in the U.S., by the way,

or recklessly driving. In the U.S., these sorts of penalties are going to vary from place to place. It could be quite a while before that penalty is going to be instituted and, you know, you could get a lenient judge. And I think the variability is a lot less and the punishment is a lot faster in Canada, which leads to more of a deterrent effect. And that's a trend in the last 15 years in Canada, as I understand it, that's been quite impactful that we just haven't seen in the U.S. in the same way. That's fascinating. And I feel like a lot of those points are accurate, line up with things that I've observed.

Certainly, Canadian cities have a lot of suburbanization. You know, there's still a lot of sprawl in our cities, but there is kind of at least a dense core. And I feel like a bit more density going out from that as well. But we can certainly discuss this aspect of things for ages. But I want to move on to talking about the technology, right? Because I feel like in particular, over the past decade or so, you know, one of the big kind of narratives that we heard was that autonomous vehicles were going to arrive in just a couple of years if we would give tech companies a few years to perfect the technology. And then we wouldn't have to worry about these problems with the roads or particular political decisions around transportation because they would address traffic, they would address

road deaths, they would address road deaths, they would address the inequities in the cities, as you were talking about earlier. And all we needed to do was wait for this magical technology to arrive. And that never really worked out as planned. How do you look back at that kind of period of time when this was the big promise that was being made from the tech industry and what actually came of it? It reminds me, somebody wrote something about Hyperloop getting in the way of high speed rail.

That's what I'm thinking of. For those listeners out there, Paris wrote about this. You should give me this article about it. But I wrote a long piece about like, what's the purpose of self-driving cars in the Washington Post in February of this year? In that article, I went into sort of the history of autonomous vehicles, which was very much not based on solving the problem of road safety or anything else. The original rationale or impetus for developing autonomous vehicle technology was the cool factor. It'd be really

neat if we could make these vehicles move on their own. And that looks like science fiction. Yeah. Wouldn't that be great? That's what people at Carnegie Mellon were thinking. And it sort of like developed from there. And they have a famous robotics lab at Carnegie Mellon. And then, you know, the military in the U.S. said, actually, these could be really useful in battle environments.

So the DARPA challenge happened that was funded by the military. And then Google got involved and basically snapped up some of the people who were central to the DARPA challenge. And it was only once Google was involved that you started hearing this narrative that autonomous vehicles will solve the road safety problem and save the hundred people a day who die in road crashes in the U.S. Let's be really clear. This was an after-the-fact public explanation of why Google was doing this, which, frankly, when you unpack it, is quite hollow because there's really no way to know whether or not truly self-driving cars will be safer or not than human drivers, not only because people are actually quite talented at being able to handle unexpected

things, which computer systems are often not, but also computers make kinds of mistakes that humans never would. The best example I was given was a computer system that kept not noticing construction workers, and they were trying to figure out what is wrong with this system? What is going on? It turned out that the system just wasn't observing the color yellow, which the people were wearing, the construction workers. You never know that because the machine learning doesn't actually tell you what it's missing. You just can observe that it's screwing up. So the safety is not a great argument or a compelling argument to me for self-driving cars. And then there's others that you hear around equity or particularly around the environment is truly nuts because the one thing we really do know about what self-driving

cars are likely to do is that they're going to induce a lot more driving because when things get easier or cheaper, we want more of it. We find new ways to consume it. And there's already been studies about this showing that with self-driving cars, it's just like if you had a chauffeur, you'd take more trips than you would without one. And when you imagine a world of self-driving cars where people own them, that is a terrifying world for cities because it's going to be gridlocked like you've never seen before. And I don't care if these cars are electric or not. If you're going to see a huge uptick in driving, that's going to be really bad for the planet. So I am quite dubious about whether self-driving cars are actually going to solve problems or if they are a solution in search of

a problem. Yeah, no, I think you've put it really well. And, you know, I think another piece when you think about the energy requirements of it is like, and I feel like this is a piece that doesn't enter the narrative because it's not part of the PR kind of story that the companies wanted to tell us was really the energy requirements of having this like really high power computer in every car, having to drive it around. And then also how they're collecting like just wild amounts of data and sending that back to data centers where it all has to be stored and processed. And so there's all of this kind of impact that goes along with it as well. And certainly that's being built into cars today too.

Yeah, I think that's all true. I mean, you could keep going to all the various problems raised by AVs, but I guess what I sort of take a step back and think about it is say, well, why don't instead of starting with the technology solution, which seems to always quote unquote solution, by the way, that orientation always seems to get us in trouble when you start saying, like, how can we use self-driving cars? Like, how can we use flying taxis? Instead, why don't we say, what are we trying to achieve societally? And what's the best way to go about doing that? You know, it's sort of like counterposing FOMO with what I, the term I use is mundane mobility. FOMO is how you end up with city officials and state officials and even countries falling over themselves to get, you know, Hyperloop or autonomous vehicles before their neighboring jurisdiction can. And mundane mobility is the stuff that doesn't grab the headlines but is so necessary for achieving goals around climate, climate support or enhancing equity or reducing road deaths. It's things like expanding sidewalk networks,

or expanding bus frequency, or building bus shelters. This is basic stuff that is not going to make you, if you're a mayor or a governor, get a front page story in the New York Times, but it's a heck of a lot more likely to actually improve the lives of your own residents, and frankly, improve the planet. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I think it's frustrating that that's the way it plays out, right? It's a lot better. It's a lot more attractive to be trying to attract the Hyperloop or the Boring Company or what have you, because it plays well, because you'll get a lot of media attention for it, because there might be some voters who would look at that and say, okay,

that's innovative. This person is trying to move things forward. But then if you take these kind of steps that are actually going to solve the problems that are mundane, that are not playing on whatever someone in Silicon Valley is saying is the next big thing, that might actually solve some real problems in the city that might make transportation better, that might save some lives, but it's not going to be sexy. It's not going to get the headlines in the same way or the same kind of attention. And it seems like a real kind of problem with the incentives that are built in how we think about transportation and how public officials approach it. I think that's right. And, you know, you say, well, what do we do with that?

Is the next question. And if you're listening to this podcast, you probably would like to see your elected officials focusing on the mundane as opposed to the flashy. And a simple thing you can do is to help build a constituency of people who celebrate the mundane. Maybe there's a way to actually build like a big sidewalk, you know, as a lobbying group. I joke, but we frankly really need that. When you look at how essential sidewalks are to infrastructure networks, wouldn't it be great if somebody who's running for office is like, you know what, I really need to be able to get support from the people who are thinking about making it easier to walk. I don't think that's happening now, but there's no reason why it can't. And I think that grassroots organizing, even tweeting support for a city councilor or a mayor who does the right thing and says, actually, we should think about reallocating some of this money toward a rail expansion, toward improving sidewalk networks in our low-income community, that's something that needs to be called out and supported so that people who do take those positions that are kind of brave right now realize they're going to get some credit for it.

Yeah, it's always cool to see those like occasional stories of people painting on their own crosswalks, you know, in places where they think that they should belong or expanding the sidewalks in their areas by putting down cones or kind of painting something on there. So it looks like a car shouldn't go there to show that, see, things still work perfectly fine like this, but it's better for the people who use these roads and these streets and things as well. Yeah. Have you had Peter Norton, the historian on the podcast before? I haven't. I should, though. You probably should. I learned a lot from him. And for those who don't know it, his book,

Fighting Traffic, is a bit of a Bible for a lot of people who think about why cars dominate cities. It's a wonderful history looking at how what he calls motordom sort of took over city streets in the 1910s, 1920s, and sort of relegated pedestrians and children to playgrounds, sidewalks, and crosswalks. It's really fascinating hearing from him as he describes how there were these mass movements in the late 1910s and early 1920s of like hundreds of thousands of people in individual cities who would do these marches and erect monuments to traffic victims or crash victims. And they're all advocating for pedestrian rights. I mean, this is how you actually build power. And motordom was successful, and he explains how,

and sort of undermining that and establishing car speed as a public sort of goal in cities, which I think is sort of the original sin of the United States in our urban design, at least with our streets. But the point becomes, you know, when you think about the potential to really galvanize the masses to push for change, that's what we really need. I mean, Peter talks about ghost bikes being a step in the right direction where you paint a bike white at a place where a cyclist was killed. And the whole point is to show like, this is a public loss. This is not just somebody who lost their life. That's the end of it. Like could have been any of us. And this is a societal problem. So I strongly support basically the

grassroots movements around these topics. Because I frankly think without them, I don't know how we're really going to make progress. Yeah. And I think that there's a lot that we can learn from those histories, whether it's the 1910s and 20s or the 1970s and these periods when there was really kinds of backlash to the domination of the automobiles or the growing domination and trying to kind of restrict that and how we can learn from it today. I want to move on to talking about some of these other technological approaches, because I feel like, you know, we see the failure of the autonomous vehicle, really. Sure, they're still out there being tested in some cities and what have you, but they're not going to revolutionize transportation in the way that we

were sold a decade ago. And I feel like advanced driver assistance systems really come out of that, right? So what are they and how do they build on it? And what is the promise for what they're going to mean for transportation? Yeah. So ADAS is the lower hanging fruit compared to autonomous vehicles. And ADAS is becoming more important because as we're recording this, it was pretty recently that there was a big shockwave for the AV industry when Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle company with the raised, had billions of dollars in valuation, just closed up shop suddenly. It was kind of stunning. And in doing so, the Ford CEO said, we're going to focus more on ADAS than we are on fully autonomous systems because we think that's more feasible and more marketable.

And so what ADAS is, maybe it's helpful to explain that first to the listeners. It's sort of a collection of features, some of which will be pretty familiar to folks, like adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, automatic emergency braking, pedestrian detection. And these individual features, some of them are meant to prevent crashes. Some of them are meant to just be conveniences, really. But when you knit them together in a powerful way, you can end up with what are known as sort of like level two ADAS systems, level two, according to the SAE definition of autonomy.

And these systems are things like Tesla Autopilot or Cadillac Super Cruise, which can let the car be driven and operated on its own as long as the driver is always vigilant and always ready to jump in when something wrong might happen. And these systems have what's called a driver monitoring system to keep track of whether that driver is paying attention, either by looking at the sort of angle of their face and where their eyes are or how they're gripping the steering wheel. So that's what ADAS is. And it has been under development really for decades. You can go back to like cruise control. Like cruise control is sort of a form of ADAS, if you think about it. And that was around in the 80s. Now it's a much bigger deal. And I wrote an

article for The Verge in September about how car companies hold up ADAS as their solution for the American road safety crisis. This is how we can end up with zero collisions, which is part of the vision of GM. That's their defining mission at the moment. And I'm pretty skeptical about it for a variety of reasons, which we could go into, but I'll let you decide if you want to delve into that now or if you had another question to tee up first. No, I think it's good to dig into it, right? Because part of this is the lane assist systems, the pedestrian detection, you know, the idea is that the car will be able to kind of detect all these things that are going on around it and,

really help the driver to navigate these things, even without having to, you know, control the vehicle necessarily, or to give them kind of nudges and alerts that things are happening. It's interesting, I'll tell a quick story. I actually used to work in car insurance. It was a few years ago now, but I remember I had a woman call in one day, and she was just like, completely shocked. She had just been in an accident or a crash. And what had happened, as she described it to me, was that she was in the vehicle. There was a vehicle, you know, up ahead. And the car had a system where it was supposed to detect the car in front and slow itself

down because it was on the highway. But for whatever reason, in this instance, it didn't do that. And it caused her just to ram right into the back of the other car, which was kind of stopped and stuck in traffic. She was obviously affected by the fact that she had been in a crash and this had taken place. But even beyond that, she was like, the car was supposed to stop. I don't know why it didn't stop. Like I was expecting it to. So it sets people up to have these dependencies on the system that it can't always follow through on. So yeah, that's just a story, but feel free to give us a bit more info

on this. I think it's an illustrative example because it hits on some of the real problems with ADAS. First of all, some of these systems do not work reliably. AAA did a study where they found that pedestrian detection is basically worthless at night, which is when the majority of pedestrians are struck and hit. The cameras and sensors don't work effectively enough. It also can't work because of physics. A automatic emergency braking and pedestrian detection can't work above like 35 miles per hour. So that's a limitation.

But then you factor in the fact that you could potentially improve these systems to a degree, but still people don't always understand what the system can and cannot do. So the woman who called you may have overestimated or misunderstood what her system could do. This happens all the time. Or maybe she didn't, the system expected her to take over

because remember you always, as the driver responsible with a level two system, you have to be able to take over. And there's a lot of evidence accumulating now that ADAS systems lead driver skills to atrophy from lack of use. Driver skills in emergency situations degrade. If we're all becoming worse drivers because in an average minute we're doing less on the road, that's really bad for the occasional emergency unexpected situations that pop up. Those are a couple of the big concerns, but I actually think

there's even more than that. There is a well-known economics theory called the Peltzman effect that goes back to the 1970s that shows that behavior compensates for mandatory safety features like seatbelts. If you have a seatbelt in your car, you're more likely to take risks as driving because you assume that feature is likely to protect you. That might be true for you, but it certainly puts other people who are not in a seat belted car at risk, especially pedestrians and cyclists. So that's something that makes me worry about ADAS in that way too, where it might lead people to drive more recklessly in ways where ADAS can't fully compensate for the risks that they're creating. Especially by the way, if car makers are leading

people to misunderstand what their ADAS system can do. And for anyone who's following how Tesla advertises autopilot and quote-unquote full self-driving, they sure do seem to be creating some misunderstandings about what these systems can and cannot do. And then the final point about why I worry about ADAS is I think actually intuitive when you take a step back. And that's that a lot of these systems like lane keep assist or adaptive cruise control really aren't related to safety, they're conveniences. They make driving more pleasant or less tedious. And when things become less tedious, we just, we do more of it. And if ADAS leads people to just drive more miles, kind of like we're talking about with autonomous vehicles a few minutes ago, that in and of itself is a recipe for more crashes. More miles driven, all else being equal, is more chances to hit something or someone.

So all of this is to say ADAS is not a panacea for road safety. It's not even clear how much a perfectly functioning ADAS system is going to reduce crashes, eliminate some crashes. On net, this is not, to me, the solution for the U.S. road safety woes, particularly when you, again, take a step back and say, forget about ADAS as the solution. Let's start on what we're trying to achieve, which is a reduction in road deaths. If we're starting with what is going to reduce road deaths, then you can say, what's the most effective way of doing it? And you get into things like speed cameras and speed limiters, and you look at bike lanes and you look at eliminating cars from dense urban areas. These are not the things that car companies want to promote

because it doesn't enhance the value of their core product. But these are far more cost-effective ways of actually reducing the maximum number of people whose lives are lost in crashes every day. Yeah. When you were talking about people taking riskier actions because of feeling that they're safer in the car with things like seatbelts. What I immediately thought of was autopilot and, you know, the videos that these people who are, you know, supporters of Elon Musk, who are listening to and put out where

they're clearly doing very kind of dangerous and reckless things just to try to prove that the system can do more than it actually can, right? Because they'll find these kind of perfect situations where it might work perfectly using it on the highway or something like that, but where there are real risks, not only to themselves, but the people around them. And I feel like, you know, you bring up a Tesla and autopilot, another thing that they have really kind of pushed and pioneered and led other automakers to adopt is this move toward the infotainment system that is on the touch screen where you're taking away the buttons that are in the car. And so more and more of what you need to do, the controls for the car are just on this touch screen. There's no kind of physical

feedback for you. And it seems like more automakers are moving in this direction to try to replicate this thing that Tesla has done first. There is even, you know, a recent Apple demo showed changing the whole dashboard into like a screen that you could customize. And, you know, the promise is that this would reduce distraction because people wouldn't have to look at their phones anymore. But it seems like it's doing the complete opposite. Yep. You must have looked over the list of articles that I've written, because this is one that I delved into deeply. By the way, I'll just mention I'm referencing a bunch of articles as we chat here. If anyone's curious, I'm sure Paris will put them in the notes, but they're also on my website, which is davidzipper.com. But I wrote, I guess it was a

year ago now, a deep dive, I think the first deep dive into the safety risks of infotainment systems and Slate. And you're totally right. This was a choice that car companies made that people didn't even really ask for. But car companies decided that we have to compete with Apple and the iPhone. So we're going to create touchscreens in place of the haptic feedback and tactile nature of the knobs and dials that I grew up with when I and how I first learned how to drive, you know, way back when. And this is just flat out a step backwards for safety, because if you can't change the song that's being played or make adjustments to air conditioning without taking your eyes

off the road, because you have to look at that touch screen, that is a second or two with your eyes off the road that is absolutely creating more risk of crashing. And yeah, there's this issue of will people be on their cell phones otherwise? Okay, well then that's a problem that we should probably be talking to Apple and Samsung and others about and erecting regulations. But as it is now, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but in the US, NHTSA, which is really the authority that can regulate this, has been pathetic in its response. There is voluntary guidance that was issued a few years ago that set maximum thresholds for

the amount of time that one's eyes should be away from the road for every step of an overall task and how long it takes to complete that overall task. And immediately car makers violated that guidance without penalty because they want to have a distinctive feel within their cars. I don't think car companies are trying to kill anyone actively, but they are striving, particularly in this age of electrification, to find ways to differentiate their core products. And when you take away the roar of the engine and the feel of that gasoline powered system in your car, the feel of sitting in the front seat and what that dashboard infotainment system looks like is a key differentiator. And unfortunately that's sort of unleashing an arms race that is leading to some

really weird stuff. Like there was one system that everyone seems to hate. This is BMWs where it's like a gesture identification. You can like wave your hands to do things. It doesn't work right. I have someone who has it tell me like he's convinced his car is possessed by a demon and he went to the dealership to see how they could get it removed. But this is all an effort to differentiate. And I think it's worth taking a step back and saying like like, like from a societal perspective, is this really where we want competition or should we be putting in some constraints to ensure that competition may be improving the performance of cars and making them more fuel efficient, making them better and in certain ways?

But I'm not sure that variegated infotainment systems is something that is going to be societally constructive. Hearing what you're saying there, what immediately comes to mind is it feels like these automakers and this industry really needs to be reined in. It makes me think of, say, Ralph Nader in the 60s and 70s and how that really kind of gave a punch to the industry, made them wake up, made the regulators and the government take safety seriously again, or, you know, for the first time maybe. And it feels like there's been this kind of drifting for a while.

And we're at this point where, especially with electrification, with the advent of these new technological systems that are being put in cars, it feels like there really needs to be like a wake up again to be like, look, we really need to pay attention to what is going on here, to what the potential effects of this are, especially when, as you say, in the United States, things are going in the wrong direction, not the right one. That's right. And by the way, it's coming for you too in Canada, and it's coming for people in Europe, where cars are shifting more toward SUVs, they're

getting heavier. Infotainment is a problem in lots of places. So I don't think you should assume that what happens in America stays in America. We export lots of things for good and for ill, let's put it that way. So I do worry about that. And I do think that we are at a particular moment now with electrification where as we ramp up

electrification efforts and as car makers develop models for their first electric vehicles, it's an open question of whether we're going to be faced with a trade-off of basically reducing emissions and increasing traffic deaths, or if we can actually achieve both goals at once. And I say this, and again, another article I wrote a couple months ago in Slate, all of us being equal, an electric vehicle that is identical to the ICE model is going to be actually more dangerous because it's heavier because of its battery. It's also going to be quieter than an ICE vehicle, which means that pedestrians are less likely to hear it. And acceleration of an electric drivetrain is much faster. So I very much worry that we're already seeing car makers advertise these like muscle car

type acceleration rates for SUVs that are electric because an electric drivetrain can let you do that. Why do we want to provide for that? Why do we want, why is it a good thing to have an SUV with a hyper-fast acceleration? That's not going to make it easier to merge on a highway. It's just going to lead to at least people confused about how fast their car can go up front. And it might actually lead to, in the long run, just more fatalities or more crashes overall. And as far as I can tell, at least in the US, Congress and NHTSA are just, pardon the expression, asleep at the wheel on this. I've heard nothing from them, nothing about managing the shift toward electrification,

which is necessary for climate reasons. And a lot of people have to drive, and I get that. But we should be doing this pivot toward electrification of automobiles in a way that reinforces our efforts to reduce traffic deaths and doesn't create an unnecessary headwind. There shouldn't be a trade-off between these goals. I feel like that expectation that an electric car should look like a sports car is another thing that really comes from Tesla, right? Setting the model for what the future of cars, for what the electric car should be. And it's, you know,

this car that needs to go really fast, that needs to be like a sports car. And that's kind of setting the incentives in the wrong direction. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Like I can see the argument that Tesla did a really good thing a decade ago by showing that EVs could be cool. Like we sort of take that for granted now to an extent in a lot of our circles where it's seen as being sort of a status marker of sorts to have an EV. But Tesla did break new ground

a decade ago showing like how beautiful the car could look and how impressive it could be to roll up in one. Now I think that's sort of taken as a norm. But at this point, you look at like the Cybertruck and you look at all these things Tesla has done in the. Now, I think that's sort of taken as a norm. But at this point, I mean, you look at like the Cybertruck and you look at all these things Tesla has done in the years since, I find it very

difficult to take credibly any argument that Tesla as a company cares at all about safety for safety's sake. They are, in a lot of ways, I would argue, strategically sacrificing safety by rolling out features to the public like full self-driving that other automakers just wouldn't do because they think it's too dangerous. And then by rolling them out faster and taking risks that others wouldn't, Tesla can claim to be ahead of the game technologically, even though it really isn't compared to a lot of its competitors. It can create that image because it's willing to put things out onto public roads that are riskier. And that's a business strategy that in some ways is quite effective for Tesla, but it's one that all of us who have to deal with the after effects, including those of us who are

just walking or biking or driving a car that isn't a Tesla should frankly say, what the fuck? Like, this is not a business strategy that should be allowable and Tesla should pay a price for it, or it should be blocked from some of the more reckless steps that the company's taking. One thing that I find really fascinating in reading some of your work is that obviously this is a critical technology podcast, right? It's critical of the tech industry, but that doesn't mean that I don't think there's no role for technology to play in making things better and making the world better. And you've written about how there are actually technologies that we can adopt that can be implemented into the transport system, into cars themselves, that can make some of these problems better. But, you know, they're clearly not the technologies that is getting the tech

industry excited that they want to adopt and put into these vehicles. And it's also something that regulators are kind of averse to take advantage of and to mandate to go into cars. What are some of these technologies and why is it difficult to get people on side with them? Sure, I appreciate the question

because there are some innovations around technology that I'm really excited about. I really briefly, one that we haven't talked about at all is e-bikes and e-cargo bikes. Phenomenal. Love it. And that's all made possible by the development of battery technology. And turns out when you stick a battery on a cargo bike, it becomes so much more feasible to transport children or groceries like these things are wonderful car replacers. And I am delighted to see this sort of Cambrian explosion of micromobility form factors, like keep going. But I think with regards to motor vehicles, a couple of technologies that I think could be really interesting. One is actually for buses,

automatic traffic cameras that are mounted on buses and can automatically identify the license plates of cars that are blocking dedicated bus lanes. Because you can have one person who's holding up 60, 120 people in a couple of buses in one of these lanes because they just ran out to get a quick cup of coffee. And likelihood of them getting a ticket is virtually nil because police officers don't really care. And also they're only there for two minutes. It's just two minutes. Well, those two minutes matter a lot when you factor it across however many people who are stuck in the buses behind them. So these cameras, which New York City is using and now Los Angeles and San Francisco as well, are terrific. There's studies showing that in New York that so

far they're speeding up bus trips. And also, this is great. No one's trying to stick it to drivers with these tickets. It turns out that the majority of people are just getting one. And once they get that first ticket in the mail, they realize, OK, I can't do this anymore. And they don't do it. That's what you want. You want to change behavior. So I love automatic bus cameras.

Another one that I like a lot for cars is what's known as intelligent speed assist. And this is technology that basically is able to identify the prevailing speed limit on a given street or road and then adjust how fast a car can go when it is basically being driven on that road. Maybe go five miles over the limit or something like that. This is already available. It's installed on some fleet vehicles. To me, it's an absolute no-brainer. When you look at some of the catastrophic crashes that have happened, like one in Los Angeles over the

summer where someone was going over 100 miles an hour in what I believe was a 45-mile-per-hour road and ended up in a fireball crash where several people lost their lives. Like why should it even be physically possible to go anywhere near that speed in an urban road at 45 miles per hour? Speed Assist or ISA is phenomenal. And car makers do not want to go down this route. They want to talk about ADAS because it's useful being able to at least advertise the potential of you being able to drive really fast in your car. Have you noticed, by the way, in your speedometer how the needle seems to go all the way up to 170 miles per hour often on these cars that you never go past like 80 miles per hour on? Funny that, it's because you feel like you have all this untapped power. Car makers know that's great

and they want to maintain it. ISAs are just a no-brainer. And New York City this summer started a pilot I think is very exciting to deploy ISAs, intelligent speed assist, on a bunch of their own fleet vehicles for the city. Data is being collected and analyzed by the Volpe Center, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation. And I'm very excited about the potential of large fleet managers, including public sector fleet managers, to adopt ISAs and sort of spread the good news. Because, frankly, you don't need every car to have ISA to have an impact. If a given proportion do in a roadway, think about it, every other car is going to have to go the speed that that car with ISA is setting. So you just created an obstacle toward reckless driving with only, say, I don't know, 20, 25% of vehicles having it. So I love that. Those are a couple of examples of technologies that do get me excited. Even when I think AVs and ADAS in different ways, the hype very much

exceeds the reality. Now, I love that. I think it's fascinating to look back like in Peter Norton's book, as he describes, you know, the fight for speed limiters all the way back in the 20s. And to see how, you know, we're trying to still make that happen today. I think e-bikes are fantastic. I know there's been some kind of back and forth in some European countries around them. But I feel like especially in North America, they make a ton of sense where we have these distances that are a bit larger because a lot of our environments are built for cars. And so they're kind of perfectly suited for the urban environment and making it easier for people to get around without a car. And then, of course, I love hostile bus technology, like bring it on. That sounds fantastic. Giving tickets to cars who are blocking the lanes. It's great.

A final question as we kind of wrap up this fantastic conversation. You know, we talked a bit about the incentives of politicians and regulators in approaching these questions, whether it's road safety, whether it's technology in transportation, and how they really haven't gone far enough. They haven't kept up with these issues to ensure that they are ensuring that, you know, the roads are safe, right? That actions are being taken to reduce deaths, to make the transportation system better for people. Do you feel like there is starting to be a shift in that direction?

Like, you know, personally, I'm not a huge fan of Pete Buttigieg, but he seems to be talking about some good things. I feel like there's been discussion in some of the regulators in the United States around taking more action on autopilot and Tesla and bringing in more regulations on automated driving systems and things like that. Do you feel like we're starting to go there

or do you feel like there's still a lot more kind of pressure that needs to be applied for them to take the actions that are really necessary? I think that we are making progress, but still there's a lot more pressure that needs to be applied. So a little bit of both. I actually think Secretary Buttigieg really does care about this stuff and would like to make a lot of progress on it. Maybe I'm a little bit more bullish on him than you are in that way, but he's really hamstrung in a couple of different ways. He's hamstrung politically by a Congress that is not interested in picking fights over SUV size or on limiting the speed that a car can go.

I actually interviewed Buttigieg when the National Roadway Safety Strategy came out in an interview that was in Slate. And I asked him about whether vehicle size reduction for SUVs and trucks was a national priority. And he danced so well, I couldn't even tell that he was not in any way, shape or form answering my question. He says a lot of the right things. He was just recently saying like autonomous vehicles feel like they're always 10 years out.

He's talked about how we have a true national crisis in roadway safety, which I think is constructive. But, you know, he's facing a NHTSA that is, in some ways, I hate to say it, but I do wonder if they're in part at least captured by the auto industry. And you see how many people, like the former NHTSA administrator who's now doing relations for GM, and this sort of revolving door phenomenon happens so often now. It's really problematic. So even having said that, it's positive seeing that there's rumblings of taking action against Tesla in a more serious way when, frankly, NHTSA was just, again, asleep at the wheel for years talking about the promise

of autonomous vehicles and wanting to keep regulations from getting in the way of their development rather than creating safeguards to ensure Americans are safe as these new and untested technologies end up being used on public roads. So I will say, I think if there's anything that gives me hope, it's that NHTSA is, whether it likes it or not, is facing a more engaged group of Americans who are just pissed off about the status quo and the rising number of traffic deaths and the recognition that part of the cause of the road traffic crisis in the U.S. is NHTSA's inaction around vehicle size, around infotainment. There have been a couple instances in the last couple of years where there's something that ends up in what's called the Federal Register. It's sort of a proposed rule that NHTSA is putting out there first for revisions to something called the MUTCD, which is sort of the uniform code for

signage that has for a long time stood in the way of cities taking steps like reducing speed limits or painting crosswalks in bright colors. These are things MUTCD is somewhat frowned upon and creates big headwinds. There were revisions MUTCD proposed and then later revisions to the crash safety ratings program known as NCAP. And both in those instances, over 10,000 responses were submitted by the public each time, predominantly from people just saying like, you NHTSA need to be far more proactive in supporting street safety and in regulating oversized cars. And I have heard from sources at NHTSA that they've just never seen this level of public engagement and they aren't quite sure what to do about it or how to handle it. They're just sort of processing. And I find that really constructive because I think five years

ago, I remember thinking like, God, we really have a problem that we have these local street advocacy groups or bike lane advocacy groups that don't really engage at the national level, aren't even aware of what's going on there. And I don't think that's true anymore. I would never write that article, which I thought about writing a little while ago, because I do see much more engagement now in the U.S. and awareness of ways in which federal regulations and federal policy are leaving Americans in danger when they travel, especially if they're not inside of a car. And that is a trend which is still nascent, but it does give me hope. I think that's a good place to leave it, because if the tech companies and if the prospect of autonomous vehicles and these other supposed solutions maybe left people waiting for a few years to say, OK, maybe this is going to solve it.

It's become pretty conclusive that that's not going to solve the problem. So there's more reason than ever for people to get engaged and to finally start demanding the political fixes that are available right now that we can take to actually solve these problems. David, it's been great to speak with you. I really appreciate you taking the time. Fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. No, it's really been my pleasure. I've enjoyed it as well.

David Zipper is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Tubman Center for State and Local Government. And if you want to read some of the many articles that he's written about these topics, you can go to davidzipper.com and you can also sign up for his free newsletter there as well. You can follow David on Twitter at David Zipper.

You can follow me at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com

slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.