Tech Won't Save Us - The Boring Company is a Complete Joke w/ Alissa Walker

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Alissa Walker to discuss how Elon Musk’s Boring Company transportation system has changed over the past few years, what his plans in Las Vegas mean for workers and transit users, and why tech companies are distracting us from a real vision of better cities.Alissa Walker is the urbanism editor at Curbed, co-host of LA Podcast, and a contributor to KCRW’s Greater LA. She recently reported on the latest updates on the Boring Company and its project in Las Vegas, and did a great breakdown of how the whole concept has evolved back in January. Follow Alissa on Twitter as @awalkerinLA.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.Support the show

He's going to win no matter what. There's no other path here because people who have a certain amount of money, they're going to buy a Tesla and they're going to become part of this cult who likes to attack women journalists on Twitter who write about Tesla. Thank you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that doesn't think many of tech solutions for transportation are really going to improve our cities for anyone other than the rich. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Alyssa Walker. Alyssa is the editor at Curbed, co-host of LA Podcasts, and a contributor to KCRW's Greater LA. Today we talk about Elon Musk's Boring Company,

how it's developed in recent years, the specific project that the company is working on in Vegas, and why tech's ideas for transportation are really not enough to improve our societies and address the needs of the very people who are not served by the system as it exists today. You can find links to a few of Alyssa's pieces about The Boring Company in the show notes. If you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it with any friends or colleagues who you think would be interested in the conversation. And if you want to support the work that I put into the show, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy

the episode. Alyssa, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me. I've been following your reporting on Curbed for quite a long time. And I particularly like, you know, your writing on The Boring Company and your perspective on The Boring Company, because it provides this critical analysis of what Elon Musk is trying to do with this project that is not seen in a lot of mainstream publications, right? And it's really important thing for us to be focusing on, which is why I wanted to talk to you today. Thanks so much. That's a very good compliment. Thank you. So I wanted to start before we get into what's happening now and kind of like the latest

developments with The Boring Company. I was hoping that you could kind of set us up and tell us when Elon Musk first announced The Boring Company and the loop transportation system, how did he kind of describe it? What was the original idea supposed to be? What was the idea responding to? And what was kind of the goal of this project? Right, I'm trying to think way back. So at first, it was his solution for beating traffic. It was how it was originally framed, right? So you just have to go way back. This is like 2017. And he apparently was in his car driving from his house in Bel Air to the SpaceX headquarters, which is in Hawthorne, which is kind of right by the airport, if you know LA very well. So it's a very bad commute, no matter how you want to get there, because there

aren't a lot of transportation options that don't get stuck in the traffic of cars that are along the 405, which is our very famous freeway, which we widened. We spent over a billion dollars to widen it, and it didn't even make traffic times better. It actually made them worse. Fantastic. Great use of public funds, right? Yeah. It's one of our greatest success stories. So if you remember Carmageddon, this was the widening of that freeway and it hasn't improved anything at all. And I think anybody that listens to your podcast or is hearing this or who knows my writing knows about induced demand. You can't just build your way out of this.

You have to actually provide options. You have to think about getting more people into shared spaces and moving them faster than people in single occupancy vehicles. But there was one thing I learned about his vision, which I didn't learn until a couple of years later. I saw him give a talk actually with LA Mayor Eric Garcetti in conversation at this event in downtown. And he said that his first idea was double and triple decker highways to solve traffic. Great.

So just if you want to know where the original idea came from and why it might be founded in a misconception about how transportation planning actually works. His first idea was actually like, let's just build taller freeways with more interchanges. And this idea, which I think you can see kind of very clearly in the Boring Company and the Loop plans is that it's almost like these slot cars that are going to go exactly where you want them to go into the city. So you kind of like shoot out this car and it goes really fast through a tunnel and it pops up at Dodger Stadium or whatever. These are all the various things he's come up with and destinations he's tried to sell this idea on. But if you look at that general framing idea and then see how far we've actually come from that idea now, because

at first it was supposed to be these shared vehicles. It was going to be these up to 16 passenger vans, these smoked glass, kind of cool minivan looking things that were going to drop down from the street and zoom through these little canyons and then pop up where they wanted to come up. And now we're really so far from that. When I went to the demonstration of the Boring Company title debut, we drove through it in a Tesla and the Tesla didn't go very fast. And it was a very bumpy and frankly, a little bit terrifying ride. It didn't feel like the future of transportation. And then he kept changing the framing around it.

So it would be like, oh, I didn't really mean it had to be that. It could be like any vehicle. And it's just going to be a place for electric cars to go faster, these tunnels and speed by traffic. And now those larger pods seem to be gone, the 16 passenger vehicles, just regular cars. They're not even going to travel autonomously. In the case of the Vegas one, I think they have said more recently that they can't actually do that yet. So there might even be drivers. Oh, my God. So there might even be drivers in the cars. Oh my God. So yeah, it's just like,

what problem are we solving was always the question. And is this a way to solve it? And could you use your billionaire clout to actually solve this problem? Or is this just a tunnel to drive cars through? And I think we know the answer now. Totally. Because basically what you saw, right,

was this original idea was that you would be like driving your car along and you'd pull on to like this on street parking spot and it would like lower you down in this tunnel and shoot you off to like wherever in the city that you wanted to go. And like at first there would be like 30 to 100 layers of tunnels. And then it was like up to unlimited. There would be all of these tunnels, right? No problem. No problem with cost. I remember reading that the proposals that he put forward for like Chicago and like Dodger Stadium in LA and in Washington, the prices were all over the place. What these plans were actually going to

entail were all over the place. There was no real consistency, right? And as you say, it was supposed to have this kind of option for pedestrians and cyclists, which was just thrown out the window. And then it was electric autonomous vehicles. And now you're saying like the autonomous might be out of there as well. So like it's really changed so much in just the span of three years. This thing that was supposed to be really futuristic, if you really want to believe that in the first place, but now looks more and more like a tunnel for a car underground, right? Right. Which, again, like, might not be a bad idea if you were going to move people at higher capacities, or if there was actually a real reason to put them underneath some kind of congested traffic area, I guess. But in this application in particular, what we're doing in

Vegas is connecting one side of the convention center to another. And yes, the convention center is huge. If you've been to CES, like, and you know, how to walk that floor is very big. And it's even bigger now they've expanded it. So it's going to go all the way to the strip, basically, from where it is kind of a little bit off the strip, and that's going to go all the way to the strip. Yes, it's far. But even within Vegas, you've seen some really good examples of how to move people over these vast distances that are pleasurable. These moving sidewalks, I kind of like those getting a boost or even things like just a little automated tram or even just like a little electric shuttle that ran around the outside of the building. It doesn't need

to be this. And now the city is spending, and it's not actually the city, it's the tourist and visitors bureau. So it's like the convention, kind of like a convention center. So a lot of people are like, these are public funds. Technically they are public funds, but they're controlled by the tourism and visitors centers. They can do with, what they want to do to improve the convention center. But now, yeah, we're not really solving the problem. And we're giving him free advertising for like, basically, you're getting like a test ride in a vehicle, and they don't seem to have any problem with that. It works out perfectly for him. So your most recent article really focused on, you know, what is going on in Vegas, and system that, or not really, it's like not even a mile

long tunnel that Elon Musk is building to connect these different parts of the convention center. So it's probably a bit much to say system, but you wrote about how it's coming to fruition now, and we're starting to really see what it's looking like. And it's looking like even less futuristic than it might have been in the past. And you particularly wrote that at the same time as this system is like nearing completion, I think it's supposed to open sometime next year, the transit funding for Vegas looks like it's going to be cut as well. So what does this kind of herald for the future of transportation in Vegas? Who is this serving, right? Yeah, I mean, that was my concern originally when they broke ground last November. They had a big

event during CES last year, which is in January. And the plan is for it to be operational for CES next year. And they said they're on track even with any type of coronavirus delays. And so when I first looked at that back in January, I was like, well, okay, you can spend the money doing this, but there's still a lot of people that come to work even at the convention center and their jobs and their commutes will be in no way improved by this. I suppose that if they needed to get from one end to the other of the convention center, they be able to even get in there. But I assume they have also probably better ways of getting around, including small electric vehicles, which is a great solution. Maybe just give it electric bikes to ride around the convention center. That would be so fun, or different mobility devices. But I think my big concern was like, okay, if we're spending this much money, it's a lot of money. It's $50 million, almost all of which is

going directly to the boring company. Is this the best we, almost all of which is going directly to the Boren Company. Is this the best we can do? It doesn't even connect to the existing... There's a monorail that I wouldn't say a lot of people who live there probably use as their transportation. But if you were, say, a tourist who was coming from the south part of the Strip and you wanted to use the monorail, it doesn't even connect to the monorail. You still have to get from the monorail station to the boring company system that's underground. So that just shows you it's not part of this bigger plan for solving problems. But what I was worried about in particular is people who rely on the bus. RTC is a big agency. They have the entire region, a bus system that's kind of connecting. As you remember,

the Strip isn't actually in the city of Vegas or unincorporated county. So they do really manage some really actually great transit solutions. If you've ever gone to Vegas, like I highly recommend using the Deuce bus to get around on the Strip, one of the best, very affordable ways to move from place to place. And I looked into what they have been facing during the pandemic. And it turns out that they have had like in many cities, really big drops off in ridership. But even more importantly for their system, their farebacks recovery isn't a huge part of their revenue. It's just a drop in sales tax. Nobody's there spending money like they used to. And that they have one of those systems that's almost 40% funded by a local sales tax. So that is the first red flag. If anything like that

happens to your transit, you're going to have to get some type of money to get you through. They applied for a CARES grant at the federal level. They got $100 million and they're spending about $10 million per month just to keep the buses running, just to keep it enough so essential workers can get to work, people can get groceries, things like that. And then we're looking a little bit more deeply into what they face. During this week in Vegas, there's a series of virtual community meetings where they're asking people, should we cut this bus line? Because they are not going to be able to keep them running, even with the CARES money, even by taking every other precaution and every other thing they're trying to do to make it safe for people to ride. They're going to have to cut some bus lines, including a bus line that serves the convention center. So I just thought the complete disconnect, I think, for a lot of people is that, oh, this is so great. Even the convention center has said it might not even be operating all the time. They might only like turn it on when there's a lot of people using the convention center. So

it's actually a $50 million system that is truly only serving the people who are the well-deserved tourists, I guess, that are only allowed to use this system. So even if you wanted to use it to make a bus connection, perhaps from the strip to the other side of the convention center, it might not be open for you at that time. And in the meantime, if you do need to take a bus to get from one end to the other, take it to go to work, you are going to have to walk farther as these tunnel boring machines are digging out this little station for Teslas under your feet. Yeah, it's really wild, right? Because you wrote about how this system clearly isn't displacing traffic or reducing emissions

or anything like that, right? It's just serving this really specific population that is trying to get between these different convention centers. And at the same time, transit service is potentially now facing significant cuts, which actually do serve the population and people who aren't necessarily using that convention center, right? And you've also said that there are other proposals by other convention centers now to copy this model. And then like, obviously, I guess Vegas is kind of like a very specific type of city. It doesn't look like many other cities, you know, around the country or the world. What does that suggest for what the future of transportation is going to look like in Vegas? And is that something that can really feasibly be rolled out in cities

that aren't dependent on like convention centers and casinos and stuff like that? Right. I mean, this is exactly it. So when you look at what happened over the last few months, so even the money that is paying for the boring companies, convention center tunnels, that is paid for with hotel taxes. You know, it's another like fund. I think every city has something like this. Vegas is probably like the best example because it has so many, you know, there's like people charge taxes on hotel rooms, people charge them on things like rental car fees, the sales tax thing I was talking about, everybody has these mechanisms to kind of funnel the money that's coming from other places into what should

be good investments. Usually they go to like stadiums. And as a good example, in Vegas, too, where they've tried to use this money collected from the tourists and like funnel it into these big capital improvements that are supposed to benefit everyone, but it's debatable if they do. So when you look at the hotel money, the hotel money from the last year to whatever that went to pay for these tunnels, that money is obviously not going to come in at the same rate as it did this year because people are not coming to stay in hotels as much as they were. However, the casinos, as you mentioned, two other casinos now are like, well, we want foreign company tunnels. And they just plan to pay for it outright. I guess they're still making plenty of money. Even if the city itself isn't recouping that money from their businesses, they seem to

have enough money to start digging some tunnels too. And this one is actually the one that would connect the convention center to some of these nearby resorts, they've said they'll charge some money for it. So three or $5, most of the transit that connects casinos is actually free. The monorail is really the only thing that costs money. It's a little expensive, but it's kind of like a ride. But the rest of the tramways and all these little people movers that you see kind of going from casino to casino, those are all free. So this is also another getting into that other level of like, who is this for? Is it for the richest people? Is it for the people to slide under the street, which is not even that complicated to get from one place to another if you were in like a Lyft or an Uber anyway, to kind of secretly get to the convention center to their casino room or whatever.

So again, like you're seeing the money and you're seeing where it's going. Like obviously, someone has money, this is how they're going to spend it. And the city is not going to be able to capture that to make their improvements. So as far as like what cities are going to look like after coronavirus, and when it comes to their transit funding, you know, we're facing similar things here in LA where I am, where we have a sales tax measure M that we have been, you know, capturing to make our improvements, that's going to be way down. We have to look at how we're going to restructure that. And I think all cities need to really look at how they're taking in their funding and where is it going to come from and how it can be more resilient when we maybe aren't going to have tourism or people spending money in our cities

at the same rate as they were before. I'm not even sure Vegas seems to be reckoning with that because every comment from either the tourism bureau or the city is just rah-rah. We love Elon Musk. It's so exciting for us. This is our Kitty Hawk moment. And I would hope there would be a group at least of bus riders in the city or people who need shaded sidewalks in the city or maybe who need a better bike share system to speak up and start saying, you can't take this money that is basically earned on the backs of people who are working at these hotels and putting it towards improvement, quote unquote, that doesn't even help them in their daily life. I think that's a great point. And it seems to me like it's very much something

that the casino or the convention center can use as marketing. You know, we have this like futuristic transportation system or, you know, futuristic in quotes. Can you just imagine the ads? Oh my God. Like, yeah. Elon Musk is a marketing genius, right?

So that's like his whole claim to fame is that he can market things, whether he can actually like innovate and create big new like innovations. I think that's more up in the air. Or it's like you get to stay at your suite. And then it says you get like a free Tesla as part of your company Tesla pass. I mean, and this is like exactly it. Like it's he doesn't advertise. Like he said, the company is not advertised, but they do they have his Twitter feed. And yeah, all just continued efforts when you see that there's a fear that enough cars will not be sold or made or you know, the public persona is failing in some way, although he hasn't done any himself any favors by just doing interviews where he continues to say

the most insulting and degrading and defaming things. But then also to your point too, about like what will transportation look like afterwards, the private car thing is going to be very attractive to a certain type of person who is afraid to go to Vegas and get in a people mover, perhaps because they think it's, they're going to be sharing space with people and perhaps get infected with COVID. And that's something that's also been played up on the Boring Company website. So if you want to see another really good truth about what car companies or private vehicle companies are going to try to be doing, it's already in action right now with this literally like a propaganda campaign. And it provides such a good contrast,

right? Because earlier on in the pandemic, and still just to a lesser degree, like Elon Musk was very much questioning the severity of the pandemic and, you know, like how big it was going to get and whether people were actually going to die, whether it was something we should worry about. He called for the economy to reopen. He sent his workers back when the, you know, the county said, like, don't do that, your factory can't reopen. It's wild, right? And now, despite saying all that, he's trying to frame his company as something that can like protect people from the coronavirus, which he said was not a big deal in the first place. Yeah, that is a complete disconnect. And I'm not sure if he just isn't talking to his board company engineers or someone else wrote that FAQ. But yeah, he's been saying publicly. Yeah, it's so wild.

Now, so what is happening in Vegas is one thing, but this project itself kind of presents a challenge for what the future of transportation should be, right? Because Elon Musk talks a lot about it being individualized mass transit, which is kind of like a contradiction in itself, and has made a number of statements in the past that are quite degrading and critical of public transportation. So what do you see as kind of what Elon Musk is trying to do when it comes to the future of transportation? And I guess, what does it suggest that, you know, he's so critical of transit and is really trying to push individualized mass transit or cars, you know,

put another way, as the future. Yeah, that was the greatest phrase, seeing all the memes that popped up from that phrase in particular that he tweeted in response to this, when people are like, wait, I thought it was supposed to be transit. I mean, even when you ask him these questions straight on, as I saw go down at the Boring Company opening in, I guess that was December of 2018 in LA, right? So he had always said, it's like when he is confronted either on Twitter and people are like, hey, you said this was transit. You said you were going to let people who are walking and biking have priority, which I still don't understand how that could possibly happen, especially not in, maybe just let people bike through the tunnel. Like that would be fun, put some cool lights up

or something. He keeps saying these things, but he's not backing it up with an actual plan that would show how it would become this like high capacity shared transit system. And even like very specifically, I remember at that press conference in 2018, somebody was like, you said that people who are riding bikes can be prioritized and people who are walking. And I also wanted to bring up that those bigger like shuttle van looking vehicles would have been great for people who use wheelchairs or mobility devices because you could just wheel on in, especially me and the family. Like, how am I going to get my kids all buckled into a car seat? And my two-year-old, if the car is

going 120 miles an hour, as they say, doesn't he need a car seat? Like, don't I need a car seat? I want to make sure that I'm feeling safe going through this tunnel at very high speeds, which was frankly, a terrifying experience when we did it at the test tunnel in Hawthorne. But it just seems like an afterthought to him because someone was like, well, if there's bikes and there's that many people, wouldn't you need bike racks? And he was like, okay, yeah, sure. And it was just, I'll say whatever I'll say to kind of like let you leave me alone on this for a minute. But it clearly hasn't been thought through.

That's what he does, right? Like you see it all the time on his Twitter feed, right? Like someone will tweet something at him like, what about this? He's like, yeah, we'll do that. And it's like. Yeah, some of those transit comments that he's made where I think he said, like, you know, you have to worry that someone on the bus is a serial killer or something. And he said other you have to worry that someone on the bus is a serial killer or something. And he said other things too. It is playing into that fear that a lot of people, I think,

have. It's a similar fear to going back and being on transit after we have been in this pandemic era right now getting around. And he is very well situated right now to really push that private car in a time where we know people are buying cars because they feel unsafe. We know that people want to buy electric cars or there is a desire. And we're seeing the regular traditional manufacturers really scale back their plans. And in some cases, like even drop them. He's going to win no matter what. There's no other path here because people who have a certain amount of money, they're going to buy a Tesla and they're going to become part of this tribe.

That's a kind way to put it. You're going to become part of this cult who likes to attack women journalists on Twitter who write about Tesla. Thank you. You're playing into that if you buy this car. But we've been left with very few other options. So I know a lot of people who say, yeah, I really don't agree with them. I don't want to support this, but I want to buy this car. But we've been left with very few other options. And so I know a lot of people who say, yeah, I really don't agree with them. I don't want to support this, but I, you know, I want to buy this car. And I think that requires a deeper look at what we're actually building up here and who is getting money, especially federal money to keep these companies going. And it's about to take another one of his businesses public. So it will literally be, you look around everywhere in your life. I think like Uber said it wanted to be the Amazon of transportation, but then there's Amazon is the Amazon of everything. And now actually Tesla might

become the Amazon of transportation in this whole thing. So what are we supporting? And when is someone really going to speak up? Starting with the city of Las Vegas, when will they say like, this is not in alignment with what we want to do in our city as we bring it back? Yeah, I think that's such a good point. You know, when you talk about how he discussed giving priority to pedestrians and cyclists, right? And the kind of 16-passenger vehicle, I guess, was... Probably, yeah. Yeah, fair enough.

Minivan-like thing. We wouldn't like that, so let's call it a min enough. Yeah. Minivan like thing. Let's call it perfect. So the minivan. So when he was proposing this, like it was in response to having gotten criticism, right? For promoting a system that looked like it was basically just going to be for cars yet again. And as you kind of touched on earlier, one of the criticisms that was leveled at him was that it wasn't really taking into account induced demand, which is when these investments are made, it encourages people to, in the realm of transportation, to take a certain form of transportation, right? So if you're expanding highways or roads, you're going to encourage more people to drive. If you're adding, say, bike lanes or better transit services or bus lanes, it's going to encourage people to

take those modes of transportation, right? So the thinking there is that if you're adding a ton of tunnels that are just for cars under a city, you're naturally going to encourage more use of cars. And this is something that Elon Musk really pushes back against and really opposes and acts like, you know, this is not something that exists. So what does that kind of show, I guess, like about his thinking about transportation and the misunderstandings that he has? Because I feel like part of this is kind of attributed to technology, right? And he kind of says that, like, we have this technology, and it can overcome this challenge, regardless of the kind of spatial implications that it suggests. I mean, sure, I guess we could all buy our own tunnel boring machine. And some of us could,

and they would just be the smaller diameter one that he is using. And I think the real thing that a lot of people miss is that the reason he is claiming he can build things so much faster and tunnel so much more efficiently is because it is literally a sewer that he is digging. It is not a subway tunnel.

It is not to the standard of say, Metro Rail here in LA, where we're building out a huge part of our system right now to allow a lot of people to be using at the same time, including people on bikes and people who are on foot and people who use mobility devices. Yes, I mean, in theory, that could work for you if you had enough money to do that and that you could dig a hole straight to your work. And I think that's what he's actually selling. And when he shows those pictures, I remember very particularly one diagram at one of the events and it was like hamster habitat. It just had like tubes and tubes and tubes like stacked in every direction. And it was like all the cars going through the different tunnels. So okay, that's $50 million per one mile of tunnel plus

a station to get down there, which it doesn't even have an elevator in it, by the way, it's just a ramp that you drive down. The earlier versions had these elevators that we were talking about before the street level elevators where you pull on it takes you down. So even the new renderings just show you just drive down, literally just going into a parking garage and then going into a place or a valet who might even have a person in the car, not even a robot car. But I think that he's good at selling that idea. And I think he knows the truth that there will be lines 500 vehicles long to get into that tunnel if you just allowed anyone to use it. But that's not really his problem. It's not really a vision that he wants to sell.

I feel like part of that, to get back to what you said earlier, relates to how I think he's really conceiving this based on his experience being stuck in traffic on the highway between his home and where he works. And he's not thinking about what it means for people in wheelchairs, what it means for people with families, like all of these different cases and all these different uses of transportation. It's like, no, I need to have an easy way to get from my home to my work. That's really the goal of this. But I'm going to try to sell it as part of like this kind of broader picture that is going to solve all of these kind of like transportation problems for all of these people. And when I get presented with criticism, I'll just like push back and keep going because no one really calls me on my shit anyway. And now this is the other thing they do is that

they have these competitions. They had one for like a hyperleave demonstration where it was to see how fast they could get this little, they call it a sled or a skate where it was like they could see if they could push it as fast as they could through this vacuum chamber and now they're going to have a tunneling competition where they're going to invite people to come and i don't know where all this ground they've been permitted to chew through is going to be maybe i don't know if it's under la or else but they're going to have a tunneling competition and it's the same kind of thing of like turning it into some kind of game and making it as this like entertainment of some sort. And that's what this is all about, which is, you know, you'd say it was fine if we

didn't have some really serious problems that we had to confront as a society right now. And for somebody who is at the same time, trying to put forth this idea that he's solving transportation, but making jokes about lithium mining, and how he has contributed to it and saying we'll orchestrate any kind of coup that we want to. I mean, that is top level irresponsibility and really just like no real concern for human life. This isn't a game we're playing right now. I completely agree. You talked about this kind of bigger problem, right? That cities are facing, that societies are facing. And I want to read you a quote because i think it will sound really familiar to you being in los angeles and california where you have this

they call it like nimby not in my backyard movement trying to oppose denser living you know transit oriented development all this sort of stuff right so at a presentation in 2018 elon must said you can weave the boring system tunnel network into the fabric of the city without changing the character of the city. The city will still feel the same. You're not going to get in anyone's way. You're not going to obstruct anyone's view. You will have this revolutionary transport system and your city will still feel like your city. Does that sound very similar to you? Wow. He got some good talking points for that one statement because I feel like that's finally getting to the heart

of why people would actually want something like this. Also why subways are actually a good idea. I think when he forgets those, the people who are most worried about character are also worried about vibrations tunneling. Or that there will be some kind of like methane explosion that their community will be blown up by. But that there will be some kind of like methane explosion that they, their community will be blown up by. But that's, that's good to hold him to that. And not that

he'll ever be held accountable for it. But if that statement was true, and to try to make it about tunneling or something, he should think about what it means when those cars have to come back to the surface, because they will eventually. And does that mean we need parking garages that are twice the height of anything else? I mean, you go to the actual SpaceX headquarters, which is something else that I really have tried to highlight. They have a parking garage that is as tall as the actual SpaceX building. They have a surface parking lot, which they had to move so they could start their tunneling enterprise in the parking lot. So they expanded their parking structure even more. And then people walking from their cars to get to work started getting hit by cars

because the street that it's on is a very big, wide, typical LA arterial street. Nobody's paying attention as they're going down this large stretch. You don't really know that people are going to be crossing the street. So they built a pedestrian bridge so that employees could safely get from the parking structure to the building. So what that is like a metaphor for is all their solutions. They made sure their employees are safe. They helped their employees to drive to work. But yet the SpaceX headquartered is like three blocks from the green line from a metro station. And there's been nothing to help people. I'm sure some of their employees take transit. I don't know how many they would tell me. I ask this repeatedly. They're doing nothing to help them get safely to work. And they're doing nothing

to help the bigger problem, which is that two blocks down, more people are still going to get hit by cars on that super fast road. Just because they made it safer for one small stretch for one small group of employees hasn't done anything to the bigger picture. It's so true, right? When I read that quote, I see it the way you see it. And then I'm also like, is this trying to kind of play to this desire to kind of like not build taller housing, not build denser housing, and just kind of like keep this automotive development. And this is your way to like, just reduce your traffic and you know, keep everything the same, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you look where he lives, I think he's selling all of his houses now and leaving Bel Air, but he has like five houses in

this very exclusive part of the city. And yeah, I think that is part of the dream that you're selling, especially with this luxury, something like a cyber truck, whatever else is coming up next. That's not really designed for getting around a city in the most efficient or responsible way, I guess. But you're selling that idea with it that like nothing's going to change. You can still drive to work. You'll be even less bothered by the other people around you. And that's car companies have always been selling that. But he's managed to make people feel better about it somehow because it's an electric vehicle. And I think that's something I had written about earlier this year as well, is the way that the electric Hummer is being marketed now.

And with all car advertising, it's this idea that it kind of doesn't matter as long as your car is quiet. That's like, you know, you're still really cool. You're not doing any damage because your car is Wyatt. It's wild. Like, you know, the justifications that they go through to try to like continue this entire system, right? So that's kind of what I wanted to end on was asking you what you think about this broader attempt by the tech industry to kind of change transportation and what effects that's having. Because as you say, in Vegas, we can see that they're more interested in building these

boring company systems while transit funding is potentially being cut. We've also seen Musk saying that there could be serial killers on the subway, talking about individualized mass transit. The Koch brothers have used the prospect of autonomous vehicles to campaign against transit funding and transit ballot measures across the United States. So the tech industry is promoting others have used the prospect of autonomous vehicles to campaign against transit funding and transit ballot measures across the United States. So the tech industry is promoting like all of these big ideas for transportation. But do you think they're actually having a positive effect on kind of the discussion that we're having about transportation in cities? Or do you think it's kind of distracting us from better transit, e-bikes, all these things that could

really be moving us in the right direction, but we're kind of being tripped up because of all of this money that's being poured into better cars or rentable bikes and scooters and things like this that are really running into a lot of problems the further down the track that they get. I think maybe this was the year, and maybe it was already happening even before coronavirus. This was maybe the year that regular people, people meaning not like people who think about this all the time, like you and me, realize that autonomous vehicles are not going to be happening. I'm just going to say it straight out. I'm sure you'll zip around somewhere in a little 15 mile an hour shuttle, perhaps not feeling super confident about my

children never having to learn to drive anymore. As I used to say, that was kind of my dream. I mean, I still hope they don't have to learn how to drive, but for different reasons, like you said. And I think with that awareness has also hopefully during this time come with a deeper understanding of who those policies were actually hurting and who those policies were actually meant to exclude. And as we've all taken a little bit of a step back during the pandemic and seen empty streets, but that came at the cost of lives and you saw clear skies, but that meant that people had to continue working even though you got to stay home. I think if we can start to rethink our cities in a way that keeps the spirit of what we think we saw and why we thought it was a utopia, even if it was truly not,

and start to understand how our whole entire transit system can start to serve the people who took care of us that whole time. And we felt like we could do whatever we wanted in our cities and we could open up street restaurants and we could scoot around with our kids on the bikes and on the streets because I saw all of that happen. But I also want to make sure my neighbor doesn't have to wait in the sun

for a bus that is not coming as she goes to the hospital. So we've got a lot more work to do and it's not going to be achieved by autonomous vehicles in the next five or 10 years. And if we can chip away at some of the bigger inequities that have caused this problem in the first place and just make everybody a lot happier as they're getting around, as they're

going back to work, what we should do is make sure people can get jobs near them. Make sure that people don't have to commute anymore. Let's get rid of that. Let's make sure that we can keep people housed and make sure that they can take advantage of unemployment benefits while they look for work and give them free transit passes to get around the city to go anywhere they need to go. This is the way we need to start taking care of people. So hopefully, if anything, we have that path forward now. I completely agree with that. So many of these big tech ideas like the autonomous vehicles or the boring company tunnels aren't really going to address those bigger structural problems or really help those populations that are really not being served take the experience of this pandemic and try to build better, more inclusive cities, that really needs to be at the forefront. And for me, at least, I just don't think that what is coming from the tech industry for the most part is really serving us in that way. That's right. Alyssa, it's been fantastic to speak with you and hear your perspective. I thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure. Alyssa Walker is the urbanism editor at Curbed, co-host of LA Podcast, and a contributor to KCRW's Greater LA. You can follow her on Twitter at awalker in LA. You can also follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us, and you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. If you liked the episode, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Ricochet Podcast Network, a group of left-wing podcasts made in canada thanks so much for listening