Tech Won't Save Us - Transit is the Future w/ James Wilt

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by James Wilt to talk about how COVID-19 is affecting transportation systems, the flaws in tech’s auto-oriented visions of the future, and why we need to fight for better transit systems to more equitably serve everyone.James Wilt is the author of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?: Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk". He's also written for Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch, and Passage. Follow James on Twitter as @james_m_wilt.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

There is absolutely reason to be concerned that this is a crisis that's going to be exploited by venture capital, by tech capital. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that wonders how Apple is going to keep saying that it promotes privacy when it's installing a COVID-19 tracking app on everyone's phone. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with James Wilt. James is the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Uber, Google, and Elon Musk. He's also written for Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch, and Passage, as well as many other publications. You can follow James on Twitter at James underscore M underscore Wilt. In today's conversation, we talk about how technology probably won't solve all of our transportation

problems if we still keep relying on automobiles, and why instead we need much more of a focus on transit and alternatives to cars. Tech Won't Save Us is a new podcast, so if you enjoy what you hear, make sure to go to Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you listen to podcasts and leave a review so more people can find us. And obviously feel free to share this interview, because it not only helps us, but it also helps James and the other guests who come on the show to promote their books and everything that they're doing. So thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. James Wilt, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. It's great to have you on today. Thanks so much for having me, Paris.

Thank you. So I want to start, obviously, we're in this really unique time with COVID-19, you know, spreading around the world, and we're shutting stuff down to try to ensure it doesn't spread and to flatten that curve. And in response, like your book focuses on transit and transportation. So we're seeing some transit agencies eliminating fares, other transit agencies cutting back on service COVID-19 that's maybe positive or negative? And what does that suggest for maybe future campaigns to make transit free, expand transit services, things like that? Yeah, you're right that there has been a really wide range of responses to this. Like in a number of cities across Canada, which is what I pay most attention to, they have made, they've just got rid of fares because they don't want, you know, riders to I mean, it's something that a lot of carefree advocates have, you know, pushed for for a long time, but I definitely don't think they saw it kind of, you know, emerging this way within this context. So that's one way. Another way that we've seen in places like Toronto is vastly increased, you know, sort of fair enforcement is that, you know, this is a trend that's been happening for a long time that rather than working to improve service by increasing frequency of service and also reducing or abolishing fares,

some cities have gone in the opposite direction as service sort of flatlines or actually decreases as represented by ridership or coverage or that kind of thing. They've increased the number of air enforcement officers. And so this disproportionately impacts, of course, Black and Indigenous people and people in low-income communities. And so we've seen some of that. But in terms of looking forward, not to say that my book has it all or that the answer is just confirmed through this but i do think that there is like external proof in the sense that the way that i laid out my book was

and this is you know talking to many experts from across north america about transit including yourself is that you know the the answer to um you know flatlining or defining transit ridership is improving service uh and so that means putting more buses on the road, more trains on the road, increasing the frequency in which they come. So if you miss a bus or a train, you can be guaranteed another one. You don't have to worry that you're going to show up late

to your job or your appointment or whatnot. And also reducing fares to make it more equitable and affordable and some of the people are going to tend towards, which we've seen numerous examples of around the world, and just make it a more comfortable experience. So things like heated or air-conditioned shelters, lots of public washrooms,

making it fully accessible for people with disabilities, et cetera, et cetera. And so these are the things I kind of lay out in my book. And watching COVID unfold, it's like these remain the exact things that have to happen, is that in order to guarantee social distancing, you need to put more buses on the road. You need to give greater ability for people to be able to hop on a bus while preventing overcrowding. And overcrowding

is linked to a bunch of other issues too, including harassment and assault of women, non-binary trans people on transit. And so this is something that advocates have been pointing out for a very long time, is that you do not want overcrowding because that can allow people to engage in those kind of hostilities towards people and then kind of get away with it. And so once again, we see that the response is not to abandon transit and just say, well, we have to cut service because we're not getting enough fare revenue, because that just puts the people who rely on transit, you know, the so-called captive riders, which I think is kind of a problematic concept to begin with, but that's how many transit agencies do frame it, that, you know, that they just have to live with, you know,

what the city can pretend to afford to provide. And so, you know, I think moving forward, you know, keeping fares abolished, I think is a great step. We've seen really radical successes, you know, in places like Dunkirk, France, which saw a massive spike in ridership and a full 50% of that came from people who had previously driven, right? So, you know, in terms of getting cars off the road and people onto buses, that's a super great step. And also, you know, it does protect drivers. So in the case of COVID, the key concern is, you know, operators will get coughed on, sneezed on, these kind of things. And, you know, there's been a string of incidents where this has been, this has happened intentionally, and that's a real huge issue in itself. But even just accidental, you know, the risk of an operator being exposed to this. And we have seen transit operators die as a result after warning that this exact thing will happen.

Is that minimizing the amount of interaction between the operator and the riders through fare-free transit and also all-door boarding? So if people can enter it at the back or the midsection of the bus. Yeah, and once again, just improving the transit experience for everyone is like a great step to ensuring that people can continue to provide the truly essential work that is required during this crisis.

So a lot of that is low wage workers and a lot of those low wage workers will be working hours, which are not nine to five and so this is something that many cities have traditionally neglected is that they'll provide decent transit service through the nine to five commuting window but then if you work or if you need to grocery shop or if you need to pick up your different child care anytime but you know after or before that the transit service can often you know kind of neglect you and so really really working to improve that.

And ultimately what that means is through the abolishing of fares that this revenue comes from general revenue. And so, you know, a government will fund it like they fund a health care service in Canada. I mean, that's kind of a complex example in itself. But, you know, the idea that we treat public transit as a public service and that it is thus funded publicly, as opposed to through fares, which are ultimately user fees and are often very regressive, even with low-income passes. And so I think all of that is to say that what I tried to outline in the book, that we need greatly increased funding. We need to prioritize transit vehicles over automobiles on the streets is also very necessary. And improving the experience for transit riders who, as transit

advocates often point out, have to start as a pedestrian or a cyclist in order to get to the transit stop in the first place. So all these things remain true. A lot of cities will look at this and be like, this is the time we have to administer further austerity. But what that's going to do is just create this vicious cycle that many transit agencies are not going to survive. Or if they are going to survive, they're going to come out with very, very weakened service. And so this is once again, just a time to really, really commit to a radical improvement in transit service, which protects everyone involved, the riders, the operators, all the other transit workers who show up every single day and put themselves at risk, which is ultimately

the result of lack of funding and lack of support from government. Yeah, I think that's a really great point because the fundamentals of what we need for great transit doesn't change just because there's a virus going around now, right? It really highlights, it even further highlights that those are the things that we need in order to improve transportation in our cities. And I think that one of the real benefits of your book is that you really focus on vulnerable people, on minorities, on the people who often are not included in the conversation around transportation in cities, right? Like you talk about the captive riders. I saw Jarrett Walker write recently about transit

dependent people and how now these people are often some of the only people left on transit services. And in many cities, the services have been cut. So it's more difficult for them to get to their jobs when those are the very people who are keeping our society running right now, who are keeping us fed, who are ensuring we can get from place to place, who ensure that we get our packages from the great evil amazon and anywhere else right yeah um but like these people who commonly we so easily kind of denigrate as low-wage workers and people who are just getting subsidized on transit because they can't afford a car, who have no skills and thus don't really contribute anything to our society and so don't deserve to be paid very much and all these sorts of things. Like it's kind of being flipped on its head and it's being proven that the job creators are not really the value creators or the people who are really dependent on it's the people at the very bottom who are often treated really terribly um who we all now depend on to be able to stay home and to work from home and all of these things um but like

these these people are again in many cases not um like being put at risk because they're being put on transit services that have been cut back um instead of you know actually increasing the service to ensure that they can stay safe and they can keep socially distant from each other exactly all these different things right yeah and so i things. I wonder as well, because there has been talk of density being one of the problems with coronavirus. I saw some numbers recently from China that suggested there was a significant shift from bus and metro use towards private car use in response to the coronavirus. So I wonder, like you talked about what really we should be doing in response to coronavirus and what we should do after coronavirus to improve transit services, but are you worried that

being socially distant, maybe people being scared of being close to other people will actually, and of course the oil price being down and gas being so cheap, that there will be a push for even more automobility and kind of these tech solutions to automobility, these autonomous vehicles, electric cars, ride-hailing, and all these sorts of things, once we get to the other side of COVID-19? Or do you think there is still a lot of opportunity to push for better transit services? I think there's both. I think there is absolutely reason to be concerned that this is a crisis that's going to be exploited by venture capital, by tech capital, as crises have been exploited for many, many years.

And that's something I try to point out in my book, is that the reason that ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft have been able to really capture the public imagination and really materially change conditions on the ground is because in a lot of places, transit service is deeply insufficient. And there are real, real problems with it. And so the likes of Uber and Lyft have been able to successfully make appeals to affluent people who can afford to rely on ride hailing and really kind of shift the conversation in that way. So I definitely can see that sort of thing continuing, you know, the idea that, you know, Uber and Lyft or autonomous vehicles are, you know, intrinsically safer because you're the only one on the vehicle, aside from the driver, and, you know, you maintain

this social distance by sitting, you know, at the corner from the driver, et cetera, et cetera, you know, like lots of, you know, steps being taken. But, you know, to return to the concerns around, you know, like harassment and assault on transit, which is something that is a deeply real concern and has happened to many, many women and non-binary and trans people across the world, is that Uber and Lyft has responded to that and been like, well, look at us. We can guarantee your safety and we can respond to this crisis by offering you this service. And then, of course, what do we find out through Uber's own disclosures is that, you know, thousands and thousands of people have been subjected to harassment and assault in these environments as well. And there is very little accountability or transparency. And, you know, Uber has taken steps to really try to minimize the amount of liability that they're exposed to because, of course, they claim that they're just, you know, they're just a matchmaker, so to speak, between the rider

and the driver. And so, you know, looking at an instance like that, we can see very clearly that, you know, this is really a marketing ploy, that they'll say, we're safer, but there is really no guarantee of that whatsoever. But that isn't necessarily, you. We're not really dealing in the realm of factual or evidence-based arguments. If we were, buses and trains would be dominating our streets because, as Jared Walker always tries to point out, transportation is an issue of geometry and there's just not the conversation that we're having. It's about appealing to people's fears. A lot of these fears can be you know, words that I would use, but this is, you know, transportation that poor people use or transportation, you know, that's, you know, homeless people use or these kind of things. And so there's already the stigma, which is produced under conditions of austerity once again. And so, you know, to point to the second part of your question about the opportunity, The opportunity absolutely still remains. There are some really strong transit rider organizations across North America, TTC Riders in Toronto comes to mind, and organizations that have been doing really

effective work in collaboration with transit unions, whether it be ATU or other transportation unions. And so there's a lot of opportunity within that, but of course there's opportunity in many, many different sectors of society. And at this point, it's kind of scary at how quickly things are progressing towards the scenario that is kind of like the worst case or close to the worst case. So I tried to strike that balance in the book itself in terms of tone, like, you know, things are really bad in terms of transit. I started by talking about the declining ridership over the past several years. You know, and there's no use

denying the fact that transit, many transit agencies are deeply in trouble. But out of that, we can also come up with a better analysis of why that is the case. It's not because transit is inferior. It's not because people don't want to ride transit. It's because good transit service isn't being provided. And when it is being provided, it's often to the tech hubs. It's often used as a means of appealing to capital to come invest in the city. And so when it's done with that intention, it often really undermines the case for transit that we should be making, which is that this is a this is a this is infrastructure, it's service that has a potential for really radical climate action, has a potential for improved accessibility for people with disabilities and seniors. I'm basically listing the fundamental argument of my book here, but that it ultimately is a potential at this point. In order to translate it from a potential into an actuality, we need to struggle for it.

And so that's where the opportunity is, is that we're in a moment of crisis. And if we organize, we can win those. But if we don't, if we sit on the sidelines and only be able to, you know, fact-based responses, as important as those are, you know, that's what most of my book is, is arguing on the merits of facts. But if that's all that we do, we will likely continue to lose and transit service will likely continue to suffer as a result. So I don't know if that strikes the adequately optimistic, pessimistic analysis, but that's what I'm kind of hoping for.

No, that's perfect. I think that's like a fantastic point, right? Because we see that in the cities where local municipal governments are willing to really invest in transit, really expand services, really make bus services better, streetcars, metros, all those sorts of things, the ridership does tend to go up right we see that in in vancouver in seattle where they've made major investments in transit services the ridership has increased as well and of course in vancouver at least until recently um the transit service didn't even have to compete with uber um so that's right you know that wasn't there to take away the ridership as so many studies show that Uber does. And of course, you touched on Uber and ride hailing and how it very much serves often a more privileged group of people, even though a lot of their marketing suggests that they serve everyone in the community and it's very egalitarian, right? But all we need to do is look at the studies that are done, which show that the people who use Uber are predominantly young, college educated, urban, and earning above $75,000

a year in the United States or above $100,000 Canadian a year in Toronto, right? So we can see that the people who are benefiting most from this service are people who are relatively well off. Whereas the impacts of services like Uber are to increase congestion, take people away from transit services. And so it actually negatively impacts the transit services and sort of the transportation options that are available to lower income people in communities, right? But I think one of the valuable pieces of your book is that you go through these arguments, you go through the facts on ride hailing. You're not just making some ideological argument, some like Drill Marxist argument or something,

right? So we really get that and it's really important. And I would like you to also touch on, because you mentioned climate and climate is a huge part of this. And there's a lot of comparisons being made toward how we completely change our economy overnight to respond to coronavirus. We shut everything down. It looks like it's going to be shut down for a while to come.

And we've been told for years that we can't do anything like that to respond to climate change, right? So not only now are a lot of cars off the road so we have this opportunity to really decide how we respond to um coronavirus like how we form our transportation systems when um coronavirus is over and where we can kind of go outside again um and we can decide whether we just unleash the automobiles again or put a lot of transit in its place and reduce the space for automobiles um but it also presents us this opportunity to really kind of think about what

the economy should look like and whether we should really start to respond to this climate crisis whether we should bail out the oil industry or whether we should respond with a Green New Deal or some sort of massive action. And one of the biggest sources of emissions in our societies is transportation. And we're often told that electric cars are the solution to reducing those emissions, because as soon as you cut off the tailpipe, everything is solved, right? The tailpipe emissions. But in your book, you explain how it's not as easy as that. So could you talk about why electric cars are not so much our solution to this problem, what the potential issues with that are, and why transit is the better alternative.

Yeah, for sure. I think it's important in this kind of conversation to always start with acknowledging the merits of electric vehicles, because there is absolutely a reason why people have tended towards them as a solution. And in terms of radically increasing the efficiency of the motor itself, internal combustion engines are just hideously inefficient in terms of how much of the energy gets translated into the momentum propelling the vehicle itself. Electric motors are very, very efficient. They use energy way more effectively than gasoline or diesel powered. And so, you know,

that's definitely a merit. It reduces air pollution from the engine itself. You know, it's quieter. You know, you can charge it at home. You know, there's all these kind of, you know, benefits, which I think we have to acknowledge Of course. They're real. But at the same time, we have to compare it to what is the potential politics and benefits of transit as a comparison. So one thing I know that you've written about and that I touch on in the book is, and this, you know, it's a tricky line

because this is a line that is harnessed by the right wing to dismiss any advances in climate policy. But there is a kernel of truth in it in terms of the sheer impacts on resources. So the amount of mining that has to scale up in order to actually support everyone having a very large battery in their vehicle. And there is this battery size race going on because of course there's fears about your car running out, you know, if you're going to the grocery store and then you're stranded. And then, so in response, some... Often unfounded fears, of course, right? Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, this is propagated by the Wright-Wooden Lobby that obviously has investments in maintaining fossil fuel status quo.

But, you know, companies like Tesla have responded by just creating really, really gigantic batteries, which you can drive for hundreds and hundreds of miles at a time. And these require a mass amount of resources. And so I spoke with Thierry O'Francos, who's a prof in the US, and she's done a lot of really, really excellent work around These require a mass amount of resources. And so I spoke with Thierry Ofrancos,

who's a prof in the US, and she's done a lot of really, really excellent work around lithium mining and what that looks like in the lithium triangle in South America. And it's already having really devastating impacts on the watersheds, on the indigenous land use, and all these sorts of things. And of course, we can always claim

that there's some tech solution coming off in the near future that will render that obsolete or whatever, but frankly it's not here and we have to make decisions on the technologies that we have available at this time, because that's a popular way of kind of dismissing and undermining critique is, and this isn't just in transportation, it's everywhere, is we see in, we see in the oil sands, oh, you know, we've got a solution coming off in 10 years to tailings waste, you know, we'll clean it all up, no problem. But, you know,

we never actually see that actualized. Elon Musk is definitely going to solve this for us, I know. Yeah, yeah, totally. So the resource materials are a huge part. And of course, you know, transit uses, you know, electric vehicles uses in transit also relies on batteries. But the argument that I find quite compelling is that the better integrated, the better plan your transit system is, the lower the resource demand will be. And so if we look at the use of streetcars or trolleybuses, If they do need batteries at all, they're very small batteries. And these are basically, you know, in the case of trolleybuses, it's for when they go off-wire. And so, you know, you can look in Vancouver with the trolleybuses

that they are predominantly linked to the wires, but if for whatever reason the plan requires them to go off-wire, they rely on the small battery, and then once they relink, they can recharge. And so that's a far smaller battery, propelling a far greater number of people than a Tesla or an Essent Leaf or whatnot. And that kind of gets to the broader point around sheer efficiency of transit as a mode, is that the fact that you can fit 40 to 60 people on a pretty regular size bus, of course, if we're trying to deal with overcrowding, maybe it'd be

on the lower end of that, is that it's far more efficient on a per passenger per kilometer ratio than it is if you're putting one to two or even five people on a Tesla. And the idea that five people are going to be riding in a Tesla is not borne out by any of the evidence of the push for carpooling over the last several decades as kind of a solution to gasoline consumption. And so that would be another point for me is just that the potential in the transit mode, if it is properly funded and if there is really good service, is a lot bigger and it's a lot more efficient than if we make a push to electric vehicles.

And I mean, I could go on this all day, but I think the final point I'll make at the moment is that electric vehicles maintain many of the negative impacts of automobility that we currently see today. And so, yes, it reduces tailpipe emissions. Yes, it reduces air pollution from the engine. But, you know, in the case of environmental impacts, it maintains air pollution from the tires and from the brakes. And yes, there's regenerative braking, so there's an argument against that. But from the tires themselves, there's a huge amount of air pollution that is created from that, that often ends up in watersheds or in the ocean itself, and the microplastics and all that kind of thing.

But in terms of other impacts of automobility, there is a lot of automobile-related inequality. And so the amount of money that you have to shell out for a new or even gently used automobile is quite a lot. And I don't think advocates of electric vehicles necessarily factor that in because the way that they look at these things is it's a sensible purchase. It's going to pay off over a decade or two decades because the amount of money that you spend on actually powering the car is far less than... You can use it as a robo-taxi. Yeah, you can use it as a robo-taxi. Yeah, you can use it as a robo-taxi. You can store electricity overnight and then feed it back into the grid for a benefit.

You know, all these kind of things. But, you know, for a lot of people who are facing deep transportation inequalities today, that doesn't resolve anything, even with very generous state subsidies for electric vehicles. And so there is, you know, it's kind of like an elite projection in terms of what's possible for everyone to use. And of course, the more people we have using electric vehicles, the more batteries we need to produce and the more impacts it has on communities where these minerals and metals are mined. And then there's also the spatial inefficiencies, the fact that we just simply don't have enough space in cities for everyone to have an electric vehicle. The fact that transit

is an inherently more efficient service in terms of emissions, but also just in terms of the amount of space that it uses. There's that famous meme where you have 40, I think it's 40 or 60 cars, and it just fills up the entire screen up to the horizon. And then there's one bus, and then there's like a small pocket of cyclists, and they all represent the same number of people, right? So that's a pretty intuitive way to look at that problem. You know, I could continue to kind of give examples of why electric vehicles are not the future we should be advocating for. But I think the way that it's been talked about, even on the electoral left, has been kind of disappointing, is that we often see electric vehicles posited as something that can be proliferated alongside

transit. An argument that I try to make in my book is that, like, really, we have to be thinking about this as an either or. And I know people will criticize that or say that that's you know overly reductionist or whatever but we but every every uh private automobile that is on the road is slowing down everyone else including transit and you see that every time you take transit in winnipeg which is where i am is that the the reason that the buses are so slow the reason they're so late the reason that you can't rely on them is because they get clogged up in cars. And the simple solution to that is taking space away from cars. So that means dedicated lanes. We've seen successes on this in the streetcar line in Toronto and the rapid transit

in New York City is that we need to physically be removing vehicles from the road and replacing that with really, really high quality transit. So that's another reason why I kind of push back against the idea of electric vehicles is that it's making transit worse. Every time someone buys an electric vehicle, it's a potential transit rider who is going to be opting to drive their electric vehicle for the foreseeable future. And that's a great concern to me. on active transportation, which includes quality pedestrian infrastructure, cycling, all these kinds of things,

to really knit a city together in a way which not only gives people the option to take transit, but makes it greatly preferable because it's far more affordable, it's far more enjoyable, and you can count on getting from one place to the other far more efficiently and far lower emissions as well. So I'll leave it at that for now.

Yeah, but those are fantastic points, right? I think the equity question is a really big one because I read the study out of the Nordic countries. And obviously, Norway is one of these countries that has a really high penetration of electric vehicles. And even the experts over there were saying, like, we're really concerned that we're subsidizing electric vehicles, but that subsidy is primarily more to lower income people and the people who actually need those subsidies, not higher income people who can afford these vehicles anyway, and are often buying them as like secondary vehicles, and not really taking advantage of them in the way that they should. Well, yeah, and we've seen the same thing in the States, is that the subsidies are primarily going to higher income households. And one of the interesting things that one study has found is that many of the switches that are happening are from fairly efficient hybrid vehicles to electric vehicles.

And so the relative improvement from an emissions point of view is quite low. mean that a single family or even an individual is getting, say, a $5,000 subsidy from the state for their electric vehicle, which is likely going to only benefit them. Maybe if they have a partner and kids, maybe that's two or three people. But on a pretty regular basis, we're talking about a $5,000 subsidy for one to two people. And think of what that could do if we kind of accumulated all of those and invested that into transit. And even beyond that point, just the idea that we're really encouraging more automobility, which once again is making every other mode of transportation less efficient and less viable. So yeah, we're seeing that happen in the US and Canada pretty much everywhere where these kind of subsidies are being implemented yeah of course and and like you said often we see left-wing parties especially in north america or center-left parties marginally who present these environmental plans but when it comes to transportation the focus is so often on electric vehicles right instead of on expanding transit um and it was actually you who brought

the trolley bus the electric trolley bus to my attention because i was like wow like obviously buses are much better than electric cars like electric buses um but then if you can implement trolley buses especially around the denser parts of the city then that further reduces the resources that you need to extract and the batteries that you need in order to make the city run right so you're cutting out the emissions assuming that you're using um you know renewable energies and not fossil fuel energy production in order to run the system even then it would be more efficient as you say because those batteries are more efficient and and what have you yeah um but like it would be a significant benefit if we can switch toward using trolley buses instead of just um like the larger scale of the electric

buses right yeah and i i i should make just a very brief intervention that like even even if we're only using diesel buses or um impressed natural gas buses or whatever whatever the the city's fleet is getting uh way more people onto those buses is just an inherent climate solution we we have the infrastructure in place and if we improve service if we hire more uh you know good unionized drivers and if we just make sure that this you know this has like really continuous service throughout the day and the night, we will see just a major improvement in emissions. And, you know, this is something that we saw in the last federal election in Canada, was that when transit was brought up, it was often, okay, we need electric buses. And of course,

I'd be like, no, no, no, we need trolleybuses. But ultimately, it's like, no, we just need improved transit service, like commit to federal funding of transit service and hopefully reduce or abolish fares along the way. And that will just radically improve transit ridership. And that in itself is a climate policy. I think over time, over the next five, 10 years, as these older buses begin to be retired, whether it's just because of age or also because of a desire for cleaner and quieter buses, we can switch towards these newer modes. But yeah, I just wanted to make the point that even given the existing fleet of transit infrastructure that we have, getting more people into that is in itself a private solution.

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point. Now, I have one final question for you. Of course. Often when we present transit and kind of like these larger reimaginings of what the city could look like, there's pushback, right? Because people are used to a certain way of building the city and of living in the city. And I often think about how Mark Fisher wrote about this concept of capitalist realism, right? This notion that it's easier to imagine the end of capitalism,

or sorry, it's easy to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Exactly, right? Yeah. So I think about that notion, I think like there almost seems to be something similar with with automobility. Right. We have this system of automobility. We have these cities that are dominated by cars. And it can be really difficult for people to imagine like what their life is going to look like in that kind of alternative system. And in your book, you write that transit success is a virtuous cycle. It can be difficult for people to imagine the benefits of a dedicated bus lane or an all-door boarding system until it's implemented. And every small success is a step in that direction. And I think Toronto's dedicated King Street pilot project for streetcars was kind of an example of that, right? And we're sort of seeing the same thing now in the United States with, I think, is the

14th Street busway in New York City and Market Street being close to cars in San Francisco. So I'm wondering, how do we kind of change people's mind and make them kind of wake up to the benefits that transit could have in their lives and in the lives of the people around them as well? And what is kind of the way that we fight to get this kind of agenda implemented when there is is still so much pushback like on a political level yeah absolutely it's obviously it's it's like the most important question kind of that we're facing uh i have a few scattered ideas the first one is uh the promise of fair free transit and i know that transit wonks will hear that and just groan because they're like, oh, this is just a fake solution. But the reason that I find it extremely appealing as a struggle is because, A, it gives people a really intuitive sense that the interaction that they're having is with a public service. And it's a collective service as opposed to something that you pay for as a user fee.

And some people who ride transit do see it as that, but that tends to be people who tend to be a bit more well off and can celebrate transit systems of different kinds around the world. And we did actually see that in Winnipeg last year, there was a very protracted, very brutal standoff between the union and the transit agency over some very, very moderate demands from

the union, like just having slightly extended bathroom breaks for drivers and these kind of things. And the union took inspiration from some actions that had been taken by the transit unions in Japan and also in Australia. I think it was Brisbane, was that they basically declared fair free days. And it was kind of like a, it was an interesting thing to see unfold because they just, they simply didn't enforce it. So they didn't inform people that they didn't have to pay, but they didn't enforce it when people didn't. And so there was this movement that was kind of encouraged by the union and also by supporters was just informing people the fact that, okay, on this day, you don't have to pay. And this is purely anecdotal, but I know that when I took the bus that day, and I did have conversations with other people who took the bus that day,

was it felt like a radically different experience of riding the bus. And of course, that doesn't improve service. That doesn't mean that your bus is going to show up on time or show up ever. But I think that's a starting point is really redefining transit as a public service. And linked to that is really pushing back against what we see, very racist and white supremacist fare enforcement in places like New York City, Toronto. We've seen actions take place around the world where there's these organized fare hopping. There's also organized reporting of when transit cops show up. And so to link those struggles together, to say by abolishing fares,

we are improving the sense of one's participation in a collective society. We are fighting back against racist policing, which will often end in very large fines or incarceration. And then also it protects transit workers. And this is like a really big point that I try to make again and again, is that there was an internal survey done of drivers across North America by ATU, and they found overwhelmingly that assaults or harassment of drivers is overwhelmingly caused by fare disputes. And, isn't to say that you eliminate fares and there's going to be no issues at all for drivers.

Any driver will tell you that that is not true. But the fact that someone comes on and they are having a hard day for whatever reason, whether they're dealing with traumas or mental health or substance use or whatever it may be, and then you combine that with an altercation caused over fares, and that can be very dangerous for drivers and drivers should not be put in that position. So that's another argument that I make for carefree. a collective struggle on many, many fronts against austerity, against capitalism, and against privatization. And this is something that I don't think transit advocates have really pointed out too much.

And I think in part that is because they don't see this as much of a problem. I think they see oftentimes any transit infrastructure being constructed as an inherently good thing. But I think the privatization of transit, which in itself is linked to ongoing austerity and the downloading of fiscal responsibility for buildings kind of services on municipalities or counties or that kind of thing, it really, really creates a lot of resentment among potential transit riders. And there's a whole bunch of complicated reasons for this. I won't get into at the moment, but we've seen this play out in the UK. We've seen how buses and trains have become wildly more expensive. Their service has been slashed. The quality of services has

declined. And the actual routes that are serviced tend to be the ones that benefit or are used by affluent people. Because if private capital is is behind this then the interest is to generate as much profit as possible which tends to be uh servicing you know more more affluent people so yeah we've seen that this in um with metro links in toronto which is a very bizarre uh organization which is like kind of quasi privatized but they are getting um pretty big money from the canada infrastructure, which was established to attract private capital, including from the likes of SNC-Lavalin, which itself completely botched the construction of the Ottawa LRT, as we're seeing again and again and again. So what this can do is have the reverse effect, is that you have an entire demographic of potential transit riders who see this kind of thing unfold. And they're uh okay so uh snc level and the

consortium behind i believe they're called radeau transit group um decided for one of the you know for the lrt stations to use a very uh low quality um material for for the steps and so what that meant is that as soon as it snowed as soon as moisture got on the steps people began slipping so they're they're basically risking breaking bones or severely injuring themselves just trying to get onto an LRT. And that's only like that's the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems with the Ottawa LRT. But people will have these experiences of transit privatization and then kind of write off transit as a whole as a result. So that's part of what we have to fight. And, you know, some ATU locals and other transit unions have been fighting against that,

especially Doug Ford's attempt to upload the subway to the province and then presumably package it off for privatization. And, you know, related to that is just the need to make this a real struggle, which is connected to many other struggles. So struggles for public housing, struggles for better health care, struggles for child care and access to education and all these kind of things. And so to really position it as part of a broader liberatory struggle, because I think if we, you know, this is coming from someone who just wrote an entire book about transit, but I think if we fixate too much on transit, we can run into some issues in the sense that

we just accept any transit project as an inherently good one. And I think we've seen many examples of why that's not true. You know, we can see Elon Musk, you know, trying to make his stabs at what he calls transit, which is clearly not transit. And some some city officials in Chicago and elsewhere will will embrace that, even though they have a perfectly functional blue line to to the airport. And so, you know, we really need to be careful about the kind of transit projects that we push for. You know, for example, it's not just about ridership. It's also about quality of service for existing riders. So in Winnipeg's North End, which is predominantly indigenous and predominantly low income, that entire area of the city is very, very neglected by service.

And there's arguably, there's technically transit service, but it is very, very neglected by service. And there's arguably, there's technically transit service, but it's very, very poor in terms of its efficiency and its timeliness and all the rest. And so I think really working to fight with those communities for better transit service and not do this top down, okay, you're having this, and this is going to be good for you, because that can really lead to negative outcomes. With that said, and this is something that I've been somewhat inspired by, is the idea, and this is a complicated one also, but just taking space for transit and for pedestrians and for cyclists, I think, can be really effective. And I would be fascinated to see how this would pan out in Winnipeg. But for example, because of COVID, they have shut down a number of streets for pedestrian cyclists,

scooters, whatever. And this has happened in a number of other cities too. And it's kind of incredible just to walk on these streets. And I've experienced this feeling in protests before, where rallies and marches have taken the street before, is that you'll be in the middle of Winnipeg, in the middle of Portage and Main. You've got banks on all four corners and and everything and you look around you're like

this is a you have to kind of save it same experience as riding fair free is that you have this just this radical kind of like internal shift of what life could be like i think that can be a very powerful thing and so there's these you know there's these uh i believe they're called tactical bus lanes these ideas that you just you take a lane that exists on the road and you paint it red or whatever color. And then you say, this is going to be for buses or, you know, bikes or whatever only. And then you do that for a month. You do that for three months. You see how it goes. And this of course has to be in deep conversation with the people who are most effective because when they do bus network redesigns, there can often be hostility towards that because people who

have come to rely on a certain type of bus service and see that radically changed overnight without what they consider to be proper consultation can lead to some really negative outcomes. So I think even if you're doing a surprise tactical bus lane, you need to do it as carefully as you can, but you also need to be prepared for the backlash from the people who have the most power, which is the business lobby and which is the affluent people who can afford to drive to the suburbs.

And so I think it needs to be done as part of this understanding of class struggle, that transit is something that is serving the working class, that it is itself a working class project because of the fact that these unionized drivers are, you know, and not just drivers, but, you know, cleaners and administrators and all the rest are behind this um and then the final final point i'll make and i'm sorry for going on about this but um is understanding transit is not just an urban issue but a inner city a rural and a national issue and so really try to connect it together as a transportation um system you know so so this idea that i could take the train in an efficient way to Vancouver, which is not a possibility at the moment, but which is just like ludicrous given how big Canada is and how proud it is of its transnational infrastructure, which is basically a highway at this point. improve transit service in rural areas because rural areas tend to be older. There tend to be more people with disabilities. And depending on where you're looking at, they tend to be heavily racialized.

So in the deep south of the U.S., there's a lot of Black communities. But this is also in Nova Scotia. Like rural Nova Scotia, there's Black communities there, which are just not served at all by transit service. And so I think really advocating for transit as part of this broader network this broader struggle which can interlink all sorts of um issues like when the stc was closed down in saskatchewan what we saw was um people you know overwhelmingly like indigenous people were unable to get to medical appointments in the city um you had people with disabilities who were no longer able to see their family or friends. And so they were just sentenced into isolation. For seniors, once again, no longer

able to get to medical appointments or get to the grocery store or like these kinds of things. And so to really, really focus in on what did exist, which was the SDC, it was a crown corp, it was extremely effective. And also look at like, you know, Greyhound, which, you know, recently pulled out of Western Canada. And it was, Greyhound, which, you know, recently pulled out of Western Canada, and it was Greyhound was not a great service, but it contained the seed of what would be a great service if it was nationally coordinated. And so I think, I know that that was a bit of a rambling explanation of, you know, where we should look to. But I think if we combine fair free, if we combine an anti privatization and pro democracy, if we combine that with trying to take space from automobiles in

a way which is deeply democratic and deeply rooted in other liberatory struggles and finally rooting that with just the sense that this is a national and national is not a great word given how related it is to nationalist sentiments um so maybe maybe a global project instead you know like just just this idea that we can really struggle collectively for better transit service that can connect all of us, that can improve our lives, that can improve our ability to see family and friends and to experience leisure, to experience pleasure, as well as just getting us to jobs in a way which, and these jobs are hopefully, you know, tied to socially beneficial projects as well. So I'll leave it at that for now. But those are a couple of my stray thoughts that I've come up with over the past while. No, I think that's a great place to leave it because it shows us how not only are our transportation systems linked, whether they are within a city, within the broader urban area, in the national context and in the global context.

These are all linked and they allow people to get where they need to go. But also our struggles for a better world and for better cities and to rectify all of these problems that we face are also connected, right? Absolutely. Just the same as our lives are connected, which we're seeing right now more than ever with COVID-19 and how essential some of the people who we often regard as inessential really are to our lives. Absolutely. So before I let you go, I do want to ask you one more thing. Is there a book that stands out

that has really been instructive to your thinking around transportation? Yeah. In the introduction to the book itself, I laid out some assumptions that I make throughout the book just to make clear to the reader where I'm coming from. And one was Mimi Scheller's Mobility Justice. I love that book. She's a sociology prof at Drexel University in Philadelphia. And it's just a really tightly written book, which makes the argument that we, which is kind of, you know, I've reflected my own argument from her is that we just really need to be thinking of mobility as a much bigger issue than just getting from A to B. level. She looks at gender oppression in transportation and also the individual experience of a migrant or of a person with a disability or racialized person, but spanning

that all the way up to how we think of mobility when it comes to climate change, when it comes to migration on a demographic level, all these kinds of things. And so I found her work really good. And I really encourage people to check that book out. I think it's from Verso Books. Really, really recommended. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, James. Thanks for chatting.

It's been really enlightening. And hopefully everyone will go fight for better transit in their cities now. Yeah. No, thanks for having me, Paris. Just last point is your work has been a huge inspiration to mine. And I relied on a lot of your arguments and a lot of the research you've done for the book itself. And so thank you for the work that you do as well.

Thank you so much. Talk to you again soon. Yeah. James Wilt is the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk. It was published by Between the Lines Books, and you can buy it at btlbooks.com, hopefully from your local independent bookstore or library, and anywhere else that books are sold. Make sure to leave a review of Tech Won't Save Us on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Follow us on Twitter at at tech won't save us. You can follow me on

Twitter at at Paris marks, and you can follow James wilt at at James underscore M underscore wilt. Thanks for listening.