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A conversation about mobility justice, elite projection and government intervention with Paris Marx, Creator of Radical Urbanist.
Paris Marx is a writer, curator and postgrad researcher focusing on the future of transportation and the global struggle to build urban solutions that benefit the many people. His weekly newsletter, Radical Urbanist, delivers a regular deep dive into the changes happening in the shifting landscapes of transportation, technology and urban development.
We spoke with Paris to learn more about his diverse and critical approach to urbanism, the techno-utopian downfalls of mobility services, and the crucial role of government in building functioning urban mobility systems.
I’m really inspired by what Jarrett Walker has written about ‘elite projection’, where people live in this elite space and have this particular experience of the world, and then they propose these solutions to society's problems that are based on these really privileged worldviews and ways of thinking.
In general, a lot of the transportation ideas that are put forward can’t see past automobility. There’s a bit of a shift in that with micromobility, but I wonder whether that’s because they’ve tried all these other ideas that have just failed — like, ride-hailing has failed, self-driving cars have failed, at least in their first experiment.
So there are all of these problems where they can’t get outside of this larger thinking about cars and the domination of cities by cars. They promised with Uber and self-driving cars that this would fix congestion in cities, that this is going to connect people with transit, that this is going to reduce car ownership. And now that we’ve had Uber around for a decade we’ve got a bunch of research showing that actually none of those things are happening.
There’s basically no effect on car ownership; congestion is growing and people who are served by these technologies are typically people who are college-educated, people who have higher than average incomes. They’re not average people who are actually struggling to get around cities — they’re people who already have adequate access to transportation, and it’s just made better for them while making it worse for everyone else.
What matters to me is what is going to improve liveability, what’s going to improve people’s lives.
I don’t approach this by thinking, ‘what technology is going to work to give us this good future?’. I approach it by asking, ‘what is the future that’s best for people?’, and if technology can enable that then great — bring it on.
But if not, I don’t really care what your technology can enable; we shouldn’t just integrate it because it’s new and it has this great marketing campaign. What matters to me is what is going to improve liveability, what’s going to improve people’s lives.
All the evidence we have on that says that we really need to get people out of cars, we really need to densify cities and get people living closer together, we need to improve our transit and get more people using it, we need to get people on bikes, we need to make our cities more walkable and easier to get around without cars.
And so many of these tech solutions are like ‘oh, let’s just take away the driver’ or ‘let’s give you a different driver and let you hail a vehicle from your phone’ — it doesn't really reckon with these larger questions.
I know. There are so many larger structures that impact on mobility and how we get around cities. If you think of North America where basically every large city has a highway running through it, that has a major effect on how people get around. We have a tax system and regulatory system that has been built to encourage automobility, suburbanisation, single-family homes; all of these larger urban questions that directly impact how we get around cities.
If we just focus on cars and transportation alone, that’s not going to fix these other bigger problems that, without addressing those, we can’t actually change how we are going to move around.
I don’t approach this by thinking, ‘what technology is going to work to give us this good future?’. I approach it by asking, ‘what is the future that’s best for people?’, and if technology can enable that then great — bring it on.
Yeah, certainly. I would say that governments have the most power to do that than the individual or the company.
So the only way we’re going to significantly change the way we live in the future — especially on a short timescale — is to make these massive investments and these big changes again.
I’m not sure about Europe, but in North America, if a company subsidises an employee’s parking then that amount can be written off in their taxes, but if they subsidise transit then I don’t think they can write it off. But like we were talking about before — with those larger systems and regulatory structures that promote suburbanisation and automobility over transit-oriented development and denser living — those are all things at the government level, they’re not going to change because an individual wants to ride the bus.
They are changes that can only happen if the government makes those changes. When you go back and look at history, you see how single-family home-ownership was incredibly difficult until regulations changed that increased access to mortgages, which made it easier for people to access home-ownership.
It’s like people who criticize the Green New Deal and these really big actions, when really, the only reason that we live this way right now is because we took these big actions in the past. So the only way we’re going to significantly change the way we live in the future — especially on a short timescale — is to make these massive investments and these big changes again.
Also, If I could say one thing about companies — there was this really interesting experiment that came out where, instead of just subsidizing transport passes for their employees, NBC Universal provided transport mentors who would show them how to use transit and work it into their commuting patterns. Of the people participating in the programme, they saw a really significant shift from people driving alone in the car to work to people using transit to get to work.