Transport: how Silicon Valley turns technologies against us all

Review of Road to Nowhere: what Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation, by Paris Marx (2022, Verso)

Unleashing Uber on cities would cut car ownership, because ride-hailing would be cheaper, Travis Kalanick, then Uber’s chief executive, claimed in 2015. It would reduce traffic congestion, allow car parks to be converted to other uses, and complement public transport with its “last mile” service.

Uber drivers demonstrate in London in March 2021, when the IWGB union won a court decision that they are workers, not self-employed. Photo from IWGB

Investors bought into Kalanick’s story, that Uber’s innovative app would produce these benefits, to the tune of billions of dollars. Central to his patter was the claim that Uber was a tech company, not a transport company (since denied by courts in the UK and New Zealand), and his crusade against local government regulations and the “taxi cartel”.

In Road to Nowhere, Paris Marx not only unmasks these falsehoods, but also explains Silicon Valley’s place in the broader crisis of capital, and the social, economic and ecological damage it does.

Marx recounts how Uber expanded in the US after the 2008 recession, flooding the market with drivers, to whom it offered incentives that were then withdrawn, while pay was cut.

Uber’s predatory pricing, financed by stock exchange investors, drove traditional taxi companies out of business. Taxi drivers’ incomes plummeted and their lives fell apart, triggering a slew of suicides.

The post-recession environment provided both a large pool of precarious labour and what Marx calls “incredible technological optimism” (page 109). Central to Uber’s strategy was an assault on cities’ transport regulations and on the labour conditions won over decades by taxi drivers’ union power. Uber and the other technology companies, cheered on by US conservatives and libertarians, deployed technologies as weapons in the class war. 

In the midst of the gathering climate crisis, Uber’s new technology drove greenhouse emissions upwards. Directly contradicting Kalanick’s promises, the Uber model put more vehicles on the road.

The real futures tech is building

In this excerpt from Road to Nowhere, PARIS MARX explains how and why the big tech companies moved into urban transport in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash. Republished here with permission. See also People & Nature’s review of the book 

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the tech industry grew substantially and claimed a dominant position not just in the United States, but across the global economy. The internet was firmly established by that point, and it began moving from the desk to the palm of people’s hands as smartphone adoption soared through the 2010s. Cloud computing and other software products made it much cheaper than in the past to launch a start-up and compete for a piece of the rapidly growing industry. Meanwhile, financing was abundant, not just because decades of inequality had caused more wealth to flow to those at the top, but also due to policy choices taken to combat the recession.

Photo by Eric Demarcq / Union of Concerned Scientists

The trillions of dollars printed by the Federal Reserve and other central banks through quantitative easing, and the low interest rates that persisted throughout the 2010s, created an environment that boosted the stock market even as most workers’ prospects continued to stagnate, which benefited venture capitalists and made it much easier for new companies in the tech sector to access capital. Such a dynamic granted investors, influential founders, and executives at the dominant companies in the industry a significant degree of power in shaping what the post-recession economy looked like – and who it served.

By 2010, today’s tech giants were continuing their rapid growth, but they were not yet the juggernauts they would become a decade later. Google had a number of popular services in addition to Search, but many people still believed its “do no evil” slogan. Amazon’s positions in ecommerce and cloud computing were growing, but it was not yet seen as such an existential threat to brick-and-mortar retail. Apple was reinventing itself with the iPhone, but it was far from being one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. Yet, as they expanded, other companies made use of smartphone access, new digital tools, and the excitement around the tech economy, to make their own splash.

Appeal to Labour Party members: help turn back this tide of greenwash

Here is a letter that I sent yesterday to Maggie Ferncombe, the chair of the London Regional Labour party, Ed Miliband, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for climate change, and friends in the Labour party in London. It urges them to do something about the tsunami of greenwash thrown over the Silvertown tunnel project by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, Labour’s most powerful elected official.

Over the last four years the Mayor and the few supporters of the project have – in defiance of reality, transport research and climate science – claimed that the tunnel project is compatible with policy objectives aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It obviously is not, as 70-odd researchers in relevant areas told the Mayor in April 2021, in a letter he did not acknowledge or respond to.

The Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition banner on a climate action march in London, 12 November. Photo by Steve Eason

More roads produce more traffic; more traffic produces more greenhouse gas emissions; decarbonising transport means sharply reducing the volume of traffic; and the resources spent on road-building projects work against that aim, and against the support for public transport, rail, cycling and other non-car modes of transport that can make decarbonisation possible.

Although the Silvertown tunnel project is a London policy issue, it has national implications. Labour’s stubborn denial of reality about the tunnel is on the same level as the Tory government’s fantasies that licencing coal mines, new oil and gas fields, or its own £27 billion road building programme, dovetails with combating global heating.

My letter – attached as a PDF – concerns a very specific set of issues, on which the greenwash spilled over into falsehoods, used by Heidi Alexander, then London’s deputy mayor for transport and now Labour candidate for Swindon South, to justify the unjustifiable tunnel project. If you are reading this and you are in the Labour party, please have a word. Simon Pirani, 21 December 2022.

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Dear Maggie Ferncombe and Ed Miliband,

I write to ask you to take action within the Labour Party over the circulation of false information about the climate emergency by the Greater London Authority, and the Authority’s failure to deal with complaints about this false information, in breach of its own rules.

The false information was circulated in 2021 by Heidi Alexander, former deputy mayor of London, in response to people who protested to the Mayor of London about the Silvertown Tunnel project. In particular, Ms Alexander claimed:

(a) that the GLA has adopted plans to reach “zero carbon goals”;

(b) that the modelling of carbon emissions on which the GLA carbon reduction trajectory is based takes into account planned developments such as the Silvertown Tunnel; and

(c) that Arup has conducted an “independent assessment” of London’s 1.5 degree carbon reduction trajectory.

The note below explains the importance of the issues complained of for climate policy. 

Recipients of this false information contacted the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition, for which I had conducted research about the tunnel project. The coalition continued to press the Mayor to review the project and its compatibility with his climate policies, but he declined.

What cutting greenhouse gas emissions actually means in practice

“We have to do things very differently”, transport researcher Jillian Anable told the Royal Meteorological Society’s Climate Change Forum in London last week. “It’s not about celebrating electric vehicles.”

Cars are “getting bigger and heavier”, Anable warned, meaning that “it will take longer to decarbonise the system”. Of new car sales globally, 46% are SUVs.

Architects for Climate Action and Architects Declare joined Fridays for Future to march through London on 23 September. Photo from Architects Declare twitter feed

For every electric car sold, 10-15 large vehicles are sold: they “negate the effect of that electric vehicle many times over”. Moreover, half the electric cars sold are plug-in hybrids, which use “a great deal” of petrol and diesel.

No country has “achieved the speed and scale of reductions [in greenhouse gas emissions] that we now need”, Anable, professor of Transport and Energy at the University of Leeds, said. And no country has “achieved deep and long-term reductions [in transport emissions] without restricting car use.”

Anable was one of several researchers at the Forum who addressed the yawning gap between government declarations about climate change, and the snail’s pace of action – the gap that has infuriated, and motivated, the new generation of protesters from Greta Thunberg to Just Stop Oil.

Transport, the built environment and the food chain – three areas of gigantic fuel consumption – were covered in detail. Adaptation (coping with the effects of climate change) was considered along with mitigation (how to minimise the level of global heating).

Built environment researcher Alice Moncaster launched a broadside against the culture of demolish-and-build, as opposed to retrofitting existing buildings.

Cut motor traffic. Live better lives. Tackle climate change

By Simon Pirani

The borough of Greenwich, south east London, plans to cut car traffic by 45% by 2030 – but even that will produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions reductions that climate scientists say are needed.

The proposal to cut back traffic is a good start to a conversation about transforming urban transport, I argued this week in a response to the council’s draft Transport Strategy. But only a start. (Download the full response here.)

Copenhagen. But coming to south east London soon. Photo by heb@Wikimedia Commons

Better still would be to set carbon budgets – limits on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted during specific time periods – and use them as a framework for transport and other policies.

Such budgets can concentrate minds on policies to improve people’s lives, while contributing to tackling climate change at the same time. Better, cheaper public transport and support for non-car ways of travelling, e.g. bikes and walking, all help.

Transport is the second-biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions in Greenwich; heat, electricity and cooking fuel for homes and other buildings is the first. 

In 2019, Greenwich was one of many local authorities that declared a “climate emergency” in response to school pupils’ strikes demanding action on climate, and Extinction Rebellion’s direct action campaign. Even the UK parliament claimed to recognise this emergency.

The Silvertown tunnel reinforces deadly climate doublethink

London mayor Sadiq Khan has lashed out at opponents of the Silvertown tunnel project, who are calling on him to pause and review the major infrastructure project at the eleventh hour.

Khan has filed a complaint against Newham mayor Rokshana Fiaz, after she shared on social media a claim by the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel Coalition that City Hall had used “lies and half-truths” to justify the scheme.

The complaint has gone to Clyde Loakes, Labour chief whip for London Councils, which brings together the leaders of 21 Labour-led councils in the capital.

The “banshees” street theatre group protesting against the tunnel project, July 2020. Photo by Ben Darlington / SSTC web site

The tunnel project has no discernible local support. Greenwich, Lewisham and Hackney councils are opposed, along with Newham, as are climate scientists, transport researchers, trade unions, community groups and thousands of local residents who have turned out on protests.

Yet preparatory work is already underway, and contractors working for Transport for London (TfL) are lowering pieces of the biggest tunnel boring machine ever used in the UK into its chamber. So political pressure to rethink is peaking.

If the £2.2 billion scheme goes ahead, it will exacerbate dreadful air pollution problems locally, boost road transport, and undermine efforts to tackle dangerous climate breakdown.

Lower Thames Crossing? No. Stop this road-building madness

The UK government is planning a gigantic new road project – a six-lane, 22-kilometre motorway with a tunnel under the river Thames near Gravesend, Kent – while, laughably, claiming to be acting on climate change.

The Lower Thames Crossing would be the UK’s largest road project since the M25 motorway ring around London was completed in 1986. Cost: an estimated £8.2 billion.

It is the largest project envisaged in part 2 of the government’s Road Investment Strategy (RIS2) that covers the period 2020-25.

The Kent Downs area of outstanding natural beauty would suffer a “large adverse” impact from the Lower Thames Crossing, according to National Highways. Photo from the Kent Downs site

And it would blast another hole in attempts to meet the UK’s own inadequate greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, let alone meaningful targets set by climate scientists.

The Thames Crossing Action Group, which coordinates local opposition to the Lower Thames Crossing monstrosity, is asking people to write in to a consultation about the project (see below). Of course more direct forms of action may be needed, too.

The Silvertown tunnel project, which has faced opposition in east and south east London, is further ahead than the Lower Thames Crossing. Contracts have been signed with developers, and within weeks the tunnel boring machine could get going.

The Lower Thames Crossing is one more reason to stop the Silvertown tunnel. If one alien abomination is created, the other even bigger monster could follow.

Greenwashed Silvertown tunnel pollutes, trashes the climate, and steamrollers democracy

London’s Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is pushing ahead with the Silvertown tunnel project despite evidence that it will worsen already chronic air pollution problems and undermine chances of meeting climate targets.

Campaigners opposed to the £2 billion-plus project, to build a new tunnel under the Thames between Newham and Greenwich in east London, gathered on Saturday at a Health Summit to hear researchers explain the project’s harmful health effects.

This article is based on a talk at the start of the meeting by SIMON PIRANI, about why, even at this late stage, the project can and should be stopped, and about some of the campaigners’ achievements.

The Silvertown tunnel, like all road-building projects, has to be considered in the context of transport policy as a whole.

Attendees at the Health Summit on Saturday. Photo by Clive Carter

The only arguments in favour of the tunnel are that it will reduce traffic jams at the Blackwall tunnel. These arguments isolate the problem of these jams from all other problems in the world.

Supporters of the tunnel ask us: “What will you do about traffic jams?”

We say: reduce the total number of cars on the road. Which we need to do anyway, to address the appalling levels of air pollution and the danger of global warming.

If you read the London mayor’s transport policy of 2018, it looks as though this is the plan. It has big headlines about non-car transport modes. But the small print, the reality, is very different. The reality is that road transport in private cars is subsidised and supported, and support for other modes is being eaten away.

Ukraine. One day in the life of Dnipro

By ANATOLY DUBOVIK in Dnipro, eastern Ukraine

A facebook post from 22 March. The shops that sell manufactured consumer goods are starting to open now. Most are still closed, but the process is underway. Shops selling expensive clothes, on the other hand, are covered in signs saying “final sale” and “this shop is closing”.

Companies are also, bit by bit, starting work again. In the building where I work, there are nine or ten offices on our floor. We first opened up again a week ago, and today three offices are already functioning. These are all industrial companies, not trade or retail outfits.

The “stone women” at the Dnepropetrovsk Historical Museum

Private businesses are obliged to accept payments by bank card, they can not do cash-only. Breaches can lead to a fine of 3400 hryvna [105 euros].

Yesterday the evacuation of the Dnepropetrovsk Historical Museum got underway. It opened in 1849, on the initiative of a local schoolteacher. In 1942-43 the Germans looted it, but it was restored and is now one of the best in Ukraine. It has several hundred thousand artefacts, dating back to the paleolithic. There is even an Egyptian mummy. Where all this is being taken to is a secret, of course.

It’s a shame that it’s a long way from where I live to the museum. I don’t know when I’ll be able to go and find out whether they have taken away the “stone women” that stand (stood?) in front of the museum. Several of them are in the photo. My late first wife, Anna Dubovik, was involved in discovering the one on the left. That was when she was a student in the faculty of history, and did a practical summer course on archaeological digs.

For the first time, I met people in Dnipro who had been driven out of Mariupol: a family with children. Gloomy, exhausted. I offered to buy them whatever they needed. At first they didn’t accept, but I convinced them – because I was in a position to help. I took them sausage, bread, cheese, ryazhenka [a type of plain yogurt], apples and oranges.

Liverpool: Stop the electronic war fair

RITCHIE HUNTER writes about Liverpool City Council and the electronic arms fair due to take place at the Exhibition Centre in Liverpool in October

Slave-branding in England, 1853. Photo from wikimedia commons / New York Public Library

During the slave trade, Liverpool Council spent thousands of pounds fighting the abolition movement and conferred the freedom of the borough on those who were the ‘spin doctors’ of the day. 

This was in a city where thumbscrews, branding irons, and fetters for use on slaves, with devices for opening their mouths when they refused to eat, could all be seen for sale in ships chandlers’ windows.

Fast forward to today and Liverpool City Council have decided not to cancel the arms fair planned for October, even though they own the venue.

This is the resolution passed by the Council on 21 July 2021: