You can't solve for traffic

Several people have sent me notices of the Wall Street Journal Facebook investigation regarding harmful content, harm to teens from Instagram, and many other issues. (I’m not putting in a link because it’s paywalled, but here is a summary from the (https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-09-23/facerbook-wsj-instagram-nyt-essential-california) Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-09-23/facerbook-wsj-instagram-nyt-essential-california) .) In return, I recommend an episode of Your Undivided Attention (https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/bonus-the-facebook-files-with-tristan-harris-frank-luntz-and-daniel-schmachtenberger) on the subject, with Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger. What do we do, the host asked Schmachtenberger, with technology that has such enormous influence over our lives? To which he answered: “As we follow an exponential curve of power, there’s this core governance question of, we’ve never done all that good of a job being great stewards of power, and now we have radically increasing exponential power. How do we govern it?” The main reason I follow futurist and tech conversations like these is that, having spent years immersed in research on how a car-centric worldview took over and fractured our lives, I deeply believe that in a century we’ll see similar damage caused by a failure to define the roles of digital technologies like social media. The history of the battle against car dominance is one of extensive pushback in the 1920s in particular, followed by automobile interests forming think tanks that served as feeders into government, where pro-car people were able to shape a future around cars and highways rather than people and communities. (That’s a very sweeping description of a more detailed history—good books related to the subject include Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/86058/the-death-and-life-of-great-american-cities-by-jane-jacobs/) and Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/) , and more specifically Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fighting-traffic) and Jeff Speck’s Walkable City (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865477728/walkablecity) , my own book A Walking Life (https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/antonia-malchik/a-walking-life/9780738234885/) , and Tom Vanderbilt’s four-part series “The Crisis in American Walking (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/why_don_t_americans_walk_more_the_crisis_of_pedestrianism_.html) ” in Slate.) I spent a good chunk of my book writing about this, so I don’t want to repeat it all here, but when talking about walking I often find that people focus on the pleasant aspects of it—the mental health, the connection to nature, the physical release and creative depth, among the countless other benefits, all of which are real—and forget the key point, which is that in North America we have spent a century creating a world where walking as a way of life is almost impossible. The damage this shift caused is incalculable, from the nearly 40,000 deaths in car crashes each year in the U.S. (over 6,000 of those pedestrians and cyclists, and these numbers do not count severe injuries like loss of limbs, paralysis, traumatic brain injuries, or the estimated 20,000 near misses every year) to the air pollution caused by exhaust (which likely contributes to health issues from Alzheimer’s to miscarriages to reduced lung capacity in children who grow up in high-traffic areas) to micropollution from abrasion of tires on the road, to climate change. The weight of cars on our lives, on this planet, is more immense and comprehensive than most of us seem able to comprehend. And yet the deepest damage might be one of imagination. Our views of how we get places is so entangled with driving that it’s rare to find regular drivers who can envision a car-free life. Who can see their own community as a place where a child could roam to school or a friend’s house without fear of being run over. Our collective minds have been colonized by the car. I was at a presentation a couple of weeks ago, online, given by the consultants and PR representatives hired by Montana’s state department of transportation to come up with a redesign for the highway that runs through the center of my town. The group was great. They’d worked hard and really thought things through. And if you didn’t have knowledge of the rigid systems that force states and cities to spend money on cars and traffic rather than promoting literally any other form of mobility, you’d leave the meeting thinking that the redesign option they came up with—which involves adding a lane each to two already busy roads—was the obvious choice. One we have to accept because it’s the only one that truly eases traffic congestion. When w...