Silicon Valley is home to some of the silliest proposals to improve transportation because some top leaders just want to reinvent the wheel, with no regard for what works.
Sam Altman has weird ideas about housing and transportation. Three weeks ago, the Y Combinator venture capitalist made headlines for proposing a tax on immigrants in order to reduce housing prices for people who are not immigrants. Vancouver instituted such a tax last year, supported by anti-Chinese racists, which did nothing to suppress housing prices. Now, he has another hot take: cancel high-speed rail, or as he calls it, “smarter infrastructure.”
Why does Altman think high-speed rail is so bad? It's obsolete, he says. “By the time it’s completed, we will have new and much better technology, like high-speed self-driving cars, electric airplanes, and maybe even Hyperloops.” He is not the first tech billionaire with no understanding of transportation who thinks this: Elon Musk's original impetus for doodling Hyperloop was that he thought California HSR was obsolete. They could not be more wrong.
But okay, Hyperloop is admittedly a maybe. The other two suggestions—electric airplanes and self-driving cars—are even dafter. Among all the reasons people take High Speed Rail (HSR) and not planes, just about none has to do with the fact that planes consume jet fuel. Jet fuel is cheap (for example, Europe steeply taxes gas for cars, but does not tax commercial aviation jet fuel). The reason for the widespread adoption of HSR is that three hours on a train beat four hours shuttling to the airport, standing in line through security, standing in another line for takeoff, and then shuttling from the airport to the destination.
As for self-driving cars, they are not going to be any faster than regular cars, for reasons of capacity and energy consumption - Silicon Valley megalomaniacs' obsession with speed notwithstanding.
So there is not a shred of technical merit to Altman's proposals. Why does he make them?
It's unlikely that any transportation expert suggested these alternatives to him. The most-quoted anti-HSR line in American media, “only two lines have broken even,” is attributed to a rail planner who supports HSR but thinks it needs public guarantees (though not always subsidies). HSR opponents generally argue that costs exceed benefits and don't propose even faster technology as an alternative. The only faster technology that exists today is magnetic levitation trains, or maglev, made by Siemens and JR Central, both of which mainly manufacture and sell conventional HSR technology (Siemens makes trains; JR Central runs a bullet train line and is trying to sell one to Texas).
Instead, what is most likely the case is that Altman and Musk are obsessed with reinventing the world. There is no expertise in public transportation or HSR construction in Silicon Valley, because there is very little such expertise in the United States at all. It’s a field of expertise that simply does not exist in tech. Therefore, this technology must be bad.
In 2008-9, a common American refrain in support of HSR went something like this: “Europe has it and it has better infrastructure than we do.” President Barack Obama praised the networks of France, Spain, Japan, and China. This short period of humility then gave way to arrogance, and nowhere is it greater than in the tech sector. To the American tech entrepreneur, Europe is Nokia, yesterday's technology. Nothing that comes from there or from East Asia is really an innovation; by definition, there must be something better, homegrown, made in Silicon Valley.
It's hard to say whether Altman, and others in that community who stopped caring about HSR earlier this decade, became this way organically. Perhaps they are just following Musk's trail, like any number of sycophants in the tech media who assume that just because Musk says something it must be true or at least interesting.
On the worst assumptions of Musk's intentions, Altman and other tech entrepreneurs blindly follow him like people who took classes at Trump University and wear #MAGA hats follow Trump. But even on the best assumptions, without any deception or malice, Altman has deprived himself of any global base of knowledge. He seems to thinks all innovation comes from the San Francisco Bay Area, and if a technology is perfected elsewhere, it must be deficient, no matter what the experts say.
Alon Levy is a mathematician with a strong interest in urbanism and mass transit, and currently works as a freelance writer. He contributes to the Bay City Beacon as a weekly transit columnist for Pedestrian Observations. You can find more of his writing supporting walkability and good transit at https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com.
Like this article? Help support our work! Become a Supporting Member today, and get exclusive bonuses like Alfred Twu's graphic novel "Field Guide to Bay Area Architecture". For just $7 a month, support an urbanist future for San Francisco!
