Motornormativity in Tech: Coding Car Culture into All Our Futures - part 2

A post about how American culture still dominates the industries that define the future

In Part One, I wrote about motornormativity: a term coined by psychologist Ian Walker to describe the way our societies assume that cars are normal and everything else is an exception. Motornormativity is a British phrase for an American idea which, for much of the 20th century, spread across the world. But recently, parts of Europe have started to push back.

The trouble is, even as some places learn the lessons, the future is still being written in the one place that never did.

America is still where most of the money, power and innovation sits. And that means the future is being built through a very specific cultural lens: one that remains deeply, instinctively car-first.

This post describes just some of the ways in which American motornormativity is shaping all our worlds.

1. Startup funding

If you want to understand what the future will look like, look at where the venture capital goes. Uber raised over $25 billion, much of it petrocash from the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Waymo, Google's self-driving car arm, has had more than $5 billion. And then there’s Tesla, Rivian, Cruise, Nuro, Aurora... the list of car-focused startups is long, and extremely well-funded.

Now compare that with public transport. There’s only one unicorn (a startup worth over $1 billion): Optibus, which builds scheduling software for buses. It’s raised $260 million. That’s not nothing: it’s a brilliant achievement, and I take my hat off to Amos Haggiag, its founder, for what he’s made happen. But balanced against the investments in cars, it’s a rounding error.

This isn’t just because of commercial models or market size (though I acknowledge these will be significant). It’s also about what founders build and what VCs can imagine. If you drive to work every day and don’t know anyone who takes the bus, you’re unlikely to spot the opportunity in a better bus network.

2. The tech giants

I recently read Sarah Wynn-Williams' book on Facebook. None of it surprised me. It paints a picture of a cynical company focused entirely on growth without any hint of a moral compass. Not evil by design, just indifferent to public good. Given the importance of their role, however, you could argue that makes them evil by omission.

Whereas in all my dealings with Google (and I led TfL’s Google Maps partnership, so worked closely with them), I've found them to be genuine to their mission to 'organise the world's information' and pretty keen to stick to their original value statement of 'don't be evil'.

But motornormativity isn't evil: it's just a norm. And while we've got some amazing people working for Google in the UK, it's a reality that the big calls are made in the USA. I really want to praise the work the London team have done to make Google Maps far (far!) more friendly to public transport. But it started out as - basically - a driving product.

Motornormativity isn’t about bad intentions: it’s about what feels normal. That’s why it’s hard to call out - because it doesn’t feel wrong or odd.

3. Generative AI

Generative AI is called 'artificial intelligence' and it's not a bad phrase. But whereas intelligence in humans is often used as a synonym for original thinking, generative AI is trained on everything that has gone before - and most of what exists online is American. Over 60% of web content is in English, and around half of that originates in the US. So if you train your AI on the internet, you train it on American norms.

Which means when generative AI systems start suggesting how we should move around, or what a city should look like, they’ll reproduce what they’ve seen. And what they’ve seen is a world built for cars.

Now, I’m going to give some credit to OpenAI here. I’ve done a lot of playing with ChatGPT, and it’s remarkably non-motornormative. Try typing “Have you any advice for my commute?” into all the main chatbots, and you’ll find that ChatGPT gives a good range of options for all the main transport modes. Most don’t*. But while someone, somewhere has done some good work, the way generative AI works means the risk still exists.

* The prevalence of American culture definitely comes through in all of them in the prevalence of advice to do mindfulness meditations on the commute. Though how this combines with driving, I’m not totally clear

4. Personalisation

Silicon Valley loves personalisation. It’s the holy grail of tech: a product that adapts to you. And in many cases, that makes total sense. Netflix, Tik Tok, etc are wildly popular.

However, it’s not totally clear whether an atomised society actually makes people happier.

Public transport is about shared costs, shared space and collective benefit. It doesn’t personalise, and that’s part of the point.

When the people making decisions are libertarian in culture and individualist by default, they see that as a flaw. That’s why you see so much energy put into personalised mobility products, even when there’s no clear business case.

It’s not that they dislike public transport (though it’s pretty clear that Elon Musk does); it’s just not part of their cultural DNA.

But in fetishising personal, they’re undermining the case for public transport - without even thinking about public transport.

5. Autonomous vehicles

This is the most stark - this hugely important technology is being built from entirely motornormative assumptions. It's going to be autonomous cars. No-one in Silicon Valley is doing the serious thinking about what autonomous driving systems could look like for public transport.

Some people are doing that thinking: most of all, Christian Willoch in Oslo (I spoke to him on The Freewheeling Podcast). But it’s a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the teams and teams and teams of researchers and developers making autonomous vehicles work

Now, fairly obviously, more people drive than use public transport.

*Lagos - being developed in a motornormative way. Does this look like a city in which only 10% of people have access to a car?*

But in a city like Lagos with 22 million people, only around 10% of people have access to a car. 90% of journeys are made by public transport and active travel yet the minority of people driving make it almost impossible for everyone else to get around. The future of the globe's population is African. By the end of this century, one in three people on Earth will live in Africa.

So if Silicon Valley was serious about investing in the future, they'd see the market in making life work for the 90% in the fastest growing market on earth.

But they won't because they're motornormative, so their vision of the future is one in which everyone in Lagos is inside their own Tesla.

What doesn’t happen: innovation that never gets imagined

You don’t see many startups trying to solve railway signalling. Which is strange, because the global railway signalling market is worth around $25 billion a year. VCs will fund a dozen AI tools for individual business processes, but not one for metro control systems.

Why? Because they don’t use trains. So they don’t spot the pain points. This is the same reason why women and ethnic minority founders struggle to get funding: because people fund what they understand, and VCs are overwhelmingly white men. If your commute is in a Tesla, your market map doesn’t include trams in Zurich.

What we could build instead

Just imagine what we could do with the same levels of imagination and capital applied to public transport:

Self-driving bus technologies
Plug-and-play road user charging
Seamless, automatic ticketing across countries
A proper operating system for running public transport networks

Every one of those is a billion-dollar market.

All of them have solutions (Karsan for autonomous buses, Fairtiq for ticketing, etc) but the level of investment, the range of choice and the options available are tiny compared to if the US investment market (coupled with the US urban demand market!) was available.

The past is motornormative. Does the future have to be?

When I spoke to Lee Waters on the podcast, what really stood out was how much of his time had been spent battling assumptions: old safety models, legacy investment rules, car-biased appraisals. In parts of Europe, the car is increasingly seen as the past. Motornormativity feels like a legacy issue.

But in America, it’s still the future.

And that matters. Because while infrastructure moves slowly, technology moves fast. And if we’re not careful, we’ll end up building new tools that reinforce the old system.

If we want a future that works for the many, not the few, we can’t wait for Silicon Valley to build it. We’ll have to do it ourselves.

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