The tech industry’s move into transportation was not only a failure; it was an active campaign to deny the public access to better transit and trains because the billionaires of Silicon Valley don’t personally want to get around that way. The Hyperloop was one part of that, but so were the Boring Company, ride-hailing services, and self-driving cars. The Hyperloop’s failure provides a lesson we’re learning far too late: that Silicon Valley won’t deliver us a better world if they can’t find some way to profit off it. We need to stop falling for their grand deceptions, and tell our media to stop echoing them too.
The Hyperloop, self-driving cars, and other transportation vaporware are the result of our cultural obsession with futurism. The idea that we can—and should—leap into tomorrow, leaving behind the constraints of the present and the relics of the past.
We look to Silicon Valley not just for gadgets but for gateways to a new age. And in doing so, we ignore the practical answers, the practical solutions to our problems. Instead of simply investing in better transport infrastructure, we want to see it “disrupted.”
The same technology that promises a streamlined future exacerbates a divide—between those who can afford to dream and those who must endure the transit realities of the present. While those who do not need and will not use public transport envision a world where transportation is revolutionized by high-speed pods and autonomous vehicles, the people who need them are left grappling with the more immediate concerns of inefficient, underfunded public transport systems.
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