Shifting Gears

Amid the pandemic, we cannot help but reflect and imagine how to make our future lives better. What timing, then, for James Wilt to publish a book on an underlying problem that has dogged us for over a century. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? he positions transportation as the centrepiece in our collective fight “against the forces of inequality and oppression” that are epitomized by the automobile. Indeed, how we get around is intrinsically “linked to many other issues including housing, food, and access to healthcare, education, and social services.” And without proper transportation for all — whether urban, suburban, or rural — any “improvements in those sectors can’t be fully accessed.”

For Wilt, we can win this “war for streets and communities” through public transit, which he frames in absolutist terms: “Public transportation must be funded as oppositional to automobility.” On one side of the fight are transit riders and workers; well-funded tech...