“Elon Musk Can't Fix Your Commute” - New York Times, 2022, 6:39 - https://youtu.be/5eHWVjUAukU
The term gadgetbahn describes futuristic transportation proposals that are overly complex and impractical. While they look and sound appealing, they take attention and resources away from realistic solutions to transportation problems. This video uses Elon Musk’s various transportation proposals to exemplify the concept of gadgetbahn, yet other examples could include flying cars and hypersonic passenger airplanes. Another related concept explained in the video is that of elite projection. This occurs when influential people believe what they find convenient and attractive to be good for society as a whole. Yet as we see here, wealth can disconnect a person from the practical constraints of reality.
What other transportation proposals could be described as gadgetbahn? If you could do one thing to improve transportation for the whole of your society, what would it be?
From the video’s description: Say what you will about Elon Musk, but the man has ideas. Loads of them. He has ideas about how to improve Twitter and colonize Mars. He has ideas about space tourism and the future of artificial intelligence. He has ideas about how to end the war in Ukraine and save children trapped in underground caves. But in the video above, Adam Kovacs, who runs the YouTube channel Adam Something, suggests that unrelenting bravado and tremendous wealth don’t necessarily make bad ideas good. Mr. Kovacs, who has developed a large following for his critiques of flawed urban planning and design, takes a close look at Mr. Musk’s proposals to revolutionize mass transit: the Hyperloop and the Boring Loop. Both ideas have generated much excitement and even investment, but as Mr. Kovacs explains, they are unnecessarily complicated and not designed for real people. There’s even a word for exciting but catastrophically flawed concepts like this: “gadgetbahn.” Mr. Musk, he says, “would rather pump millions of dollars into some made-up tech fantasy than doing something actually useful for us mortals.”