Perhaps it has nothing to do with tech, but framing it as a tech problem lends credibility and allows for easier structural changes/violence. It is easy to say "here's how to improve transportation because xyz is a tech issue" than to say "we have a NIMBY and willpower problem, let's hire some political grads to draft a plan on lobbying politicans and researching the impact of solution abc", especially when your past achievements are all tech related.
Also tech has the perception of being hard, inflexible. Just ask anyone who had to contact Google for customer support. Tech billionaires are not known to be easy to sue either, at least compared to a bunch of city-council bureaucrats. See the first paragraph of this article as an example of how tech CEOs are portrayed in the media versus city government bureaucrats:
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-...
Framing it as a people problem is simply asking for interference by third-party interests, which is one of the main factors currently preventing accumulation of sufficient political willpower to build metros. It may be a cheap, unethical hack in the sense that the state avoids having to exhaust political capital/use controversial powers like eminent domain in exchange for having private interests build poorly thought out transportation infrastructure. At the end of the day there is an unfulfilled need for transportation infrastructure. A poorly thought out one is still better than nothing.
Also tech has the perception of being hard, inflexible. Just ask anyone who had to contact Google for customer support. Tech billionaires are not known to be easy to sue either, at least compared to a bunch of city-council bureaucrats. See the first paragraph of this article as an example of how tech CEOs are portrayed in the media versus city government bureaucrats: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-...
Framing it as a people problem is simply asking for interference by third-party interests, which is one of the main factors currently preventing accumulation of sufficient political willpower to build metros. It may be a cheap, unethical hack in the sense that the state avoids having to exhaust political capital/use controversial powers like eminent domain in exchange for having private interests build poorly thought out transportation infrastructure. At the end of the day there is an unfulfilled need for transportation infrastructure. A poorly thought out one is still better than nothing.