Drive Read online

  DRIVE

  TIM FALCONER

  DRIVE

  A ROAD TRIP THROUGH OUR COMPLICATED

  AFFAIR WITH THE AUTOMOBILE

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2008

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Tim Falconer, 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval

  system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both

  the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Pages 327–29 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Falconer, Tim, 1958–

  Drive : a road trip through our complicated affair with the automobile / Tim

  Falconer.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06569-1

  1. Automobiles—Social aspects. 2. Automobiles. I. Title.

  HE5611.F35 2008

  303.48’32

  C2008-901399-9

  ISBN-13: 978-0-670-06569-1

  ISBN-10: 0-670-06569-2

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  FOR CARMEN

  “The evil genius of our time is the car,” Barry Byrne, an elderly architect, observed several years ago. “We must conquer the automobile or become enslaved by it.” … Less than a year after our conversation, Mr. Byrne, on his way to Sunday mass, was run down by a car and killed.

  — From the introduction to Working, by Studs Terkel (1972)

  Contents

  1 Toronto Cars. Can’t Live With ‘Em, Can’t Live Without ‘Em

  2 The Border Leaving Minivan Nation

  3 Detroit Motor City Sadness

  4 Interstate 69 Amateur Driver on a Crowded Road

  5 Indianapolis Road Trips, Pilgrimages and Other Journeys

  6 Interstate 70 The Automobile as Living Room

  7 St. Louis Sedentary Behind a Steering Wheel

  8 Route 66 (Part One) Kicks, Flicks and Tailfins

  9 Route 66 (Part Two) Oil, Booze and Automobiles

  10 Route 66 (Part Three) The Long and Lucrative Road

  11 US 285 Drivers Wanted

  12 Colorado Springs “More Than I Need, Less Than I Want”

  13 Glendale “The Biggest Wins”

  14 Denver Pedestrians Wanted

  15 Las Vegas Muscle Bound for Glory

  16 San Francisco Man versus the Internal Combustion Engine

  17 The Pacific Coast Highway Conflicted

  18 Los Angeles Suburbs in Search of a City

  19 The Road Home Avoiding Carmageddon

  Appendix: Car Song Playlist

  Acknowledgments

  Trademark Notices

  Index

  DRIVE

  1 Toronto Cars. Can’t Live with

  ’Em, Can’t Live without ’Em

  EVEN THOUGH I LEFT EARLY to avoid the worst of the Friday afternoon snarl, the city roads are thick with cars and I don’t reach the highway as quickly as I’d hoped. Once I do, three lanes of high-speed congestion surround my car. I’m heading north to a cottage for the weekend, but suburban sprawl mars the landscape for most of the next hour; the subdivisions seem to creep a little farther every time I drive up here and I feel old remembering how all this land was nothing but fields when I was a kid. As soon as the traffic eases and I hit open road, and the dispiriting tract housing gives way to lush farms and dense forest, I sit back, crank the tunes a little louder and step on the gas. Within an hour, I will be lakeside, far from the smog, a cold beer in my hand—though it’s not just my destination that makes me happy. My car is not a convertible, but as I rejoice in the speed, the power and the freedom it offers, I imagine the sun on my face and the wind in my thinning hair. I press the pedal a little harder. I feel exhilarated.

  That doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty. I do. After all, I’m contributing to the traffic I curse, I’m spewing greenhouse gases and other harmful emissions and I’m part of the reason we build cities for cars instead of people (not that we’re doing even that well). Most North Americans, and increasingly those in other countries, have convinced themselves that a car is a necessity. I’m not that addicted, but my relationship to the automobile—a complicated mix of desire and disgust—is still a powerful one. While car lovers can make a passionate case for the object of their affection and car haters can marshal the facts against it, most of us are conflicted: the more we’ve allowed ourselves to be sucked into the car’s considerable charms, the more brutal and complete our subjugation to it has become. If intelligent life forms on a distant planet ever bothered to study our civilization, they would surely conclude that the vehicles were the dominant creatures while the humans, who build roads, provide warm, dry spots to park and do the cleaning and fixing, were the servants.

  The closer the aliens looked, the more baffled they would become. Even as road engineering and automobile safety have improved dramatically, the death toll remains ludicrously high: 1.2 million people die on the world’s roads each year. The thirst for oil has led to many conflicts around the world, including two wars in the Persian Gulf and civil unrest in Nigeria, and it threatens environmentally sensitive habitats. All the while, the humans fret about their tailpipe toxins, lament the lost hours spent stuck in traffic and cluck at the urban sprawl that makes no economic, environmental or aesthetic sense.

  BEYOND ITS PIVOTAL ROLE in our day-to-day lives, the automobile has worked its way into our psyches. From the sunny California of the Beach Boys to the darker New Jersey of Bruce Springsteen, the car is a central image in American music. And from the chicken run in Rebel Without a Cause to the main-street cruising in American Graffiti to every road trip movie ever made, the car plays an essential role in film. It’s not just that the automobile is a handy device for storytelling. Through music, movies, television and literature—and advertising—vehicles have become metaphors for freedom and symbols of status and success.

  Though it started developing earlier, the iconography of the car generated by movies and music really took hold in the 1950s and 1960s, when the automobile posed no pressing problems. With the building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, the American economy boomed. People moved around easily and trucking quickly beca
me the preferred shipping method. But it didn’t take long for the true cost of these freeways to surface: bypassed towns slowly withered and died while inner-city neighbourhoods succumbed to a similar fate quickly because of expressway construction. That led to a flight to the suburbs, exacerbating the urban sprawl the highways had already spurred. Today, it’s no stretch to live without a car in a few cities—and in Manhattan, it’s actually advisable—but I wouldn’t want to try it in Atlanta or Houston.

  And yet, for some people, a car is still an objet d’art to be collected and fawned over, though perhaps seldom driven. Talk show host Jay Leno has more than 150 cars, trucks and motorcycles, and a full-time staff to keep them running. No doubt buying and maintaining a fleet of collectible cars puts little strain on Leno’s fortune, but for most regular folk, a vehicle is the second-most expensive purchase they’ll ever make. And between loan payments, insurance, gas, maintenance, parking and other costs, some people spend more each month to keep their car going than they do on their rent or their mortgage. That’s even more likely for those with more than one set of wheels: so many families insist on owning several—they should be thankful they don’t live in Bermuda, where automobile ownership is limited to one per household—that the United States now has more vehicles than drivers. Americans, who represent just 5 percent of the global population, own 200 million of the more than 520 million cars in the world.

  This proliferation has shaped where and how we live. Many businesses, from drive-in cinemas to drive-thru banks, cater to those behind the wheel (and often exclude those on foot). No wonder people say we either love cars or we need them. Even some activists dedicated to protesting against the auto and oil industries and to promoting environmental awareness find they have no choice but to own what they hate—or at least take a lot of taxis.

  CITY DWELLERS COME IN three categories: drivers (and passengers), cyclists and pedestrians. Each one can’t stand the other two. Drivers have nothing but contempt for pedestrians who jaywalk or, even when crossing the street legally, take too long, and they detest cyclists who sneer at the rules of the road. Cyclists despise drivers because too many of them refuse to admit bike riders have a right to be on the road and they hate pedestrians the way a bully hates the smallest kid in the playground. Pedestrians fear and loathe aggressive and distracted drivers, especially the ones who prefer yakking on a cell phone to paying attention, and they dread and abhor cyclists who won’t obey stop signs and seem to take joy in running down people on sidewalks.

  I am a pedestrian.

  My first choice has long been to walk whenever possible, but I always intended to get my licence. Someday. Owning a set of wheels isn’t essential where I live, so I was able to avoid getting a driver’s licence until I was in my late thirties. Finally, a friend who was a magazine editor asked me if I wanted to rent an RV for two weeks and write about it. Turning down such a fun assignment was so painful—and felt so pathetic—that I decided it was finally time to grow up. Driving seemed like the adult thing to do. And so I joined the ranks of the drivers, and then, a few years later, the owners.

  When I finally did, I regretted having waited so long. True, my 1991 Nissan Maxima, my first—and so far, only—automobile, is no aficionado’s idea of a sweet ride. Light blue (or Silver Blue, according to the manufacturer), the body is still in good shape, but it’s old, and even when it was new, it wasn’t the most stylish car on the road. The horsepower isn’t impressive, and I don’t spend any time tinkering with it, let alone tricking it out. I don’t even use it that much. In the summer, I love to escape the city without cadging a ride from friends, but in the winter, it just sits on the street for days until I throw two sticks and a big equipment bag into the back seat and drive to a hockey arena. Since 1999, I’ve added just sixty thousand kilometres to the hundred thousand that were already on the odometer. I certainly could live without a car, and I know I should, but I don’t want to give it up.

  THE STREET WHERE I park my car is a short, leafy cul-de-sac in midtown Toronto. In most American cities, my street, which is just a block from a six-lane north–south arterial road, would be no place for single-family homes. Fortunately, my city never suffered an exodus to the suburbs. The evacuation that killed the central core of too many cities didn’t happen here because a group of citizens killed a highway.

  The Spadina Expressway—which would take suburbanites from the northwest corner of the city into downtown in the morning, and then out again in the evening—was all part of a master plan that featured five expressways. Plenty of putative experts thought the scheme was an excellent one; after all, the great American cities were doing it. And in the 1960s, Toronto was anything but a great city: it was puritanical, placid and parochial. A good time was hard to find. My parents, like a lot of people who lived here back then, drove to Buffalo or Detroit to shop and enjoy some nightlife. Today, that seems laughable because those places are decaying cities with dead downtowns, while Toronto is now a vibrant place. It will never have the energy of Manhattan, the joie de vivre of Montreal or the architecture of Chicago (a town Toronto looks up to the way a kid reveres his big brother), but to most objective observers, the city is largely a success. True, the place is still a bit uptight, developers seem to take pride in throwing up unremarkable buildings and the wasted opportunity of the waterfront is a disgrace, but it is also dynamic, tolerant, wealthy, safe and among the most livable cities in the world.

  Some good decisions and a huge dollop of luck helped make this possible, but stopping the Spadina Expressway was crucial. In 1971, the road was already under construction. Suburbanites were all for it; downtowners, not so much. They knew the highway would mean the end for central neighbourhoods. Some of the most vocal opponents were from the Annex, which was right on the path of the planned construction. Annex resident Jane Jacobs led the activists who stopped Spadina. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, she moved to New York City, where she took on Robert Moses, the autocratic master builder who was, for more than four decades, one of the most powerful people in New York. Though he never learned to drive, he favoured highways over public transit, suburbs over cities and grand projects over neighbourhoods. His plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway would have destroyed Greenwich Village and SoHo. Jacobs and her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, galvanized opposition to the proposed road. After that defeat, Moses lost much of his influence in New York, but by then his ideas had infected other cities across the continent.

  A few years after helping to save it, Jacobs left the West Village. Appalled that their taxes were being used to fight the Vietnam War—and with two sons eligible for the draft—she and her architect husband moved to Toronto and settled in the Annex. She stayed until she died in April 2006, just a few days shy of her ninetieth birthday. In the rest of the world, she’ll be best remembered for The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but in many ways her legacy is modern Toronto. Along with leading the crusade against Spadina, she was prominent in many other fights (for public housing, for intensification) and was a mentor to some of our better municipal politicians. The central plan that shaped Toronto from 1975 to 2000 incorporated many of her ideas.

  The Annex became one of the most desirable parts of the city. John Barber, the city columnist for The Globe and Mail, lives there—on a street where his great-grandparents bought their first house in 1880. Though he and his wife ride their bikes to work, he loves American V8s and is the proud owner of a 1998 Mercury Grand Marquis LS, which he calls the Grand Monkey. I had lunch with him two weeks before Jacobs died, and when, inevitably, the subject of the Spadina Expressway came up, he pointed out that many people who complain about the traffic in the city still argue that the big mistake was not building Spadina. I stated the obvious: “You wouldn’t live where you live if it had gone through.”

  “I’d be living on an off-ramp,” he agreed.

  Other residential areas—including mine—would likely have been collateral damage. Some of the highway’
s opponents may have been motivated more by NIMBYism than anything else, but when the provincial government finally agreed to kill the project—along with three of the other proposed inner-city expressways—it not only saved the Annex but also changed the way the city thought about its neighbourhoods. (The fifth highway, the Don Valley Parkway, had already been built in a bosky river valley. Environmentalists would never let that happen these days, but it did mean that fewer homes were destroyed. And though it usually seems closer to a parking lot than a parkway, it does offer a lovely, winding and tree-lined drive into Toronto and an impressive view of downtown.) With the scrapping of the planned inner-city highways, Toronto became a city of neighbourhoods—and, more important, a city that valued them. Aside from meaning fewer people fled to the suburbs, that mindset was also an ideal fit with the waves of immigration that would, over the next couple of decades, transform Toronto from a sleepy regional town full of dull, white Protestants to the most multicultural place on the planet.

  While much of downtown Detroit remains a no-go zone, the American cities having the most success revitalizing their downtowns—San Francisco, Portland and Washington, D.C., for example—boast extensive, if often aging, transit systems. So Toronto is fortunate it didn’t tear up all of its streetcar tracks and for a while built subways, but the transit system is now underfunded, overcrowded and struggling to keep riders happy. For downtowners at least, it offers an alternative to driving, though apparently I’m not alone in thinking that walking is an even better option. After a study found that 45 percent of people who live close to the waterfront walk to work, Rod McPhail, the city’s director of transportation planning, told the Toronto Star in October 2004, “What we found, it blew me away.”

  Inner-city success couldn’t stop the surrounding suburbs from sprawling, but the vigour of the downtown made the region a magnet for newcomers from across Canada and around the world. The city now has a population of almost 2.5 million and a healthy density greater than 10,000 people per square mile, but the Greater Toronto Area has more than 5 million residents, most mired in car dependency and poorly served by public transit. Many of those people commute to Toronto for work, but only 20 percent take public transit. Solo drivers account for 67 percent of the trips into the city each morning, and since the road infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the growth, travel times continue to rise.