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  I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT Hogtown, as we call it, was akin to older East Coast American cities that have grown in a radial pattern around a downtown core, and I was surprised to hear that many American urban planners see Toronto as closer to the polycentric cities of the American West. Perhaps it has a chance to combine the best of both. Or it could become everything it fears. Eric Miller, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Civil Engineering Joint Program in Transportation, worries the city has been dining out on some good choices, such as killing Spadina, that are now decades old. “I don’t think we’ve made any smart decisions since,” he told me, citing the failure to continue building subways and the sprawling suburbs as examples. “We lost control over the situation and we lost our will to make decisions and to see the vision through. We still talk about it but we don’t really do it and we haven’t done it for a long time and now we have a lot of catching up to do. We’re resting on our laurels.”

  Unfortunately, now is the worst time to be coasting. The city’s population is growing rapidly, and already 49 percent of the people who live in Toronto were born in another country and 43 percent of the population are part of a visible minority. This is our great experiment, and so far the results have been encouraging. If it is a success, that diversity will be our greatest strength and could turn Toronto into a model of multicultural urban living for the rest of the world. But pulling it off won’t mean a thing if we don’t solve the problem of the car.

  My hometown isn’t the only place facing this challenge: as a society, we can’t live with the car and we can’t live without it. Although the suburbs promise more space and relief from inner-city woes, they are too often dismal, wasteful and unhealthy communities filled with soulless shopping malls, drive-thru fast-food joints and clogged roads. And we’ve now sprawled so much that commutes of over an hour—once unthinkable—are now commonplace. And that’s on a day without lane-closing crashes. All that time in the car is not good for us. Traffic tie-ups are costly in terms of wasted fuel and productivity—and human health and sanity. Many suburbanites suffer from frazzled nerves and neck and back problems brought on by long commutes, and because they must get in a car just to pick up a litre of milk, they are less fit and more likely to be overweight or obese than their inner-city counterparts. Even if governments could afford to build as many highways as they wanted, they’d never get ahead of demand: more roads beget more cars. And although most politicians prefer subsidizing roads to public transit, many highways are in disrepair. So no one’s happy.

  More worrisome is the prospect of people in other countries joining in. So far, the obsession with the automobile has been most acute in North America. Europeans love their cars, but their societies don’t revolve so completely around the automobile: the vehicles are smaller, the gas more expensive, the transit systems better, the urban densities greater and the distances people travel shorter. Nevertheless, traffic in London was so bad that the city introduced a congestion charge for cars entering the central core. Worse, as emerging economic powerhouses such as China and India—where automobile ownership is 10 percent but growing rapidly—fall in love with the car the way we have, we’re headed for deeper trouble. Mexico City gives us a hint of what could happen: the streets are so overwhelmed with cars that it takes several hours to drive across town, while the pollution is so bad that many visitors cannot even wear their contact lenses. And all those cars don’t necessarily mean a vibrant economy: the most cardependent cities are the least efficient.

  As always, though, there is some hope. Many companies, trumpeting a variety of technologies, work feverishly to find the alternative fuel that will be clean enough, efficient enough and cheap enough to make future generations wonder what the hell a gas-guzzler was. And despite the disappointing results of experiments such as New Urbanism, planners can take comfort in the knowledge that many North Americans actually want to live downtown again.

  The glory days of the automobile, extended beyond all good sense by twenty-five years of cheap gasoline, are finally over. Despite what the auto industry and the oil industry and the politicians in their pockets would have us believe, we won’t survive our current addiction—yet the Utopians calling for a ban on all cars are equally deluded. A carless future won’t happen anytime soon because we couldn’t go cold turkey even if we wanted to. Before I could consider solutions in between those two extremes, I knew I had to develop a better understanding of our peculiar love–hate relationship with our wheels. And the best way to do that, I figured, was to take a road trip to the heart of car culture: Los Angeles, California.

  2 The Border

  Leaving Minivan Nation

  JUST AFTER EIGHT O’CLOCK on Monday morning, I loaded my last bit of luggage into my Nissan Maxima and hopped into the driver’s seat. After turning the ignition key, I flicked on the wipers to get rid of the heavy dew on the windshield and hit the rear defrost button. I plugged in my iPod and drove away in search of some insight into why we love our cars so much and what we can do about it.

  I’d gassed up the night before so I wouldn’t have to stop until I hit the border, almost four hours away. The drive out of the city was relatively painless—better than a lot of the trips to Sunday lunch at my in-laws’ I’ve taken along the same route—but traffic in the other direction on the Gardiner Expressway and the Queen Elizabeth Way was downright ugly as countless commuters put up with a soul-crushing amount of congestion just to get to the office. The morning was crisp and clear, though the blue skies eventually gave way to cloud cover around the time I hooked up with Highway 401 near Woodstock on my way to the border between Sarnia, Ontario, and Port Huron, Michigan.

  I knew I was about to cross into a country that had, in many ways, a similar relationship to the car as the one I was leaving. But there are significant distinctions, too, as I learned when I met David MacDonald, vice-president (automotive) with Toronto-based Environics Research Group. A tall, easygoing man with a moustache, MacDonald has always been a car guy, the kind whose wife says he’d let his dinner go stone cold while talking about his favourite subject. When I visited him in his midtown office on a Friday afternoon, we spent two and a half hours chatting—and I got the impression he’d have happily kept at it all weekend.

  After getting his licence at the age of seventeen in 1986, he drove a 1969 Valiant that had been his grandmother’s—“a piece of crap,” it was true, but he absolutely loved it. A man always remembers his first love and his first car. Today, his wife drives a 1999 Honda CR-V because it’s sporty and nimble, while he’s just as happy to take the family’s 1998 Honda Odyssey because it’s big; he is, after all, six foot five. But his dream car is an old Dodge Charger. His new office had nothing on the walls yet, but he had found the time to place a model of a green 1969 Charger and a framed ad for a 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona from an old Playboy magazine on the credenza. He also showed me a May 1981 issue of Cartoons, the first auto magazine he ever bought, which he keeps in his office because his wife, a high-school teacher, threatened to throw it out. She’s also not that keen on the Charger. “You want a forty-year-old car that gets zero miles per gallon, drives like a drunken pig and pollutes left, right and centre. And now it costs forty thousand dollars,” she told him. “Give your head a shake!” Still, when they got married, they made a pact that once they could afford it, she would get a cottage and he would get his Charger. They have the cottage, but with the recent arrival of a third child, his prize isn’t exactly imminent.

  In the meantime, MacDonald compensates by doing what he’s done for more than a decade: making his living researching and talking about cars. In 2004, his company did a survey comparing Canadian and American attitudes on a variety of topics, including whether people agreed with the statement “A car says a lot about a person—it must reflect my personal style and image” or instead thought, “A car is just an appliance, something to get me from point A to B.” Turns out, 54 percent of Americans preferred “style and image,” while only
34 percent of Canadians did. On the other hand, 62 percent of Canadians and just 40 percent of Americans saw their cars as appliances. (This may explain the popularity of the practical, but rarely stylish, hatchback north of the border.) “If Americans have a passionate love affair with the automobile,” concluded MacDonald, “Canadians have a mild crush.”

  That the two peoples view cars slightly differently should come as no surprise to anyone who understands the fundamentally different cultural values of the two nations. Michael Adams, the president of Environics and the author of books such as Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values, believes that cars play an even greater symbolic role in America. In 2005, he wrote a piece for Marketing, a trade publication, arguing that for Americans, the car has always represented not only socioeconomic status but also mobility, independence and freedom. “Cars were to middle class suburbanites what horses were to cowboys: keys to movement and productivity and, if everything else went sour, tickets to a fresh start in another town,” he wrote. “When it comes to how we imagine ourselves, Canadians seem happier to admit that their cars really are just appliances that mostly travel in circles: away from home and back again. Americans are more attached to the ideal of the car as an extension of themselves: an expression of their individualism, and a means of heading off toward a new frontier should they so desire.”

  THE INTENSITY OF THEIR PASSION for their rides may differ, but both nations experienced the bulk of their population growth after the turn of the last century, so most North American urban centres are designed for cars, though that’s proven to be not such a good thing. In addition, both have economies built on cars and trucks. In my home province of Ontario, one in six jobs is related to automobile manufacturing. And almost all of our jobs are dependent in one way or another on the ability for people and goods to move along roads.

  Roads such as Highway 401. More than 815 kilometres long, it runs from just shy of the Detroit River all the way to the Quebec border—and always seems to be clogged. The section through Toronto can be particularly infuriating: it’s the busiest in North America, busier even than California’s famed Santa Monica Freeway. Originally completed in 1956 as a northern bypass, the 401 wasn’t a way to avoid the city for long. Since Toronto sits on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, southward expansion was impossible, and the expressway accelerated the northward spread of people and businesses. Decades of sprawling growth mean the 401 now takes commuters, truckers and other drivers right through the continent’s fifth-largest city and fourth-largest conurbation.

  On weekdays, this part of the highway regularly carries more than 420,000 cars—and half a million people. Compounding the congestion is the design of the road, which doesn’t offer much in the way of what traffic engineers call lane continuity. Two lanes in each direction—with a capacity of 35,000 cars a day—seemed like more than enough when construction started, but by 1959, as many as 85,000 cars jammed the 401 daily. In 1963, the provincial government finally announced plans for the first expansion of the highway. Today, at its widest point, the road has eighteen lanes. Since drivers must contend with lanes that appear and disappear, transfers between the express and collector lanes, and frequent exit ramps, the congestion is exacerbated by a lot of merging and lane changing. “There’s no doubt that the 401 violates one of the basic principles of simple is better,” observed Les Kelman, director of transportation systems for Toronto. “We’re trying to squeeze capacity so much that it has introduced a degree of unpredictability, which is not necessarily good in a driving environment. Even for an experienced driver, it’s a nightmare.”

  That nightmare gets worse for the people involved in the average of twenty-five collisions a day on this thirty-six kilometres of highway. Most of these incidents are minor, but the ones that aren’t can create real havoc. One of the worst in recent years occurred just after three o’clock in the morning on September 29, 2004. The fiery crash involving two tractor-trailers closed most of the highway’s lanes until well past the time the morning rush would normally have morphed into just heavy traffic. Nearly twelve hours later, police and clean-up crews had finally finished clearing the mess, meaning the crash wasn’t just a huge inconvenience for commuters, but also a big hit to the economy. Although the 407, an electronic-toll highway that opened a little to the north in 1997, offers an alternative for those willing to pay the everincreasing charges to the private consortium that now owns it, the 401 remains the economic spine of the region, and more than $1.4 billion worth of goods move through Toronto on the old highway each day.

  Fortunately, because I’d left the city from the south, I didn’t join the 401 until west of Toronto. And then, just after London, I exited onto Highway 402 to Sarnia, which meant I also missed Carnage Alley. The London to Windsor stretch of the 401 has been the site of several gruesome crashes over the years, including an eighty-seven-car pile-up in thick fog on Labour Day in 1999. Eight people died and another forty-five suffered injuries.

  The carnage on our roads and the economic significance of our freeways are far from the only elements of car culture that Canada and the United States share. Both are geographically big, with vast, wide-open spaces and gorgeous landscapes that lure people into their cars and out onto the roads. And both countries are home to car lovers. In a couple of weeks, I would meet several members of the Guthrie Flashbacks at an auto show in Depew, Oklahoma. One of them—retired attorney Dennis Doughty— told me about an internet forum called ChevyTalk, where enthusiasts from both countries hang out. “We don’t always get along on politics,” he said dryly, “but on the old Chevys we seem to have common ground.”

  And yet that ground may not be quite as common as Doughty thinks because car culture does change north of the forty-ninth parallel. While some Canadians may like to spread their car knowledge, lefty politics and other charms on the ChevyTalk site, their fellow Canucks are less likely than their American cousins to be members of car clubs, to spend time fixing, restoring or otherwise tinkering with their vehicles, or to accessorize them. Rather than a hobby, in Canada a car is probably just a means of transportation or even a “necessary evil,” according to industry analyst and automotive consultant Dennis DesRosiers, whose research also suggests, “Canadians tend to buy vehicles to fill fundamental needs rather than desires, whereas Americans are more aspirational with their vehicle purchases.”

  OBLIVIOUS CAR LOVERS ASIDE, many North Americans watch the automobile with increasing alarm, a predicament that’s eerily reminiscent of the one people faced when they travelled on four hoofs instead of four wheels. The horse wasn’t convenient or efficient: most people had to go to a livery stable to arrange transportation, and even for the few who had their own, spontaneous trips weren’t practical, so no one said, “Let’s go down to the five-and-dime. I’ll bring the horse and buggy around!” But traffic was still a growing problem in cities, and the congestion was exacerbated by the absence of rules of the road. Horses also created health problems: they relieved themselves frequently, and rotting carcasses often stayed on streets for days before someone bothered to clean up the mess. People needed an alternative. The bicycle spurred social change—including acting as a catalyst in the women’s movement because it provided previously undreamed-of mobility and even encouraged less-restrictive clothing—as well as creating the need for better roads, but bikes weren’t practical for everybody or for long distances.

  Automobiles first appeared in Germany in the 1880s, but the development soon moved to France, where more people could afford to buy them. Initially a luxury, or even a toy, for the wealthy, the car quickly became a necessity in the United States. By the early 1900s, even before the automobile was really practical, Americans embraced it with an optimism that seems laughable today. Instead of urine, manure and dead horses attracting flies and spreading disease, American streets would be clean, quiet and uncluttered. The car never delivered on that promise, of course, but it changed just about everything. Society-altering
inventions—including air travel, antibiotics and the birth control pill—seemed common in the twentieth century, but the automobile may have been the most profound of all.

  The auto and oil sectors were soon giant engines of the U.S. economy, while many other industries, including restaurants and hotels, changed and grew. Aside from making shopping easier, cars fostered consumerism because automakers introduced the concept of credit. Since the banks wouldn’t lend money to people to buy cars, the manufacturers offered financing, and by 1925, threequarters of the cars sold in the United States had been purchased on instalment plans. Although Henry Ford hated the idea of people buying anything they couldn’t afford to pay for with cash, his competitors left him with no choice and he caved in 1928.

  Ford may have lost that battle, but he won on another front. He refused to contribute to projects such as the Lincoln Highway, the first link between New York and San Francisco, because he believed that if the private sector built roads, the people never would. So the government stepped in. Today, the widespread adoption of just in time delivery means private-sector manufacturers have essentially turned public highways into warehouses, increasing congestion, harming the environment and damaging the infrastructure, which taxpayers then have to pay to fix. And once politicians started building roads, the welfare state wasn’t far behind.

  Automobiles also helped to attract immigrants. Many Europeans loved their cramped cities, but most of the people who came to America wanted land, and the car helped to gratify that thirst for green, open spaces. Women also benefited. Almost from the beginning of the era, carmakers created advertising aimed at them, and several technological advancements, including power steering and automatic transmissions, were overtly promoted as enablers for female drivers. And once she was armed with an automobile, a woman was less likely to accept staying barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Homes were also changing. In the 1800s, garages were unnecessary. By the 1920s, more and more houses had detached garages tucked away in the back, usually on a lane. In the 1950s, the typical suburban home featured a big driveway leading to an attached garage at the front. And by 2001, 18 percent of American houses had a three-car garage, up from 11 percent in 1992. Viewed from the street, many appear to devote more space to cars than to humans. More dramatically, the automobile dictated the form of the modern city by drawing us from dense downtowns to the sprawling suburbs, trading efficiency for a feeling of space, safety and freedom.