Actually, I won’t be doing much fishing this time because the focus of this canoe trip to the Dumoine River in Quebec is shooting rapids. But I’ll still be gone for a week and unable to post or moderate comments.
This Globe and Mail story looks at the Statistics Canada study that suggests people in the Great White North, unlike their American cousins, are not changing their behaviour because of high energy prices. I still wouldn’t want to be trying to sell a big SUV now.
One of the guys I was canoing and fishing with in the Yukon was Rick Taylor, a zoology prof at the University of British Columbia. Around the campfire one night, we got to talking about a section of DRIVE that my editor made me cut. It was the story of a road trip I took with Rick and here it is:
Sometimes there is no destination. In 2000, Rick Taylor, a friend since high school, and his family put me up for ten days in Vancouver. As my stay was about to end, he asked if there was anything I’d wanted to do that I still hadn’t done. I’d seen the city, I’d seen the Pacific Ocean, I’d ferried to Vancouver Island to visit friends, but I hadn’t seen the mountains on this trip. The next day we climbed into a 1987 Chevy Suburban nicknamed “The Beast” and headed north on Highway 99. Also known as the Sea-to-Sky Highway, this meandering ribbon of asphalt balances precariously between Howe Sound and the Coast Mountains. After Squamish, we left the ocean behind and continued on to the booming resort town of Whistler, past Pemberton and into the interior of the province. Just before Lillooet, we marveled at the scarped mountain faces and the abrupt change in the topography, vegetation, geology and climate – or, as Rick called it, “the biogeoclimatic transition.” We were suddenly in the dry interior, where summertime highs reach forty degrees Celsius. At Lillooet, we turned south and drove along the Fraser River Canyon retracing, in part, the historic route of fur trader and explorer Simon Fraser. Rick, a zoology professor, couldn’t help but point out that down in the river countless sockeye salmon were traveling in the opposite direction to us on an early run. Just south of Boston Bar, we entered Hell’s Gate, a severe narrowing of the canyon with dramatic rock faces, headed down to Hope, out of the canyon and into the lower Fraser Valley, with its verdant pastures. As we drove west along the Trans-Canada Highway, we passed Chilliwack, a town best known for having the same name as a once-famous Canadian rock band, and then into the inevitable anonymous sprawl as we neared Vancouver. The cookie-cutter houses, fast-food joints and the other esthetic blights of suburban squalor were a striking contrast to the natural beauty we’d been enjoying. Soon, after ten hours of driving, we were back at Rick’s home. We’d stepped out of The Beast a few times to take photographs and once to eat, but mostly we’d just kept moving. It was fun. Silly, but fun.
I love the food at Terroni (try the Funghi Assoluti) and generally find the staff lovely — one of the Richlers called the waitresses at the old Victoria St. site “uncommonly foxy and vuluptuous” in a National Post review, which was about right — and find the pretentious food rules more amusing than annoying, so I eat at the three Toronto locations too often. Still, I got a kick out of this rant called “Terroni Abhors Your Unsophisticated Palate” over at the Torontoist site. Writer Marc Lostracco might have added that no amount of pleading will get you balsamic with your bread and olive oil.
The Star’s Tyler Hamilton has a good piece on the reluctance of Ontario’s politicians and bureaucrats to approve low-speed electric vehicles.
The good news is there’s a backlash aimed at getting Transportation Minister Jim Bradley to do the right thing: “Some members of the public are growing impatient. Barry Taylor, a disc jockey at Toronto radio station 102.1 The Edge, has for the past three weeks been encouraging his listeners to demand answers from Bradley.
‘For 21 days, thousands of e-mails and telephone calls have been sent to Mr. Bradley in an effort to have him take a five-minute phone call, anytime at his convenience between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to explain his stance,’ Taylor wrote last Thursday in his blog. ‘He has yet to accept the offer.’”
Fast Forward, Calgary’s alt-weekly, ran this interview with me about DRIVE. Writer Bob Blakey makes a good point: “The book isn’t a lecture, even if it could be used to bolster one.”
Seriously. I am going to the Yukon to canoe down the Big Salmon River and do some fly fishing. I won’t be able to post or moderate comments until I get back in early August.
I appeared on Global TV’s Focus Ontario last week and argued that the Big Three American automakers “don’t have small fuel efficient vehicles people want.” I was thinking of the compact segment in particular, where the top cars are the Honda Civic, the Mazda3 and the Toyota Carolla. David Paterson, vice-president of corporate and environmental affairs with General Motors, took umbrage at that suggestion and called to tell me that if you group all of his company’s small cars together, GM actually outsells the Japanese carmakers. He then emailed me these stats:
2007 Small Car Segment Sales in Canada
* GM outsold Honda by more than 5,000 units (GM 75,951 vs Honda 70,838)
* GM outsold Mazda by more than 27,000 units (GM 75,951 vs Mazda 48,236)
* GM outsold Toyota by more than 35,000 units (GM 75,951 vs Toyota 40,474)
He added: “GM is the only one of the 3 domestics with subcompacts for sale in Canada. We introduced our Chevy Aveo and Pontiac Wave in 2002 to compete with Honda and Toyota. As a result, GM now outsells everyone except Toyota in the subcompact segment.”
Finally, he noted, “It can also be a bit misleading to cite just one (albeit very good) car in one segment (like say the Honda Civic) and draw broad conclusions about its competitors ‘not having cars people want.’ I mean, 75,951 people did seem
to want a GM small car enough to buy one over a Honda! That’s a lot of Canadians - more than fit in Rogers Centre with the roof open.”
Ford, the automaker that launched the SUV craze when it released the Explorer in 1990, is now going to focus on small cars. The company does not currently sell a subcompact in North America, but according to this New York Times story, “A large part of its future car lineup will be based on vehicles currently under development for the European market. By 2010, Ford plans to begin assembling six of its upcoming European car models in North America, starting with the Ford Fiesta subcompact.” Let’s hope the company stays committed to developing great small cars even if the price of oil drops again.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are still fifteen years away from being commercially viable, according to the 80beats blog at Discover magazine’s site.
Brooklyn resident Tom Vanderbilt, who has written about design, technology, science, and culture for Wired, Slate and the New York Times, has a new book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), which needless to say I am looking forward to reading. He’s generated lots of great advance buzz — and this blurb from James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds and a must-read New Yorker columnist: “Tom Vanderbilt is one of our best and most interesting writers, with an extraordinary knack for looking at everyday life and explaining, in wonderful and entertaining detail, how it really works. That’s never been more true than with Traffic, where he takes a subject that we all deal with (and worry about), and lets us see it through new eyes. In the process, he helps us understand better not just the highway, but the world. It doesn’t matter whether you drive or take the bus–you’re going to want to read this book.”
Tom also has a excellent companion blog called How We Drive.
The Streets of Chicago blog has an interesting post about how evangelical Christians are giving some thought to our complicated affair with the automobile through a site called What Would Jesus Drive?
The Numbers Guy blog over at the Wall Street Journal has a look at the Walk Score site in a post called “How Walkable is Your Neighborhood?”
The site “allows users to type in an address and get a “walkability score” from 0 (must have car) to 100 (walker’s paradise). Thursday the site released a ranking of the nation’s top 40 cities, ranging from No. 1 San Francisco (86) to No. 40 Jacksonville (36), based on weighted averages of scores throughout the cities.” Here’s how it works: “Each address gets points for amenities — restaurants, grocery stores, libraries, parks, and more — found by a Google Local search within a mile “as the crow flies.” The closer the amenity, the more it boosts the walkability score.”
I plugged in my address and scored 73 out of 100 (very walkable). See what your walk score is and post it in comments.
Fans of Donald Shoup, the UCLA prof and expert on the high cost of free parking, call themselves Shoupistas. And they now have a Facebook group. (You can read more about Shoup in this excerpt from DRIVE: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile that ran in the Toronto Star.)
Some good news for automakers: buyers want small cars, which have smaller profit margins, but they want them with lots of luxury options (including leather seats, satellite radio and great sound systems), which goose the profit margins, according to this story in the New York Times.
This morning I taped a segment of Global TV’s Focus Ontario. If you want to see me in a suit, you can get your giggles this weekend (6:30pm Saturday, repeating Sunday at 7AM and 11:30pm).
I think The New Yorker’s satirical cover of the Obamas is brilliant, so I’ve been following the controversy over it with relish
Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan has served up several good posts about the controversy, including this one with a link to an online poll showing a majority think the cover is dangerously close to reality. Meanwhile, Poynter Online offers this look at satire’s place in journalism and D.B. Scott, who often writes about magazine covers, points out that the cartoonist, Barry Blitt, is a Canadian. And the New York Times has a story about how hard it is to make jokes about Obama and how the writers for late night comedians are hoping he picks an idiot as his running mate.
But, no surprise here, perhaps the smartest take I’ve seen so far is from Paul Wells: “Or — and this is crucial, and I see it about a hundred times a week in political circles — did more people tell themselves something that sounded a little more like, ‘Well, I get it — I see the joke, funny or lame — but I’m quite sure the simple folk, the ordinary voter who is far less sophisticated in these matters than I am… well, they can’t be expected to understand a joke! And therefore I am outraged on their behalf, for I am ever steadfast in my solidarity with the ordinary cretin who can’t be expected to reason things through for himself!’”
Apparently, the pitbulls in the ethanol lobby have had their way with the Toronto Star’s Tyler Hamilton. Normally a sensible writer, Hamilton defends not just ethanol, but government support for ethanol. If the politicians diverted a fraction of the support they give ethanol — and, needless to say, oil — to sensible alternative fuels, we might already be driving hydrogen or battery-electric vehicles.
Pitchfork reviews The Hold Steady’s brilliant new album Stay Positive, which comes out tomorrow (though it’s been available for a month on iTunes).
In a column called “Breaking up GM will be hard to do,” the Toronto Star’s David Olive offers his thoughts on the future of General Motors:
“It’s difficult to see a future for GM except after being stripped down to Chevrolet, which accounts for well more than half of GM’s total business, and a reviving Cadillac that could serve the same purpose that Lexus and Infinity do for Toyota and Nissan Motor Co., respectively.
It probably will take a wrenching bankruptcy to achieve that transformation, since buyers for most of GM’s assets are non-existent. Buick and Pontiac long ago lost their value as brands. And foreigners have twice been burned purchasing North American automaking assets – Renault SA with its acquisition of an ailing American Motors Corp., RIP; and the more recent Daimler-Benz AG disaster over nine years in trying to fix Chrysler, which served only to cut parent Daimler-Benz’s market value in half.
To pull itself back from the brink, GM needs to wholly commit itself to the costly task of replicating the Volt and becoming the undisputed leader in the small, fuel-efficient vehicles of a 21st-century market. It is a market in which vehicle sales will fall to a permanently lower level as climate change, energy security and urban traffic congestion compel more and more motorists to forsake their vehicles – or their current extensive use of them – in favour of cycling to jobs closer to home and making more use of public transit.”