I love fiction, and read as much of it as I can, but I realize some people can’t get into it. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to learn that the Mount Pleasant branch of the Toronto Public Library has a No Fiction group. I was surprised — but also delighted — to receive an invitation to speak to this group about DRIVE on Thursday, Oct. 8 at 7 pm. Everyone is welcome so feel free to drop by even if you’re not a member of the group or you also love reading novels and short stories.
I will be on CIUT’s Take 5 this morning to talk about the war between drivers, cyclists and pedestrians on our streets. CIUT is at 89.5 on the FM dial or you can listen on the station’s website. I will be on about 9:40.
When employers provide — and pay for — guaranteed parking spots, employees are more likely to drive to work. That’s obvious and the reason Donald Shoup came up with the idea for the parking cash-out law adopted by California (read about it in this excerpt from DRIVE that ran in the Toronto Star). Now Tom Vanderbilt, the author of the excellent Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), makes a strong case that if employers provided better parking for bikes, more people would cycle to work.
In his smart essay on Slate.com about the need for cities to invest in more and better parking for bicycles, Vanderbilt looks at some of the effective steps some cities are taking. Portland, not surprisingly, is a leader among US cities, but others are making intelligent moves. New York City, for example, “passed a bill mandating that commercial parking garages provide spaces for bicycles — one bike space for every 10 cars, up to 200 cars.”
He also points out that commuters would be reluctant to drive to work “if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking.”
I recommend reading this blog post — called “Smart growth must become more demanding, more community-oriented, and greener (literally)” — from Kaid Benfield, the director of the Smart Growth Program in Washington, DC. He makes the case, with photos, that density is not enough, we need to insist on density, diversity and design. “We in the smart growth movement need to become much more discriminating in what we support and what we don’t,” he writes. “In particular, we must stop applauding density per se and start advocating what my friend David Crossley, president and founder of the great organization Houston Tomorrow, calls the right kind of density — a built landscape that respects and improves upon its neighborhood instead of overpowering it.”
The obits for Robert McNamara, who died at age 93 on Monday, naturally concentrated on his role as defense secretary to JFK and LBJ during the Vietnam War. And, if you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend The Fog of War, the fabulous Errol Morris documentary. (The subtitle says it all: “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”)
But this remarkable man also makes a cameo in Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile as the father of the Ford Falcon.
Here’s an excerpt:
“The Falcon was Ford’s answer to the small imports that had somehow snatched nearly 10 percent of the U.S. market. To Americans, it was an inexpensive compact, but since it could seat six it was big enough to be a family car. Introduced in the fall of 1959, the Falcon was such a hit—the company sold 417,000 in the first year—that Robert McNamara, the man behind the project, earned a promotion. In 1960, he became the first president of the company who wasn’t a member of the Ford family. His stay at the top was brief, though, because before long President John F. Kennedy appointed him Secretary of Defense.
“Ford made and sold the Falcon in the United States until 1970, but the car had an even longer and more successful life in other parts of the world, where many saw it as a mid-sized model. In Australia, it remains the company’s best-seller. And in Argentina, the Falcon was not just the most-produced car, with half a million built between 1962 and 1991, but also a hugely important one culturally. The Falcon was a racing car, a family car, a taxi, a police car—and, from 1976 to 1983, a sinister symbol of the country’s military dictatorship and the so-called ‘Dirty War’ that the generals who ruled after the coup d’etat waged against their own people. Death squads used dark green Falcons to ‘disappear’ trade unionists, artists, students and anyone else who might oppose or question the junta. Since the squads illegally arrested, tortured or killed an estimated thirty thousand people, the car now stirs bitter emotions for many Argentines. (Lawrence Thornton’s 1988 novel Imagining Argentina does a hauntingly good job of capturing the ominous mood those dark green birds of prey created.) Even today, some people in Buenos Aires won’t get into a taxi if it’s a Falcon, and a tour operator in the northern city of Salta, who would have been just four or five when the dictatorship crumbled, told me, ‘I don’t like it when I see a Ford Falcon, I get bad memories.’”
Chris Turner, author of the excellent book The Geography of Hope, has a great piece on peak oil in The Walrus.
Jeff Rubin, the CIBC chief economist who famously predicted $200-a-barrel oil, isn’t backing down. He’s left the bank and his new book — Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — argues that expensive oil will return and force a reversal of globalization. The Globe and Mail has a good piece on Rubin and an excerpt from the book. Well worth reading.
Here’s a taste of Rubin’s thinking from the sidebar: “What we need now is something equivalent to the U.S. Highway Act in 1956, when all of a sudden the U.S. decided to build an immense road infrastructure. … We need to do the equivalent in public transit. … Detroit’s problems are now permanent and structural, they’re not cyclical. There will be no recovery in auto sales.”
Kenneth Kidd of The Toronto Star has two excellent pieces in today’s paper — and I’m quoted in both saying things that will be familiar to those who’ve read DRIVE.
The first, shorter one, is “What car interiors say about us” and I have a little fun with coffee in it: “They’ve really schooled the Americans,” says Falconer, who jokes that the only thing this continent’s auto industry got right all on its own was the cupholder. (”In Europe, a man stands and has an espresso. He doesn’t drink non-fat decaf latte in his SUV.”)
The second — “Why we drive like idiots” — includes this bit: “There’s a societal pressure to make getting a licence easy,” says Falconer. The predictable result: We are, collectively, not the finest of motorists. “People just have bad skills. It’s too easy to get a licence compared with Europe.”
As I point out in DRIVE, improved interiors are related to sprawl because the more time we have to spend in our cars, the more comfort we demand from automakers and the more comfortable our cars, the more we’re willing to accept spending lots of time in them.
But something I didn’t think about until Kidd interviewed me is the role of sprawl in our attitudes toward licencing for drivers. In a car-dominated culture (read: North America) too many people need to drive because they live in sprawl, where public transit is inadequate, where walking is impractical and where even cycling is uninviting. After years of driving their kids everywhere, parents would punish any politicians who made it tougher for 16-year-olds to take the wheel. But, of course, that means teenagers are learning (and, too often, dying) at high speeds on our roads — and developing too many bad habits along the way.
Europeans, on the other hand, live in walkable communities with excellent transit, strong cycling cultures and extensive (and often fast) train systems. Meanwhile, gas is far more expensive and the rate of car ownership is much lower than in the US, where there are more cars than drivers. That means parents can afford to be a bit more patient and let their kids develop the necessary skills before hitting the Autobahn.
So sprawl not only encourages more driving, it fosters more bad driving.
Following in the wake of The New York Times article about Vauban, a German suburb where 70 percent of families live without a car, the paper asks six experts if this is a realistic goal for America. The answer again and again — as I discovered when I was researching DRIVE — comes back to accepting density and building mixed-use walkable communities.
I recommend reading the entire piece, but here are some highlights:
Witold Rybczynski says: “A more realistic goal for most Americans would be a semi-carless community, that is, one that is walkable within the neighborhood for convenience shopping, school-going and errands, and drivable for weekly shopping, consumer purchases and so on.”
D.J. Waldie says: “I can’t drive. And I daily benefit from these planning choices. But few Lakewood residents make as much use of Lakewood’s walkable, bike-able grid as I do. Good design is a requirement for letting go of your wheels, but only a partial requirement.”
Christopher B. Leinberger says: “There are many reasons to encourage this market trend: social cohesion, environmental sustainability, public health, lower public sector costs for infrastructure per square foot. But the bottom line is household economics. American families who are car-dependent spend 25 percent of their household income on their fleet of cars, compared with just 9 percent for transportation for those who live in walkable urban places… Walkable urban development is not for everyone but it is time that American communities offer choice.”
In an era when newspapers are struggling to survive, The Globe and Mail has foolishly given its readers one more reason to cancel their subscriptions: replacing must-read city hall columnist John Barber with unreadable international affairs columnist Marcus Gee.
After thirteen years at the clamshell, Barber deserves new challenges so I can’t really begrudge his decision — and I look forward to reading him in the Review section — but I am shocked and appalled that anyone believes that Canada’s answer to Bill Kristol is a worthy successor.
Barber is the kind of guy who loves vintage Detroit V8s — he dubbed his Grand Marquis the Grand Monkey — but rides his bike to work. Someone who understands urban issues, how city hall works (or, too often, doesn’t) and why it all matters so much, he wrote with insight, passion and plenty of wit. He never allowed himself to be sucked in by the cocktail party nonsense about socialists hordes taking over city hall and delighted in chronicling the clownish antics of the councillors who oppose Mayor David Miller. But he certainly was not shy about gleefully detailing the follies, foibles and flaws of the mayor and his allies either. Barber was, quite simply, the paper’s best columnist.
Not just bad news for the Globe, his departure is also a blow to those of us who care about Toronto, a city with great promise, but daunting challenges. The colleagues Barber leaves behind, he left behind years ago: at the Star, Royson James confuses crankiness with intelligence; at the Sun, Sue-Ann Levy sees reds under every bed; and at the Post… wait, is the Post still publishing?
My guess is the Globe bosses really do believe socialists run the city and they’ve promoted Gee to this crucial column to rant about it (and, if all goes well, influence the outcome of the next mayoral election). So here’s what we can expect: paint-by-numbers punditry, high dudgeon about high taxes and constant whingeing about the so-called war on the car.
That’s not a column I will be reading.
When I was doing the research for Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile, I kept hearing car lovers blame the decline of the Big Three on the beancounters who had replaced the car guys in the executive suites of the automakers. But Grant McCracken, who shows up in Drive, offers a different take on his blog.
He argues that those companies should have hired chief culture officers: “What Detroit needed was a man or a woman in every C-Suite who understood what was happening in culture. It needed someone who understood what was happening in the minds of boomers (and why they were so deeply wedded to German luxury cars), in youth culture (when the muscle car culture was back with new and strange differences, and why cars like the funny, boxy little Scion was flourishing), in the life, the heart and the mind of the soccer mom (for many of whom the mini-van felt like the end of everything and especially their youth and their joy). Detroit needed a senior executive who understood the consumer, and the American feeling for mobility in every sense of the word.”
Instead, McCracken points, Bob Lutz who was into speed, not culture — and famously dismissed global warming as “a crock of shit” — ran GM’s product development. And now that Lutz has retired, a guy from the powertrain division is taking over.
Returning to Drive for a moment, the Freakonomics blog over at the New York Times site has a fascinating look at walkable cities.
A couple of highlights:
“First, note that seven of the 10 most walkable cities sit on large bodies of water. With a coastline checking expansion, available land had to be used more intensively… Intensive land use means density, and density generally means walkability.” Nine of the ten least walkable and most car dependent cities on the list of 40 are inland, without geographic barriers to sprawl.
“Second, the walkable list is dominated by Northeastern and West Coast cities that are comparatively old, at least by American standards. Six of the 10 most walkable cities were among the 20 largest urban places in 1900… On the other hand, the least walkable cities are relative newcomers on the urban scene. Eight of 10 are in the South, the site of much of America’s most explosive urban growth in the postwar period.”
But as blogger Eric A. Morris points out even the walkable cities are surrounded by sprawl. His conclusion: “In short, with some admittedly notable exceptions (such as the interesting case of Portland), they just don’t seem to be building walkable cities any more. The tricky part is figuring out how, and whether, we can take steps to remedy this.”
I suggest you read the whole blog post — and if the subject interests you, read DRIVE.
Last night my aunt told me that while she’d given DRIVE to several friends, she didn’t think That Good Night would make a good gift. “Yes,” I said, “People might take it the wrong way.”
But later, I realized that while a book about dying may not make the best birthday present, it is something parents should give their adult children — and, then after the family has read it, they should all sit down and talk about how they want to go.
I am disgusted that the IOC is banning Right to Play from the Athlete’s Village at the Vancouver Games. Right to Play, a humanitarian organization that grew out of the
Olympics, works with kids in war-torn and poverty-stricken
countries, and many Olympic and professional athletes are involved.
Alas, I can’t say I am surprised by this heavy-handedness. Let’s face it, the Games are about making money, nothing more. And what’s freedom of speech when General Motors is an Olympic sponsor while Mitsubishi backs Right to Play.
It’s all just one more reminder that all this stuff about Olympic ideals is pure fiction, just marketing BS to cover the corruption, the cheating and the coziness with totalitarian governments. That’s not news to anyone, but that this censorship will take place in Canada is a disgrace.
So far 92 athletes, many of them high profile, have signed a letter criticizing the decision, according to this National Post story. Let’s hope all athletes use their outside voices to protest this censorship as vigorously as possible.
Since my wife always says I’m susceptible to peer pressure, it should come as no surprise to her — or anyone else who knows me — that I’ve started twittering. I have no idea if this will help sell books (unlikely) or just be a complete time suck (likely), but I am giving a go. You can follow me at twitter.com/timfalconer.
GM Canada turns down an emergency loan from Ontario. Is this a precursor to the company pulling out of the Great White North?
Barack Obama didn’t waste any time. He’s going to let California and thirteen other states raise fuel-efficiency and emission standards for automobiles. (This was something the Bush government categorically refused to do.)
Canada’s Conservatives now want to adopt similar standards. The reaction over at Inkless Wells? “Fun fact: Canada’s government has been in power for three years; President Obama for six days.”
My wife gave me my first iPod for Christmas in 2001, just after Apple released the insanely great gadget. It was 5GB and, compared to today’s versions, big and boxy, but I loved it from the first time I touched it. For years, I used a cassette adapter when driving, but eventually, the cassette player in my car stereo ate the adapter. I switched to an FM frequency adapter, which I hated as much as I loved the iPod. It sounded terrible and I kept having to seek empty frequencies. Before I went on my road trip for DRIVE, I bought a new car stereo with an input jack — that was the only way I was going to be able to survive driving across the continent and back. When I bought a new Mazda3 in 2007, it came with an iPod jack conveniently placed in the storage compartment that sits between the two front seats. But this is what I’ve wanted all along. How could something so obvious take so long to arrive?
I’m sure I am not alone in my dismay at the Globe and Mail’s decision to drop its stand-alone book section. But one of the benefits of the paper’s enhanced online book site is that old reviews — including Kevin Chong’s delightful consideration of DRIVE — are now available. And I am hopeful that some of the new features will be good for both readers and writers.
Over at his blog, Tom Vanderbilt, the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), considers who’s safer: those with automatic transmissions or those who drive stick. I bought my first manual transmission car a year and a half ago and I think I’m more attentive behind the wheel now. As a guy in Argentina told me, the thing about driving stick is that it means “the car needs the driver.” I assume that makes for safer driving.