Albany stopped Manhattan from introducing a congestion charge, but Los Angeles and Chicago are now investigating the idea and the Department of Transportation is giving those cities some dough, according to this New York Times article.
When I hit Los Angeles on my road trip, I really wanted to meet someone who lived happily
without a car in that megalopolis. As it turned out, my first interview
was with James Kushner, who is delighted to be done with cars. He lives in Old Town Pasadena
and takes transit to his office at Southwestern Law School, which is near downtown. But he’s not alone: here’s a good post by a car-free Angelino on how freeways have failed the city from the Los Angeles Times blog.
If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.
I met a friend for breakfast on Queen St. on Friday morning and afterward, we ignored a red light at a quiet cross street and kept walking. Halfway to the other side, I noticed the squad car. Busted. “What does a red light mean to you guys?” the cop demanded. We mumbled something about not noticing it because we were so engaged in conversation and made the kind of apology you made as a kid when you figured it might get you out of trouble. “Well,” he admonished, “this is why so many pedestrians get killed.”
Now, it’s true that some jaywalkers do get hit, but what got me was the way he said “pedestrians” with such contempt. What a menace these people who refuse to drive everywhere are, he seemed to be saying — always in the way of cars and getting run over. I guess in his world, it would be better if sidewalks were abolished and we all stayed behind the wheel.
According to The Globe and Mail, which kindly included my launch party in its “Things to do and people to see in T.O. this week” listings, Drive “chronicles the writer’s love-hate relationship with the wheel after he filled his old clunker with gas in the fall of 2006, and pointed his headlights to Los Angeles.” Well, not exactly, but close enough.
Copies of Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile have arrived from the printer and should be on store shelves any day now. Or come to the launch party (5 pm to 10 pm, Tuesday, April 29 at the Cadillac Lounge, 1296 Queen St. West, Toronto). If you live out of town and want to get a signed copy, just email Ben McNally Books at ben@benmcnallybooks.com.
The Globe and Mail’s Jeremy Cato has a good piece on how rising gas prices are changing our car-buying habits and makes the point that Canadians are finding the adjustment to smaller vehicles less daunting than our American cousins are.
If you’re a Quill & Quire reader, check out the piece on how the designers came up with the cover for my book in the May 2008 issue. (Sorry, the story is not available online.)
Las Vegas is a fast-growing, sprawled, car-conquered city with woefully inadequate public transit and bad traffic congestion, among other problems. But according to this New York Times piece, the city has come up with a fresh idea: revitalizing downtown by building a new one next to the old one. Sounds about right for a city that seems to be constantly tearing down the old (or merely middle-aged) and putting up something new (and usually ersatz).
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the guys who wrote Freakonomics, argue that pay-as-you-drive insurance — higher premiums for heavy users, lower premiums for occasional drivers — would be the best way to convince people to jump into their cars less often. Sounds good to me.
The Wall Street Journal has a good roundup on all the “active safety technology” going into cars these days. Oddly, the title is “Can Technology Make Safer Drivers?” As I argue in Drive, all this new technology may make cars safer, but it certainly won’t make drivers better — and may give the people behind the wheel a false sense of security, making them worse drivers.
The NIMBYs don’t want the proposed — and embarrassingly overdue — rail link to Toronto’s Pearson Airport to go through their ‘hood, according to this Star article. What a surprise.
PBS’s Nova will run an episode called “Car of the Future” on Tuesday, April 22 at 8 p.m.
Here’s the blurb: “Tom Magliozzi has a problem. The wacky co-host of NPR’s Car Talk needs to replace his beloved 1952 MG roadster. But in today’s car market, where should he turn? Is new technology about to transform the way we drive? Tom and his brother Ray hit the road in NOVA’s “Car of the Future” for a lighthearted but shrewd take on America’s four-wheeled future. Join them as they mix their trademark slapstick with serious nuts-and-bolts analysis of what it will take to make our autos more energy-efficient.”
And while you’re setting the PVR, my lovely and talented bride’s doc on Hilary Clinton will air on CBC’s The National on Monday night.
Matthew Blackett’s road trip continues with a report from Albuquerque and one from the successful 16th Street pedestrian mall in Denver, which I wrote about in Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile.
The Toronto Star’s transportation series continues with a look at the pros and cons of free transit and a sidebar on what happened in San Francisco after the city tore down the Embarcadero Freeway. Not sure public transit should be free, but it should be cheaper than it is in most places, including Toronto. A monthly pass should be cheap enough that buying one� would make sense even for people who don’t take transit every day.
Ever notice that good indie music stores exist in walkable parts of town and not in suburban sprawl? Today is Record Store Day across North America, so please stroll — or cycle or take transit — to your favourite independent music seller. If you’re not sure what to buy, may I suggest Sun Kil Moon’s April.
The Toronto Star’s transportation series continues today with a look at the problems created by free parking at commuter rail stations. As Donald Shoup, who I interviewed in Los Angeles, has long argued, free parking is a subsidy for the car. We will never solve the problem of the car until we end that subsidy, which remains a dangerous blind spot for most urban planners and politicians.
Chris Turner, the talented author of Planet Simpson and The Geography of Hope, writes a monthly feature on sustainability for The Globe and Mail. Today’s excellent piece is about how the people behind Scaledown Windsor in Canada’s auto capital, of all places, are pushing for “human-scale urban design.”
Spacing magazine’s Matthew Blackett is driving a snowbird’s Mercedes C320 (seriously sweet!) back from Arizona on a driveaway gig. Here’s his first report, with some great photos, of the Phoenix, Arizona to Gallup, New Mexico leg. He plans to head up to Denver after he hits Albuquerque and I hope he takes Highway 285, as my buddy Scott and I did on my road trip.
We’re expecting a transit strike to start here in Toronto on Monday. Now, first of all, I consider transit an essential service — and I wish the so-called senior levels of government thought so too, because then maybe they would fund it properly. But that’s another rant. A strike will obviously be a massive inconvenience for everyone in the city, not just transit users (good people who don’t deserve to be inconvenienced), but it’s also an opportunity for plenty of folks to explore alternative ways to get around, including walking, cycling and blading. And others may discover that carpooling isn’t so bad after all, especially with gas prices threatening to flirt with $1.50 this summer.
This site for the Car Club for Men hasn’t been updated since December, but I still get a kick out of it. Anyone with a car that’s at least ten years old and has 160,000 klicks on the odometer is eligible for membership.