Sorry for my long absence — I was up north and away from the Internet for a few days and then in Montreal pimping my book. Did nine media hits on Tuesday, including the Radio Noon phone-in on CBC. The lines were jammed.
I am now in Calgary and have a full day of media here tomorrow (Friday), starting with a visit to CityTV’s Breakfast Television at 7 am.
At 6 pm, I will be doing a reading at The Marquee Room (612 8th Avenue SW), so drop by if you’re in town.
Advertising Age has an interesting look at the successful branding of the Toyota Prius.
Contrarian Neil Reynold’s continues his defence of the car with today’s column in The Globe and Mail. Once again, he relies heavily on economist Randal O’Toole, who at least favours
hybrid vehicles and congestion tolls. But I’m struck by this line: “He
calls for the smartest traffic-light technology that money can buy.
Congestion, he says, is not the fault of cars; rather, he says, it is
the fault of urban planners.” I have no doubt that the technology could
be improved, but the big problem with traffic lights is not the
technology, but the competing interests of drivers and pedestrians. So,
apparently, it’s not enough that we give up on public transit — we
should also punish people who want to walk.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog picked up on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s John Timpane’s column on the death of car culture that I wrote about yesterday. Some of the comments on the AJC site are hilarious. Jeff, for example, writes: “John Timpane is an idiot. What solutions does he propose? Oh, typical big media thinking - he DOESN’T propose any real solutions!!! He just expects Americans to stop working at nice jobs, stop living in a nice suburbs, stop living their lives… I guess he just wants everyone to live three blocks from a dingy bookstore, get soggy walking to work in the rain every day and make $20,000 a year, all in the name of stopping the ‘car culture.’”
Contrarian Neil Reynolds has a column called “Road to hell is paved with public transit” in today’s Globe and Mail. Relying heavily on a research paper by Oregon economist Randal O’Toole, Reynolds argues that public transit is less efficient that cars, though he does point out that New York has the most efficient transit system in the US. Well, duh — it’s efficient because people actually use it. And with rising gas prices, Americans in other cities are using their transit systems more and more, making them increasingly efficient in the process.
In addition, transit systems will never be as efficient as they can be until we live in communities that are dense enough to support efficient transit. And that’s the main argument of DRIVE: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile — no matter what cars run on, we need to design our cities, our communities and our lives so that we have alternatives when we want to go somewhere: to walk, to cycle, to take transit or, when it makes the most sense, to drive.
“How, then, can I say that car culture doesn’t work? Because the cost to individual and communal life, and to the environment, has been too high. And the bill is just now coming due,” writes John Timpane in a great piece called “The American car culture is running out of gas” in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Touching on many of the same themes as in DRIVE: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile, and examining the recent rise in public transit use in the U.S., Timpane suggests, “So, no, we haven’t reached the tipping point — we’ve reached a pocketbook point. When things really tip, we’ll discover — gasp –we don’t have enough trains and buses for those who need them.”
A respected oil analyst at Goldman Sachs, who faced guffaws when he predicted $100 a barrel oil, now predicts a “super spike” that will lead to the black gold hitting $200 a barrel, according to this story in the New York Times. That would mean Americans would be paying $6 a gallon at the pump. Arjun N. Murti, who owns two hybrids, says the high prices will spur the development of alternative fuels and, “send a message to consumers that you should try your best to buy fuel-efficient cars or otherwise conserve on energy.”
Ethanol is a political solution, not a technological one — and I don’t think I need to go into the dangers of that. We’ve already seen that heavily-subsidized corn ethanol drives up food prices, while be a ridiculously inefficient way to generate energy, and Brazilian sugar cane ethanol means further destruction of the rain forest. Biofuel boosters now like to talk about cellulosic ethanol made from wood chips, switchgrass and so on.
But this story in the New York Times points out a problem with using non-food crops to make ethanol is that “most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process.”
The lesson here is that when the biggest boosters of a solution are politicians and investors, it’s unlikely to be the answer to our problem.
In the run-up to the 100th anniversary of the Model T on October 1, the Toronto Star’s Patricia Hluchy has a good piece on the Tin Lizzie and the birth of mass car culture.
Yesterday’s Star also ran ran a not-so-great review of DRIVE that focuses on the road trip aspect of the book — and finds it “dependable, sure, and stocked with information, but decidedly short on thrills” — while making only passing mention of the ideas and the argument.
Paul Krugman has seen the future — and it’s Berlin, not Atlanta. His New York Times column today — called “Stranded in Suburbia”– argues: “With rising oil prices leaving many Americans stranded in suburbia, it’s starting to look as if Berlin, a city of trains, buses and bikes, had the better idea.”
Streetsblog refers to Donald Shoup and the excerpt from DRIVE in the Toronto Star in a post about a parking controversy in New York City.
I don’t know why the people who write display copy for magazines have to be such wankers, but the June issue of Toronto Life offers a blatant example of words used to sell a story that bear little relationship to that story. The dek for Philip Preville’s piece “All the Rage” is: “The tension between drivers and cyclists has escalated to swearing, punching, bird-flipping hysteria. City hall thinks additional bike lanes will calm everybody down. What if they’re wrong?”
Leaving aside the egregious grammatical error — city hall is singular, they is plural — I was shocked because the display copy sells the article as an attack on bike lanes. Now, Preville is a smart guy, an excellent writer and someone with many sensible thoughts on car culture (check out his Preville on Politics blog). Could he really be against bike lanes? Was he really anti-cycling? Well, no, of course not. The piece, which is well worth reading, is about the relationship between cyclists and drivers — and he barely mentions bike lanes.
Pick up a copy of the June issue of The Walrus to read “Geared Up,” an excellent piece on cycling by Bill Reynolds. “I ride to work, the DVD shop, the fruit and vegetable stand, the theatre, the mall, a gig, the bar, the bank machine,” he writes. “It seems the practical, economical thing to do. I’m not against cars. I own one — a beat-up 1991 Buick Regal my dad sold me at a price only a parent would set — but I prefer not to use it.”But as Reynolds shows us in the story, riding a bike in our car-conquered society isn’t exactly safe.
You can read it here, but I recommend buying a copy of the magazine, especially since it’s a long article. (Full disclosure: Bill is a friend and colleague.)
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Update: The Spacing site also loves “Geared Up” and the post is generating some comments.
This is how stuck we are in our car culture: skateboarding is a clean, healthy way to get around and yet a 25-year-old man is in a Fredericton, NB, jail for riding his skateboard on city streets. This Toronto Star story notes that Fredericton actually has a Green Matters campaign that encourages residents to find alternative ways to get around. Once again, though, such campaigns are little more than public relations nonsense because politicians, bureaucrats and cops always put cars ahead of people.
Car chases are really about our cultural relationship with the automobile, according to University of Toronto professor Bart Testa in this piece on chase scenes in movies by Barbara Carey on the cbc.ca site. She points out that gangster movies of the 1920s and 1930s always featured chases and “on the big screen, the souped-up sedan was as much a symbol of criminality and violence as the Tommy gun.”
Carey goes on to write: “Testa attributes the golden age of car chases, the 1960s and ‘70s, partly to technological advances — with cameras mounted on cars, extended chase scenes could be filmed on location. Also, it was the era of the counterculture, and even the police are anti-establishment — just look at Steve McQueen’s taciturn detective in Bullitt (1968) and Gene Hackman’s abrasive cop Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971). The automobile was an extension of personality, which is why these mavericks drove muscle cars.”
GM plans to release the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid, in 2010. Toyota is also promising its own plug-in hybrid that year. Now Nissan claims it will have an all-electric car by then too, according to this piece in the New York Times. High gas prices seem to be focusing the minds and efforts of the car companies to get serious about finding and developing alternatives. Can’t wait.
I will be on CBC Radio One’s Sound Like Canada to pimp DRIVE on Wednesday, May 14. The show starts at 10 am.
Paul Krugman has a blog post over at the the New York Times site that compares Atlanta (city of sprawl where not even 4 per cent of people take transit), Boston (old city with old transit system used by 11 per cent of Beantowners) and Toronto (Canadian city where 22 per cent of the population takes transit).
He concludes: “America’s main problem is that we have a capital stock — cars, public infrastructure, and housing — designed for dirt-cheap oil. And the transition may be nasty.”
Today’s Sunday Star features an excerpt from DRIVE.
The rise in gas prices is motivating Americans to take transit. That’s a good thing and not much of a surprise. But according to this piece in the New York Times, many transit systems — even in places such as Denver, which has invested in transit recently — are having trouble handling the demand. Needless to say, it makes far more sense for governments to invest more money in transit than to offer a gas tax holiday, as Clinton and McCain have proposed.