The always wise, incisive and entertaining John Barber takes on parking in this morning’s column. The TTC is floating the idea of charging Metropass holders for parking in the commission’s sixteen lots — with predictable results: plenty of whining and laughable claims from commuters that they’ll never buy a Metropass or take the TTC again. That “controversy” is just a starting point for Barber, who argues, “Places that offer free parking are places nobody wants to visit.” As I pointed out in DRIVE, that is exactly what the people of Old Town Pasadena discovered.
Shai Agassi is a guy with big dreams for the electric car. That doesn’t exactly make him unique, of course, but according to this Wired profile, he has some innovative ideas: “Agassi reimagined the entire automotive ecosystem by proposing a new concept he called the Electric Recharge Grid Operator. It was an unorthodox mashup of the automotive and mobile phone industries. Instead of gas stations on every corner, the ERGO would blanket a country with a network of “smart” charge spots. Drivers could plug in anywhere, anytime, and would subscribe to a specific plan—unlimited miles, a maximum number of miles each month, or pay as you go—all for less than the equivalent cost for gas. They’d buy their car from the operator, who would offer steep discounts, perhaps even give the cars away. The profit would come from selling electricity—the minutes.”
The Vine, the energy and environment blog at The New Republic, had this to say about the idea: “The notion that car-owners would essentially rent their batteries is clever, but also radical: Auto companies would move out of the business of simply selling cars and into the business of selling entire transportation networks. Drivers might benefit, though: If a typical car-owner gets 20 miles per gallon and drives 15,000 miles per year, she’d pay $3,000 a year at the gas pump with $4 gas, compared with just $1,050 for the cost of electricity plus battery depreciation under Aggasi’s plan. Obviously this network makes most sense for people with relatively short commutes—long road trips would pose a challenge—but then again, short trips make up a hefty chunk of all car travel.”
While the Big Three churned out SUVs and pickups like they ran on fumes, Honda didn’t get sucked in by the big-car craze and is reaping the dividends now. In fact, according to this New York Times report, “No major automaker in America is doing better than Honda, whose sales are up 3 percent for the first seven months of this year in a market that has fallen 11 percent. By comparison, General Motors is down nearly 18 percent, Ford Motor has dropped 14 percent, and Toyota has slid 7 percent.”
And given that the debate over cars as appliances has turned out to be one of the most controversial aspects of DRIVE, I read this part with interest: “‘Honda’s cars seem to have more personality than Toyota’s,’ said Aaron Bragman, an analyst with the research firm Global Insight in Troy, Mich. ‘Their cars are enjoyable to drive, and not just appliances.’”
Sgt. Cam Woolley, who shows up in a few chapters of DRIVE, is retiring from the Ontario Provincial Police after thirty years and next week starts as the traffic and safety specialist for CityTV’s CP24. The Toronto Star’s Michele Henry offers this fine look at Woolley’s impressive — and entertaining — carreer.
OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino is no doubt finally happy to be the biggest celebrity on the force.
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.”