Drive (2 page)

THE STREET WHERE
I park my car is a short, leafy cul-de-sac in midtown Toronto. In most American cities, my street, which is just a block from a six-lane north–south arterial road, would be no place for single-family homes. Fortunately, my city never suffered an exodus to the suburbs. The evacuation that killed the central core of too many cities didn't happen here because a group of citizens killed a highway.

The Spadina Expressway—which would take suburbanites from the northwest corner of the city into downtown in the morning, and then out again in the evening—was all part of a master plan that featured five expressways. Plenty of putative experts thought the scheme was an excellent one; after all, the great American cities were doing it. And in the 1960s, Toronto was anything but a great city: it was puritanical, placid and parochial. A good time was hard to find. My parents, like a lot of people who lived here back then, drove to Buffalo or Detroit to shop and enjoy some nightlife. Today, that seems laughable because those places are decaying cities with dead downtowns, while Toronto is now a vibrant place. It will never have the energy of Manhattan, the joie de vivre of Montreal or the architecture of Chicago (a town Toronto looks up to the way a kid reveres his big brother), but to most objective observers, the city is largely a success. True, the place is still a bit uptight, developers seem to take pride in throwing up unremarkable buildings and the wasted opportunity of the waterfront is a disgrace, but it is also dynamic, tolerant, wealthy, safe and among the most livable cities in the world.

Some good decisions and a huge dollop of luck helped make this possible, but stopping the Spadina Expressway was crucial. In 1971, the road was already under construction. Suburbanites were all for it; downtowners, not so much. They knew the highway would mean the end for central neighbourhoods. Some of the most vocal opponents were from the Annex, which was right on the path of the planned construction. Annex resident Jane Jacobs led the activists who stopped Spadina. Born in Scranton,
Pennsylvania, she moved to New York City, where she took on Robert Moses, the autocratic master builder who was, for more than four decades, one of the most powerful people in New York. Though he never learned to drive, he favoured highways over public transit, suburbs over cities and grand projects over neighbourhoods. His plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway would have destroyed Greenwich Village and SoHo. Jacobs and her first book,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, galvanized opposition to the proposed road. After that defeat, Moses lost much of his influence in New York, but by then his ideas had infected other cities across the continent.

A few years after helping to save it, Jacobs left the West Village. Appalled that their taxes were being used to fight the Vietnam War—and with two sons eligible for the draft—she and her architect husband moved to Toronto and settled in the Annex. She stayed until she died in April 2006, just a few days shy of her ninetieth birthday. In the rest of the world, she'll be best remembered for
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, but in many ways her legacy is modern Toronto. Along with leading the crusade against Spadina, she was prominent in many other fights (for public housing, for intensification) and was a mentor to some of our better municipal politicians. The central plan that shaped Toronto from 1975 to 2000 incorporated many of her ideas.

The Annex became one of the most desirable parts of the city. John Barber, the city columnist for
The Globe and Mail
, lives there—on a street where his great-grandparents bought their first house in 1880. Though he and his wife ride their bikes to work, he loves American V8s and is the proud owner of a 1998 Mercury Grand Marquis LS, which he calls the Grand Monkey. I had lunch with him two weeks before Jacobs died, and when, inevitably, the subject of the Spadina Expressway came up, he pointed out that many people who complain about the traffic in the city still argue that the big mistake was not building Spadina. I stated the obvious: “You wouldn't live where you live if it had gone through.”

“I'd be living on an off-ramp,” he agreed.

Other residential areas—including mine—would likely have been collateral damage. Some of the highway's opponents may have been motivated more by NIMBYism than anything else, but when the provincial government finally agreed to kill the project—along with three of the other proposed inner-city expressways—it not only saved the Annex but also changed the way the city thought about its neighbourhoods. (The fifth highway, the Don Valley Parkway, had already been built in a bosky river valley. Environmentalists would never let that happen these days, but it did mean that fewer homes were destroyed. And though it usually seems closer to a parking lot than a parkway, it does offer a lovely, winding and tree-lined drive into Toronto and an impressive view of downtown.) With the scrapping of the planned inner-city highways, Toronto became a city of neighbourhoods—and, more important, a city that valued them. Aside from meaning fewer people fled to the suburbs, that mindset was also an ideal fit with the waves of immigration that would, over the next couple of decades, transform Toronto from a sleepy regional town full of dull, white Protestants to the most multicultural place on the planet.

While much of downtown Detroit remains a no-go zone, the American cities having the most success revitalizing their downtowns—San Francisco, Portland and Washington, D.C., for example—boast extensive, if often aging, transit systems. So Toronto is fortunate it didn't tear up all of its streetcar tracks and for a while built subways, but the transit system is now underfunded, overcrowded and struggling to keep riders happy. For downtowners at least, it offers an alternative to driving, though apparently I'm not alone in thinking that walking is an even better option. After a study found that 45 percent of people who live close to the waterfront walk to work, Rod McPhail, the city's director of transportation planning, told the
Toronto Star
in October 2004, “What we found, it blew me away.”

Inner-city success couldn't stop the surrounding suburbs from sprawling, but the vigour of the downtown made the region a magnet for newcomers from across Canada and around the world. The city now has a population of almost 2.5 million and a healthy density greater than 10,000 people per square mile, but the Greater Toronto Area has more than 5 million residents, most mired in car dependency and poorly served by public transit. Many of those people commute to Toronto for work, but only 20 percent take public transit. Solo drivers account for 67 percent of the trips into the city each morning, and since the road infrastructure hasn't kept pace with the growth, travel times continue to rise.

I'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT
Hogtown, as we call it, was akin to older East Coast American cities that have grown in a radial pattern around a downtown core, and I was surprised to hear that many American urban planners see Toronto as closer to the polycentric cities of the American West. Perhaps it has a chance to combine the best of both. Or it could become everything it fears. Eric Miller, a professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Civil Engineering Joint Program in Transportation, worries the city has been dining out on some good choices, such as killing Spadina, that are now decades old. “I don't think we've made any smart decisions since,” he told me, citing the failure to continue building subways and the sprawling suburbs as examples. “We lost control over the situation and we lost our will to make decisions and to see the vision through. We still talk about it but we don't really do it and we haven't done it for a long time and now we have a lot of catching up to do. We're resting on our laurels.”

Unfortunately, now is the worst time to be coasting. The city's population is growing rapidly, and already 49 percent of the people who live in Toronto were born in another country and 43 percent of the population are part of a visible minority. This is our great experiment, and so far the results have been encouraging. If it is a success, that diversity will be our greatest strength
and could turn Toronto into a model of multicultural urban living for the rest of the world. But pulling it off won't mean a thing if we don't solve the problem of the car.

My hometown isn't the only place facing this challenge: as a society, we can't live with the car and we can't live without it. Although the suburbs promise more space and relief from inner-city woes, they are too often dismal, wasteful and unhealthy communities filled with soulless shopping malls, drive-thru fast-food joints and clogged roads. And we've now sprawled so much that commutes of over an hour—once unthinkable—are now commonplace. And that's on a day without lane-closing crashes. All that time in the car is not good for us. Traffic tie-ups are costly in terms of wasted fuel and productivity—and human health and sanity. Many suburbanites suffer from frazzled nerves and neck and back problems brought on by long commutes, and because they must get in a car just to pick up a litre of milk, they are less fit and more likely to be overweight or obese than their inner-city counterparts. Even if governments could afford to build as many highways as they wanted, they'd never get ahead of demand: more roads beget more cars. And although most politicians prefer subsidizing roads to public transit, many highways are in disrepair. So no one's happy.

More worrisome is the prospect of people in other countries joining in. So far, the obsession with the automobile has been most acute in North America. Europeans love their cars, but their societies don't revolve so completely around the automobile: the vehicles are smaller, the gas more expensive, the transit systems better, the urban densities greater and the distances people travel shorter. Nevertheless, traffic in London was so bad that the city introduced a congestion charge for cars entering the central core. Worse, as emerging economic powerhouses such as China and India—where automobile ownership is 10 percent but growing rapidly—fall in love with the car the way we have, we're headed for deeper trouble. Mexico City gives us a hint of what could happen:
the streets are so overwhelmed with cars that it takes several hours to drive across town, while the pollution is so bad that many visitors cannot even wear their contact lenses. And all those cars don't necessarily mean a vibrant economy: the most cardependent cities are the least efficient.

As always, though, there is some hope. Many companies, trumpeting a variety of technologies, work feverishly to find the alternative fuel that will be clean enough, efficient enough and cheap enough to make future generations wonder what the hell a gas-guzzler was. And despite the disappointing results of experiments such as New Urbanism, planners can take comfort in the knowledge that many North Americans actually want to live downtown again.

The glory days of the automobile, extended beyond all good sense by twenty-five years of cheap gasoline, are finally over. Despite what the auto industry and the oil industry and the politicians in their pockets would have us believe, we won't survive our current addiction—yet the Utopians calling for a ban on all cars are equally deluded. A carless future won't happen anytime soon because we couldn't go cold turkey even if we wanted to. Before I could consider solutions in between those two extremes, I knew I had to develop a better understanding of our peculiar love–hate relationship with our wheels. And the best way to do that, I figured, was to take a road trip to the heart of car culture: Los Angeles, California.

2
The Border

Leaving Minivan Nation

JUST AFTER EIGHT O'CLOCK
on Monday morning, I loaded my last bit of luggage into my Nissan Maxima and hopped into the driver's seat. After turning the ignition key, I flicked on the wipers to get rid of the heavy dew on the windshield and hit the rear defrost button. I plugged in my iPod and drove away in search of some insight into why we love our cars so much and what we can do about it.

I'd gassed up the night before so I wouldn't have to stop until I hit the border, almost four hours away. The drive out of the city was relatively painless—better than a lot of the trips to Sunday lunch at my in-laws' I've taken along the same route—but traffic in the other direction on the Gardiner Expressway and the Queen Elizabeth Way was downright ugly as countless commuters put up with a soul-crushing amount of congestion just to get to the office. The morning was crisp and clear, though the blue skies eventually gave way to cloud cover around the time I hooked up with Highway 401 near Woodstock on my way to the border between Sarnia, Ontario, and Port Huron, Michigan.

I knew I was about to cross into a country that had, in many ways, a similar relationship to the car as the one I was leaving. But there are significant distinctions, too, as I learned when I met David MacDonald, vice-president (automotive) with Toronto-based Environics Research Group. A tall, easygoing man with a moustache, MacDonald has always been a car guy, the kind whose wife says he'd let his dinner go stone cold while talking about his favourite subject. When I visited him in his midtown office on a
Friday afternoon, we spent two and a half hours chatting—and I got the impression he'd have happily kept at it all weekend.

After getting his licence at the age of seventeen in 1986, he drove a 1969 Valiant that had been his grandmother's—“a piece of crap,” it was true, but he absolutely loved it. A man always remembers his first love and his first car. Today, his wife drives a 1999 Honda CR-V because it's sporty and nimble, while he's just as happy to take the family's 1998 Honda Odyssey because it's big; he is, after all, six foot five. But his dream car is an old Dodge Charger. His new office had nothing on the walls yet, but he had found the time to place a model of a green 1969 Charger and a framed ad for a 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona from an old
Playboy
magazine on the credenza. He also showed me a May 1981 issue of
Cartoons
, the first auto magazine he ever bought, which he keeps in his office because his wife, a high-school teacher, threatened to throw it out. She's also not that keen on the Charger. “You want a forty-year-old car that gets zero miles per gallon, drives like a drunken pig and pollutes left, right and centre. And now it costs forty thousand dollars,” she told him. “Give your head a shake!” Still, when they got married, they made a pact that once they could afford it, she would get a cottage and he would get his Charger. They have the cottage, but with the recent arrival of a third child, his prize isn't exactly imminent.