Drive (29 page)

Sure enough, at 5:30 Monday morning, the roar of cars woke me up. Although ownership rates are much lower than in the United States, they are rising; in fact, the city is adding between three and four hundred thousand cars a year and, as the number of old clunkers on the road suggest, retiring few. Almost everyone drives stick, and small cars predominate: Volkswagens, Renaults, Peugeots, Fiats, Hondas, small Chevrolets, Ford Fiestas and some old Falcons. Minivans, SUVs and pickups are rare and tend to be driven by people who need them for work. With so many old cars on the road, toxin-spewing tailpipes are common. Unlike Mexico City, though, Buenos Aires is on the plains and the good winds blow most of the pollution away.

Rather than orderly congestion, the traffic is a (mostly) fluid chaos with much bobbing and weaving. The lane lines appear to be mere suggestions as
Porteños
, as the residents call themselves, prefer to squeeze more cars across a road than it's designed for. Meanwhile, signalling lane changes is evidently optional—and probably even a sign of weakness. Everyone goes in every direction at once and stop signs are rare, so if there's no traffic light, cars slow, look and go. Once, Carmen and I took a taxi to meet a friend who lived outside the downtown core. At one point, our taxi had to go through a busy street and there was no signal or stop sign; it slowed and then began to creep across. A couple of cars flashed their lights and kept going. Finally, our cabbie just bulled his way to the other side. More than once during my stay, I was sure we'd be T-boned. Yet no one ever hit us and I never even saw any fender-benders, though dented cars were everywhere.

The best place to see Buenos Aires traffic is on the Avenida 9 de Julio, a north–south boulevard that is 140 metres wide and is
actually made up of three parallel roads. All that open space in a dense city is an impressive sight, but nineteen lanes of thick traffic create too much noise and pollution to make outdoor patios appealing. They also suggest the planners favoured cars too heavily—at the expense of pedestrian safety. And with the completion of connecting motorways in the mid-1990s, traffic on the boulevard tripled. “You could say it's three streets,” observed Andres Borthagaray, the former undersecretary for traffic and transportation for the city, “or it's a motorway.”

I met Borthagaray for an espresso in the lobby bar of the Panamericano Hotel on Avenida 9 de Julio. Now the director of the city's strategic planning council and a member of the steering committee at the Institut pour la Ville en Mouvement, an urban think tank sponsored by Peugeot Citroën, he has thick, dark hair parted on the side and showed up carrying a trench coat and a black briefcase and wearing a blue jacket over a salmon-coloured shirt and a blue V-neck sweater. He looked like a twelve-year-old dressed up for his school photo. A bow tie would have been the perfect final touch. An architect with training and experience in urban planning as well public policy and government, he said, “Political skills are the most important to get things done.”

Borthagaray drives his Renault Megan mostly on weekends, preferring to take the subway or a taxi to work. “I like to drive. I feel the difference between a good car and a standard car. But it's not my number one priority,” he said. “For me, the question is not whether one should have a car, if one can, but whether the car is the best way to go for everyday trips downtown.”

Given the good walking and the cheap and plentiful taxis— there are thirty-eight thousand licensed cabs in the city and a lot of unlicensed ones—my wife and I hadn't been in a rush to ride the subway (called
el subte
). Frankly, she was reluctant because of her experiences on the Mexico City metro. But I convinced her to take it with me to the Panamericano and she was pleasantly surprised. While it was old—the first station opened in 1913—it
was clean and safe and the riders appeared to be from a mix of socioeconomic classes. It was also, at three o'clock in the afternoon, packed.

Still, not even 10 percent of
Porteños
take the subway, and the percentage of people commuting by all forms of public transportation is actually shrinking as more and more people drive. The government has neglected the commuter rail infrastructure, and the system has become less reliable with the shift in focus to building motorways in the last couple of decades. Today, more people drive their cars than ride the bus, which had been the most popular form of transportation in the city. And while the subway system is expanding at about a kilometre a year, Borthagaray thinks it should be expanding even faster. He'd also like to see the speed, comfort and condition of the buses improve. On the roads, he suggests higher parking fees and HOV lanes for carpoolers and buses. He respects people's freedom to travel the way they want, but if their choices hurt society as a whole, “The ones who decide to do that should assume part of the responsibility.”

Argentina is among the most dangerous places in the world for car crashes, especially for pedestrians. Driver fatigue, alcohol and dangerous passing are the major causes of highway deaths. As for the pedestrian slaughter, Borthagaray attributes it to three factors. One, many intersections are uncontrolled. Two, inattention to car safety means that many vehicles are in such bad shape that the brakes don't work. Three, driver education is poor, drunk driving is too common and there's a general indifference to the rules of the road and the vulnerability of pedestrians.

“I don't get the impression there's much enforcement here,” I suggested.

“You have the right impression,” he replied with a little laugh. “That's one of the big problems.”

Indeed, although there's a heavy police presence in this country, traffic infractions seem to be the last thing on the minds of the cops. Part of the problem is that the police are federal, with
little interest in municipal matters, so driving infractions are a low priority (this doesn't have to be the case—the police in Paris are federal and they enforce rules better than they do in Buenos Aires). “We are cynical,” he admitted. “On the one hand, we want more enforcement. On the other, we don't respect the law.” He thinks education campaigns about the high death rate could make it possible for Argentines to accept more enforcement, but so far all the government has tried are two-day blitzes that no one takes seriously.

Until enforcement improves, pedestrians will have to be ever vigilant—and not just in Buenos Aires. “It's the law of the jungle,” one car lover in the northern city of Salta told me. “The biggest wins.”

WAYNE CHERRY,
GM's retired vice-president of design, spent twentysix years in Britain and Germany with the company, so he's familiar with driving habits on both sides of the Atlantic. “In Europe, people have a lot of discipline in the way they drive,” he told me, noting that over there, drivers communicate with their lights, use their turn signals and respect lanes. “And in America, they … kind of … don't. I think that's part of the pioneering spirit.”

He then told a story about finding himself in a discussion about turn signals after he returned to the States. At one point he asked, “Why do we need them? Nobody uses them here.”

If he thought the United States was bad, I replied, he should go to Argentina. Without missing a beat, he said, “Well, see, there are no pedestrians in North America, so that helps. There are no sidewalks and nobody walks.”

His tone was jocular, but I wondered if it was a case of true words spoken in jest. He was, after all, a former auto exec. But while there certainly are places where no one gets around by foot, a few American cities are ideal for walking. And others are making an effort to encourage pedestrians, as I discovered when I left Glendale and moved into a hotel in downtown Denver.

14
Denver

Pedestrians Wanted

IN 1978,
having just finished high school, James van Hemert and two friends rode their bicycles across Canada. First, they dipped their tires in the Pacific Ocean at Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island; three months later, they dunked their wheels in the Atlantic Ocean at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Along with being a lot of fun, the adventure taught him that there's more than one way to travel from place to place. “It opened things up for me in many ways,” said van Hemert, who grew up in a car-filled suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. “And I realized for the very first time in my life that I can use a bicycle to get around.”

Today, the urban planner lives about a mile from his office at Denver University and commutes by walking or biking. Ever since his sixteen-year-old Toyota Camry died in 2005 after lasting 215,000 miles, his family has happily lived with one car. His wife commutes to work in their Plymouth Voyager, and if he needs a car, he rents one. Most people equate automobiles with freedom, and the more they have, the greater the independence, but the executive director of DU's Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute doesn't see it that way. “Owning three cars is enslavement,” he told me, citing all the time and money needed to maintain vehicles. “If we walk or bike, we can be free. That, in fact, is more freedom than being forced to buy three cars.”

I met with van Hemert at Kaladi Brothers Coffee, a small but comfortable café and roaster of organic and fair trade coffee near the university. The place had a bohemian charm—and Steve McQueen posters in the restroom. At 7:30 a.m., van Hemert was in his usual haunt on the right side of the café at a table beside a
bookshelf. A large, round insignia with the words “Kaladi Coffee Academy” on the top and “Intellectualize, Socialize, Revolutionize” on the bottom adorned one of the red clay–coloured walls. The half-dozen or so other men at the table were middle-aged or older, except for one slightly younger man with a shaved head and a young daughter. They weren't all professors, just an eclectic and politically diverse bunch that gathers for some lively discussion over their morning jolts of caffeine.

When I arrived, the topic inevitably turned to cars. One member of the round-table gang, Gerry Edelstein, kept on reading his paper, but every once in a while, he would lift his head and offer his iconoclastic point of view. First, he pointed out that the car was originally an environmental solution and argued that we'd never have had our highly developed society if we were still travelling by horse, to which someone else chimed in: “But we'd never be short of fertilizer.” A few minutes later, the contrarian physicist took his eyes off
The New York Times
long enough to suggest that we should deplete all fossil fuels as fast as possible in order to ensure the development of alternatives: “I'd like to see a tax on all vehicles that get more than ten miles to the gallon.”

As we moved to another table, van Hemert confided, “We're never sure if he's joking or not.”

In the mid-1990s, van Hemert served as a planning director in Mississippi. He was already convinced of the wisdom of public transit, high-density development and mixed-use zoning. “But I kept my mouth shut. There was no hope. Southaven, Mississippi, is one hundred percent car culture. The only people who take a bus in that part of the country are the poor, and the bus service is rotten,” he admitted, adding that even he drove a car everywhere. “The best I could do was to ask for sidewalks. People said, ‘Why put sidewalks there? Nobody walks there.' I'm serious, that's what I was told. I could get sidewalks in residential areas, but not on major arterials.”

Later, he moved to the planning department in Douglas County, Colorado, which includes Highlands Ranch, a community that became the poster child for sprawl when it made the cover of
National Geographic
in 1996. After he became chief planner for the county, his department had a chance to recraft some of the land use patterns. The 1979 plan for Highlands Ranch included two town centres. The first one was a dismal effort, and city hall ended up in a strip mall. When it came time to build the second one, van Hemert was determined to win a greater mix of uses, better design standards and pedestrian-oriented streets. A requirement for a minimum average height of twenty-eight feet produced a sense of enclosure and fostered more vitality; and, though it took a while, the engineering department agreed to slightly narrower streets. The town centre is not as dense as he would have liked because the developer couldn't afford to wait until enough demand for that kind of housing emerged, but some brownstone-style townhouses went up. And the developer built a parking garage rather than relying on surface lots. “As long as you still have surface parking, you can't create a very vibrant, immersive urban environment,” explained van Hemert. His department also attracted a library branch. Allowing a big-box Home Depot to move in was a sacrifice, but it did drive business to the other retailers, 80 percent of which aren't chain stores.

Despite that success, qualified as it may have been, he jumped to the Land Use Institute, an interdisciplinary forum for planning and environmental issues, in 2004. He was tired of his daily fifty-mile commute and fed up with all the shortsighted and selfish opposition that too many good ideas face from residents—or, as he calls them, the “incumbent club”—who are determined to fight anything in their backyard. “Quite frankly,” he confessed when I asked why he'd switched into academia, “I was sick of NIMBYs.”

Dressed in a tweed sport coat over an indigo shirt, van Hemert has a long, slender face and a beard. Although calm and mild mannered, he was clearly passionate about the subject of sprawl
and our need to get over the car. As he talked, he often bounced around in his seat or leaned forward with excitement. The smell of the fresh coffee beans inside the café was intoxicating and stayed with me—perhaps in my clothes and hair—for hours after I left. Many of van Hemert's ideas stayed with me even longer.

MY HALF-HOUR JAUNT
to Kaladi had been a great way to start the day. If the old sailors' adage held, the red sky suggested that the forecasts for a coming snowstorm would prove true, but Denver is just fifteen miles east of the foothills and I enjoyed the morning light on the Rocky Mountains as I strode west along Evans Avenue. The people of Colorado are proud that they live in the thinnest state in the nation, but self-selection has a lot to do with it since skiers, mountain bikers and other active people move here for the recreational opportunities. That's one reason the metropolitan area now has a population of more than 2.3 million.