Drive (32 page)

McClintock is also excited about some of the small changes Denver has made with foot traffic in mind. One example is the installation of countdown timers for pedestrians at intersections, as well as more all-way stops that give walkers the opportunity to cross in every direction, including diagonally. These pedestrian scrambles are sometimes called “Barnes Dances” (although he copied the idea from other cities in the 1940s, Henry Barnes, Denver's first professional traffic engineer, gets credit for promoting them). After finishing his latte and sticking his gum on the plastic lid of his takeout cup, McClintock offered to show me what he meant. We left the café, walked around the corner and down the block to 15th and Glenarm. Each direction of Glenarm has one car lane, a bike lane, parking and a fifteen-foot-wide sidewalk. On the other hand, 15th Street has five car lanes. At the intersection, McClintock used his watch to time the Barnes Dance at twenty-five seconds on every second red light. “Because it's a car-oriented street, we've made the changes to say to pedestrians, ‘Okay, you're going to have your moment in the sun,'” he boasted, adding that if the all-stops are short enough, drivers don't even really notice them. “The biggest thing that's changing right now is that we're trying to make our streets complete to work for everybody.”

Street light timing may seem like a rather inconsequential improvement to get excited about in the face of an overwhelming problem such as sprawl, but both McClintock and van Hemert know that people in the West love their cars, changing behaviour isn't easy and NIMBYism will always make improvements more difficult, so small victories are to be savoured. Besides, they see a lot of forces working in their favour: shifting demographics and
attitudes; increased awareness of the health problems associated with car dependency; less willingness to put up with long commutes on congested roads; and the realization that owning several cars makes living in the suburbs less affordable. In addition, sprawl is becoming an environmental imperative. “People think if you label something green that it's the silver bullet, that it's enough. You recycle, that's good. You get a hybrid car, put up some solar panels, that's all good,” said van Hemert. “But it's the land use pattern—the mixed use and the higher density—that is really going to get us to a point where we can seriously preserve resources.”

For his part, McClintock is rooting for those developing alternative fuels and other ways to make cars less of an environmental burden, but he knows the perfect car won't solve every problem. People in the Denver region now drive sixty million miles a day, and by 2030, that number could increase to ninety million miles a day—the same distance, coincidentally, as the earth is from the sun. “Even if we find a way to be more efficient and pollute less as we drive to the sun every day, would it be progress? Yes, on one level, but not in terms of these other values of walkable communities,” he said, adding that we need to reduce the amount of time we spend in the car. “If we could figure out ways to get out of our cars and have shorter distances between destinations, the benefits would include better health, greater civic engagement, more time with families and personal happiness.”

I had plenty more time in my car ahead of me, but that afternoon, as I drove south from Denver in the bright sunshine, I was feeling surprisingly optimistic.

15
Las Vegas

Muscle Bound for Glory

THE COUPLE IN THE NEXT ROOM
was going at it. The participants moaned and panted, the bedsprings squeaked and the headboard slapped rhythmically against the thin wall between their bed and mine. I slipped my earbuds in my ears, turned up the volume on my iPod and cursed cheap hotels as I tried to sleep.

I was in Española, New Mexico, a town of ten thousand that is the Lowrider Capital of the World in the summer but doesn't offer travellers much to do on a Friday night in the fall. I'd been on my own for a week, and the loneliness of the long-distance driver was setting in. But while moving from hotel to hotel—the morning pack-up, the evening check-in—was certainly getting on my nerves, I wasn't fed up with being in my car and I never felt lonely there because I always had good music to listen to, the driving gave me something to do and I'm always content thinking my little thoughts. As I drove toward Las Vegas on Sunday evening, the city's lights seemed to spread out forever and I had to admit that, at night, urban sprawl looked pretty cool.

A mess of traffic congestion, high crime rates and bad planning all impractically set in the middle of a desert, Vegas has grown from 65,000 residents in 1960 to more than 575,000 now. That boom has come without much intensification—there are only a little more than 4,200 people per square mile—or investment in public transit. More of a gimmick than an effective solution, the monorail runs for just 3.9 miles beside Las Vegas Boulevard—better known as The Strip—and over to the convention centre, costs a steep $5 a ride and, shortly after it opened in
2004, had to shut down for more than three months because it was shedding parts.

On Halloween, I spent a couple of hours walking along The Strip, popping into various bars and casinos (strictly for research purposes, of course). A few people were already in costume as I walked into the Stardust Resort and Casino, which was scheduled to close the next day. One of the oldest landmarks on The Strip, it was the largest hotel with the largest casino in the city when it opened in 1958. But this is a town where no one, and certainly no developer, has any interest in the middle-aged or the historical, so while the famous sign was destined for the Neon Museum downtown, the building itself was doomed to implosion so a resort and convention centre called the Echelon Place could replace it.

My hotel was on Paradise Road and I'd enjoyed a pleasant enough stroll to the Stardust along Convention Center Drive. Once I got to The Strip, it was, not surprisingly, packed with people. Later, I walked back to my hotel along Sands Avenue. Fences lined much of the road and there were few if any pedestrians; eventually I started to feel a little uncomfortable and decided to hail a taxi. I was surprised when the cabbie explained that he had taken a risk picking me up: not that I looked dangerous, just that flagging a cab is illegal in Las Vegas. Officially, the ban is a safety measure, even though millions do it in other cities every day and survive. Whatever the reason, tourists and locals must call a taxi or go to a hotel and line up. At peak periods, these lineups can easily last half an hour or more, but no doubt the hotels, and especially the doormen who pocket the tips, think this is an excellent policy.

Vegas welcomed an estimated thirty-nine million visitors in 2006. Other than what they watch on the hit television show
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
, most tourists see little but the tacky glitz of The Strip, the smoke-filled casinos and over-priced performances by Celine Dion, Barry Manilow and other cheesy
crooners. Beyond these dubious attractions—and perhaps because of them—Las Vegas hosts more than twenty-two thousand conventions and trade shows every year, and I was there for one of the big ones. The SEMA Show, put on by the Special Equipment Market Association, is an unabashed orgy of goodies, from tires to audio equipment, car-care products to high-tech gadgets, filters to concept cars. It is hardware heaven.

Held every fall, it runs the same week as the Automotive Aftermarket Products Expo, making Las Vegas—which already has an anything-goes car culture—one seriously auto-obsessed city for a week. At the first SEMA Show, held in 1967 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, just five cars were on display. This year, close to two thousand were. The convention is not open to the public—just exhibitors, buyers and the media—but it still attracted over a hundred thousand people. Within one million square feet of convention space, they wandered the aisles between the more than ten thousand booths. Some folks looked bedraggled, with eyes glazed over, while others oohed and aahed over cars and engines. Companies handed out swag (I waited in line to pick up a toy 1967 GTO at the Hot Wheels booth) and many booths featured the comely women, often with immodest clothing, who are trade-show and car-show staples and just one more reminder of the connection between cars and sex. The whole scene was further evidence that the fetishization of cars—especially powerful ones—won't end any time soon.

GIVEN THAT THIS YEAR'S
theme was “Celebrating 40 years of American Muscle,” SEMA was a place where the battle-weary Detroit automakers didn't need sex to feel good about themselves. Typically a mid-size, rear-wheel-drive machine with a big engine, the muscle car is back in favour as collectors eagerly snap up old ones and the Big Three scramble to release modern versions. Ford had already pumped up its Mustang, Dodge was planning to bring back its Challenger in 2008 and Chevrolet was promising to have
its fifth-generation Camaro rolling off the line in 2009. The cars have particular appeal for baby boomers with the money to once again own the models they drove back when they were young, or who now finally have the money to afford what they couldn't afford in those days.

This may turn out to be a short-term strategy for the automakers given that the target market will soon be moving into retirement and forsaking expensive toys. “Chevy's new Camaro, like the new Dodge Challenger, is aimed directly at the balding and pot-bellied looking to extend their mid-life crises,” wrote auto journalist David Booth in the
National Post
. “But, according to David Foot, he of
Boom, Bust and Echo
fame, the front end of the Boomer bulge is about to retire. Some time in the near future (he says 2011 or 2012), their free-spending ways will come to an end, just in time for Chevy to get a mere four good years out of Camaro sales. A shame, really, since it's a bitchin' ride.”

No such discouraging words were on the lips of the speakers at the keynote luncheon the day before SEMA officially opened. Three cars—a Mustang and concept versions of the Challenger and Camaro—flanked a stage in a huge ballroom filled with round tables at the Las Vegas Hilton. Moderator Angus MacKenzie, the editor of
Motor Trend
magazine, defined American muscle as “more engine, less car” and “real performance on a working man's wage” and reckoned that the 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 was the original. During the genre's glory years—from 1962 to 1972—they became icons of pop culture. Toward the end, the cars often displayed a real playfulness in colours, including bright oranges, lime greens and deep purples, and fun graphics based on cartoon characters (the Plymouth Road Runner, for example). But soon a perfect storm of outside influences—rising gas prices, insurance industry demands for safer cars, government regulations on emissions and competition from foreign manufacturers—brought an end to the era of affordable high performance. The situation grew especially dismal in the 1980s, when the
American carmakers really lost their way and the only vehicles that got people excited were trucks. “It does strike me that Detroit tried to build better Camrys and better Accords,” said MacKenzie, “and forgot what its roots were and what the visceral American driving experience was.”

The popularity of racing, particularly NASCAR, showed that no matter what Detroit did, Americans still carried a torch for fast cars. So, whether it's a genuine reawakening or an act of desperation from struggling companies, the muscle car is back. And as the automakers go retro, they're hoping to generate excitement among young people—just in case the whole boomer nostalgia trip really is the last gasp of an aging generation. The Camaro was the least retro of the three models on display: although it does pay homage to its stylish predecessors, it's a completely new design with a modern look because GM wanted to create a car that would strike a chord with young buyers as well as those familiar with the Camaro heritage.

Nostalgia being what it is, most people who dream of these rides have conveniently forgotten that the original muscle cars weren't exactly dream machines. Along with guzzling gas and spewing pollution, they handled poorly. As MacKenzie said, “Every road was an adventure if it had a turn in it.” But the contemporary versions take advantage of advancements in design and technology to improve handling, increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions.

An Australian with shoulder-length hair and dressed in a black suit, he shared the stage with six designers who sat in a row of director's chairs. One of them was former Chrysler engineer Tom Hoover, considered “the godfather of the Hemi” for his role in developing the 426 Hemi—an engine with a hemispherical shaped combustion chamber; car lovers revere it for its power and, originally, its noise. Another panellist was Ralph Gilles, best known for his work on the Chrysler 300C. A four-door, rear-wheel-drive sedan with some echoes of the 300 series that Chrysler
produced from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, it features a deep body and narrow windows, a Hemi V8 and a sticker price that's not outrageous. Some people didn't like it—inevitable given its bold design—but others loved it, including those who considered it a “baby Bentley” and those who were impressed that it appeared in hip-hop videos and was a favoured ride of rappers. Either way, the 300C won several awards, including being named the 2005
Motor Trend
Car of the Year. And sales took off.

Although he's always insisted that designing a car is a team effort, Gilles got the credit—so much, in fact, that he became a celebrity.
Time
called him Chrysler's Bling King,
People
dubbed him the sexiest man in Detroit and
Black Enterprise
put him on its hot list. The son of Haitian immigrants who lived in New York when he was born in 1970, he grew up in Montreal crazy about cars. By the time he was eight, he'd started drawing concept vehicles and when he was fourteen, his aunt sent one of his sketches to Lee Iacocca. The response from the Chrysler chairman, which may have been a form letter, encouraged the teenager to keep at it and consider going to design school. Eventually, Gilles did go to Detroit's College for Creative Studies—one of the recommendations in the letter—and then landed at Chrysler in 1992. Later, he did an MBA at Michigan State, and now that he's vice-president of Jeep, Truck & Component Design for the company, he hopes to use his magic on the minivan with new versions of the Town and Country and the Caravan. Casually dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, and with a shaved head, he looked like a rock star, but talked like a designer, pointing out that one of the advantages of industry globalization was that his company inherited Mercedes-Benz's stability control technology, which allows anyone to safely drive a large horsepower car, even in the snow.