Drive (37 page)

Holtzclaw takes people to San Francisco neighbourhoods and asks them how dense they think it is. “He gets estimates that are so wildly inaccurate,” said Frank. “It's just amazing.” I wondered how I would do. I associate bungalows with sprawl, but I was sitting in one just off a main street in an old streetcar suburb built in the 1920s. The homes sit on small lots at a rate of about eight units per acre—not exactly sprawl, but not high density either. What I hadn't noticed until my host pointed it out was the nearby fourstorey apartment building. By mixing homes and apartments, the neighbourhood had a density of about fifteen units per acre.

When he joined the Sierra Club in 1988 to work on land use issues, one of his jobs was to negotiate with developers to preserve wilderness areas, win trail easements and extract similar concessions. Now, he often supports developers asking for higher densities or hoping to build fewer parking spaces. Sometimes the builders seek out the Sierra Club; sometimes it's the other way around. For developers, the economic benefits of putting more units on less land are obvious, but Frank can marshal several different arguments in favour of density—everything from social justice (the benefits of encouraging a range of incomes in a neighbourhood) to fiscal conservatism (more compact development means government can be smaller, leaner and more efficient because providing police, fire and other public services is cheaper).

Even good projects face opposition from NIMBYs, but Frank can make the case that increasing density improves quality of life in three ways. First, sprawl spawns traffic congestion, which is annoying, stressful and robs people of valuable free time. Second, it increases pollution, which is not only unhealthy but unpleasant. And, third, it eliminates open space, which should be enjoyed rather than gobbled up. When Frank testifies at planning and
community meetings, he has credibility because the Sierra Club has no financial stake. In one case, he spoke on behalf of a mixed-use project with residential units above retail space proposed for the main street in Windsor, a town on the Highway 101 corridor in Sonoma County. “Beautiful project, great architecture, something I'd be proud to make a neighbour of mine,” thought Frank. But some residents complained, “No, we don't want it. It's different.” And it was different—it wasn't the traditional collection of detached single-family homes on large lots separated from commercial strips. “That format,” he noted, “forces you to use lots of land and forces people to drive for every trip.”

With the developers already onside, politicians are coming around. “It's a myth that somehow sprawl is a function of the natural course of the free market,” he insisted. “Public policy is part of what got us in this pickle in the first place.” Indeed, governments at all levels have been making bad decisions for decades. The federal government's redlining practices, which lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s, made it harder for people to get mortgages in denser, more racially diverse downtown neighbourhoods. And local governments outlawed mixed-use development, even though the traditional main street, with residential above retail, had always worked well. But Frank sees that changing. “Even in places like Arizona,” he said, adding that he was convinced Phoenix would find opportunities for in-fill development and take on more urban characteristics. “Citizens are going to demand it because the present course of just falling all over the place is going to have such a tremendous impact on the quality of life that people are going to revolt against it.” In Tampa, residential highrises, which haven't gone up for decades, are returning. And all across the country, old, failed malls offer big parcels of land— anywhere from ten to forty acres—ripe for redevelopment into mixed-use neighbourhoods with a variety of housing choices close to shopping.

Local residents who don't see the connection between density and the presence of shopping and entertainment choices as well as the viability of public transit aren't likely to completely fade away; but both Frank and Holtzclaw admitted that even within the Sierra Club, not everyone understands how sprawl exacerbates climate change. Although global warming and energy use are the number one issue for the organization, some environmentalists are so focused on their own issues and projects that they don't see the larger picture. “It's not just building more hybrid cars but building more cities so people don't have to drive as much,” Holtzclaw said, adding that people who live in multi-family housing share walls and a roof, so they use less energy for heating and cooling and tend to have smaller appliances. “There are lots of ways that the global warming effort benefits from building more compact cities.”

He is also excited about the social benefits of living in a diverse community. The night before we met, Holtzclaw watched the mid-term election results at the office with his colleagues, and perhaps inevitably our conversation sometimes touched on politics. He argued that when people have to drive everywhere, that hurts the social environment. “You know your neighbourhood from the windshield. You don't know your neighbourhood from walking around and meeting your neighbours, chatting in the coffee shop or meeting them casually in the supermarket,” he said. “You don't build up both the sense of community and the sense that people who look different really aren't that different. And so you are gullible to the Bush-type fear appeals.” Decrying “our country's arrogance” toward people of different religions and races, he suggested, “that attitude doesn't carry too well in the city, where you're meeting all these people” and if more people lived in cities, the spirit of this country could change “from one of fear and hate for people who are different.” Intolerance would become inclusiveness.

Maybe San Francisco wasn't liberal because of its history of beatniks and hippies but because of its density. Indeed, if Holtzclaw was right, no one should be surprised that two of the country's densest big cities—New York and San Francisco—are its most liberal. People who live closer together and are less dependent on the automobile develop a different attitude toward citizenship and activism. As he pointed out, “People take responsibility for their community if they feel a sense of community.”

SOMEDAY WE MAY
all live in tolerant and diverse communities, but we'll still want cars—if only so we can visit other tolerant and diverse cities. So, one way or another, we need to find a technological solution for a problem technology created in the first place. It's like that sage show-ending toast in
The Simpsons
episode called “Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment,” in which Prohibition returns to Springfield, and Homer, who becomes a bootlegger known as the Beer Baron, declares, “Here's to alcohol: the source of, and answer to, all of life's problems.”

Someday we may be able to say the same thing about technology and be just as right, but so far no one has come up with any easy answers or even a surefire path to the future. Ethanol, biodiesel and hybrids are, let's hope, transitional technologies. Plug-in hybrids, when they become available, will be an improvement, but our goal must be cars that don't use fossil fuels or internal combustion engines.

Either battery-electric power or hydrogen offers carmakers the opportunity to completely rethink the design and manufacturing of vehicles. But even if the ideal technology suddenly emerges and everybody says, “Oh, boy, the next car I buy is going to be one of those kinds of cars,” it will take years to replace all the gas hogs. After all, I was driving across the continent in a fifteen-year-old set of wheels. Boehm had stated the obvious: “There's no way you're going to snap your fingers and wake up tomorrow morning and
it's going to be a hydrogen world or an electric vehicle world or whatever.”

We need to step up the research and development, and cross our fingers. But, at the same time, let's not forget that we wouldn't be so desperate for a technological fix if we didn't drive so much— if more cities were like San Francisco and more people walked to work, to shop and to play.

17
The Pacific Coast Highway

Conflicted

I PARKED MY MAXIMA
at the airport in San Francisco and rented a silver convertible Mustang for the drive to Los Angeles and back. My sidekick for the trip south was Mike Harper, who owns two Porsches and races one of them, and admits to being a devout car worshipper. But since he was going through a crisis of faith, it turned out that I was to be his confessor over the next few days.

As a preteen growing up in Kitchener, Ontario, Mike fell for his dad's exotic automobiles, including a BMW Bavaria, a couple of Jaguars and an old Morgan. “I couldn't drive them but I certainly enjoyed driving in them,” he told me. “And I got to wash them. So from an early age I literally had hands-on experience with cars. I got close to them and noticed the curves and the artfulness of special cars and started looking forward to the day when I could start driving them.” When he was a teenager, his family had six sets of wheels and only three drivers, so Mike did much of his driving in a Fiat Spyder. At twenty-one, he bought his first car, which he is embarrassed to admit was a two-tone Pinto wagon. He then bought his own Fiat Spyder, nicknamed “Fix it Again, Tony”—and his mechanic really was named Tony. He sold it after the hassle and expense of keeping it on the road became too much for him.

In 1994, he bought a Porsche 911 and started racing, reasoning that it would be a shame to have a car like that and not take it on the track and really learn how to drive it. He joined the local Porsche club, started out at the lapping days and then progressed up the various levels. “Half of it is the racing,” he explained, “and the other half is the race culture and the people.”

Though he owns three other vehicles—a 2000 Porsche Boxster S, a Saab and a pickup truck he uses at his place in the country— he has a special attachment to his 911, which has been through many iterations, from street car to track car, back to street car and finally to a full race car. Someday, he'll probably convert it to a street car again. “I've never had a car that I had a deeper relationship with,” he said. “It's doubtful that I will ever sell that car.” But he was having second thoughts about his Boxster, which he liked but considered a bit of a poser car—the kind of car driven by men who aren't car guys but have lots of dough. This wasn't the first time Mike had let peer pressure sway his opinion of a car. He liked his Mazda Miata, except that it was the source of too much ridicule from his friends, who considered it a “chick car.” Finally, after one guy asked him if he had pink racing gloves to go with it, he decided to sell.

Since he lives in central Toronto, close to the subway, and enjoys riding his bike, he doesn't need to get behind a wheel every day, but still racks up twenty thousand kilometres a year on his four vehicles. “I wish we could have cars that we could live with and enjoy,” he said. “Cars have made life so much better for so many people, but they've now put the world into a tough position so we have to change our attitudes about them. We have to change our behaviour because doing more of the same is going to end in disaster.”

He's so conflicted that, lately, he wonders if his cars will be the last he'll ever own. “Most days I torture myself thinking about what my next car is going to be, but then sanity creeps in,” Mike confided, adding that the ones he already owned had as many kilometres left in them as he was likely to drive the rest of his life. “One part of me says, live with what you've got and be happy with what you've got,” he said. “So instead of thinking of what my next car will be, I start thinking, will I ever have another car? Should I ever have another car?”

Before we hit the Pacific Coast Highway, we were going to San Jose to stay with people I didn't know. Bruce Spencer and I are both on an internet mailing list devoted to our favourite hockey team, the Boston Bruins. We'd never met or even really emailed each other privately, but when he heard about my road trip, he insisted I visit him.

San Jose was a small farming city with fewer than 100,000 people in 1950, and the area was known as the Valley of Heart's Delight. Today, the city is the booming high-tech centre of Silicon Valley with a population of more than 950,000, which makes it bigger than San Francisco. Early growth policies that encouraged sprawl through the annexation of surrounding land gave way to ones that promoted intensification and managed growth. That's meant that the density of the city itself has improved, but the sprawl has continued outside San Jose's borders and, as Spencer warned me, the road and transit infrastructure hasn't kept pace, exacerbating the traffic congestion in the area, something Mike and I experienced first-hand when we arrived in town late Friday afternoon.

Because it was the end of the week and we were out-of-town guests, Spencer invited his in-laws over for a barbecue. As Al Correa, the oldest in the clan, told me more than once, when the family gets together, they're a party all by themselves. And all of the men are car guys. Originally from Massachusetts, Spencer moved west in the mid-1980s and was soon struck by the richness of California's car culture and how people take greater pride in their vehicles than Easterners. The CPA, who owns a tax preparation company, has owned more than two dozen cars (and half a dozen motorcycles) over the years. He bought his first set of wheels, a late 1960s model Toyota FJ40, when he was fifteen and then counted down the days until he turned sixteen and could drive it. His next ride was a 1973 Pinto. Though the Pinto sold well, the Ford subcompact gained considerable notoriety after several fuel tanks exploded in rear-end collisions. Undeterred by
that reputation, Spencer moved on to a 1979 Pinto wagon, complete with faux-wood exterior. That was good for hauling his music gear around, but by his senior year of high school he needed something with a bit more style. So he bought a silver 1976 Pontiac Firebird, the first car he really fell in love with. It was also the first car he learned to work on, partly out of necessity, partly out of desire. “I spent weekends pulling that thing apart for no reason, other than to jam it back together late Sunday so I could drive it to school,” he remembered. “You know that commercial where the guy pulls his car apart to clean a piston with a toothbrush? Well, that was me. And you know how later on that week he reaches in his pocket and pulls out an extra piece of the car that didn't make it back in? Yep, that was me, too. I'm proud of the maintenance I was able to do, but I also screwed up a few things pretty bad.”