Drive

by Tim Falconer

  Along with making the country safer and the economy stronger, highways promised to give Americans the freedom to never walk again. And that was the optimistic view.

  RATHER THAN CRUISING the open road on our way to a new city, too often we’re stuck in traffic as we do various chores, including shopping and chauffeuring the kids to their games and classes, or making our way to and from our jobs. Even for those who like their jobs, commuting by car is frustrating, time-consuming, expensive, unhealthy and bad for the environment. It is also more popular than ever: our society has voted with its feet—its right foot, more accurately. The one on the gas pedal. Although most people support the idea of public transit, our crowded highways suggest that people prefer the comfort of their cars to the inconvenience, overcrowding and potential uncertainty of trains, streetcars and buses. In fact, U.S. census data from 2000 suggest that despite substantial investment in public transit in cities across the country, only 4.7 percent of people took it in 2000, down from 5.3 percent a decade earlier. Northeasterners were the most likely to be transit users, and just under a quarter of the people in New York State were. (The percentage of users drops off dramatically outside New York City.) Meanwhile, just 2.9 percent of Americans walked to work, down from 3.9 percent in 1990.

  Drivers may rationalize their choice by saying they don’t have the time to take transit or walk, but their journeys to work take up more and more of their day. In 2005, the average Canadian commuter spent 59 minutes a day driving to and from the office, up from 51 minutes a day in 1992, according to a 2006 report from Statistics Canada called “The Time It Takes to Get to Work and Back.” The situation is only slightly better in the United States: the average American spends 25.5 minutes for the one-way trip to work, though that number includes all commuters, not just drivers. And it’s probably even worse than those studies suggest, according to Nick Paumgarten, author of “There and Back Again,” a 2007 piece in The New Yorker. “But commuting is like sex or sleep: everyone lies,” he writes. “It is said that doctors, when they ask you how much you drink, will take the answer and double it. When a commuter says, ‘It’s an hour, door-to door,’ tack on twenty minutes.”

  One reason for the longer and longer commutes is that rather than just travelling from the suburbs to downtown, more and more trips are from one suburb to another, and neither the road infrastructure nor the transit infrastructure is in place to make doing that fast and easy. Another reason is the increased traffic congestion.“Rush hour used to be an hour,” according to Sgt. Cam Woolley of the Ontario Provincial Police.“Now we’ve got two rush hours: all day and all night.”

  Nor is commuting cheap. A study of long-distance commuters in the Greater Toronto Area in the fall of 2006 found that while these drivers thought they were spending between one hundred and two hundred dollars a week to get to work, the actual cost was closer to four hundred dollars. One way to save money is to carpool, but 76 percent of the 128.3 million workers in America drive to work by themselves. Sharing a ride can provide convivial company for the long ride and mean getting to work in less time if the route includes high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. Sometimes called diamond lanes or carpool lanes, these have been controversial ever since the California Department of Transportation first reserved one lane of the Santa Monica Freeway for cars with three or more people in them. Author Joan Didion called the pilot project “a foray into bureaucratic terrorism” in a 1976 essay called “Bureaucrats,” collected in The White Album. She complained that Caltrans was devoting 25 percent of the highway to 3 percent of the cars and argued that the lanes led to more collisions.

  Three decades later, HOV lanes have cropped up across the continent. And they’re still contentious: now, though, car fans are increasingly positive about them, while much of the criticism is coming from environmentalists. Carpoolers enjoy being able to zoom down the highway beside solo drivers stuck in thick traffic, but even the latter benefit because the new lanes mean fewer cars on the rest of the road. New lanes around Toronto in 2005 meant that Highway 403 commuters saved eight minutes and those on Highway 404 saved eleven minutes. But by adding lanes rather than converting existing ones, transportation departments are actually encouraging people to use cars rather than switch to public transit. A smarter approach would be to convert existing lanes, but rare is the politician with the guts to do that. Meanwhile, for all the investment and hullabaloo, the increase in ridesharing has been small; since the number of Americans driving alone grew, the percentage of commuters who carpooled actually fell from 13.4 percent to 12.2 percent between 1990 and 2000. Apparently the lure of HOV lanes can’t overcome the disadvantages of ridesharing: carpools are a pain to organize, passengers don’t like giving up the freedom and flexibility of their own car and some people find the company more annoying than convivial.

  As our travel time stretches, we prefer to suffer alone. To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2006, Midas International held a contest to find the person with the longest commute in America. The winner was Dave Givens of Mariposa, California, who drives 186 miles to San Jose, where he works as an electrical engineer with Cisco Systems, and another 186 miles back home. The round trip, which he has been doing since 1989, takes seven hours and he survives it by drinking a lot of coffee, listening to the radio and keeping his eyes on the road. “I have a great job and my family loves the ranch where we live,” he told the company. “So this is the only solution.”

  Well, obviously not the only solution, just a trade-off he’s willing to make. But according to Paumgarten, “Commute time should be offset by higher pay or lower living costs, or a better standard of living. It is this last category that people apparently have trouble measuring. They tend to overvalue the material fruits of their commute—money, house, prestige—and to undervalue what they’re giving up: sleep, exercise, fun.”

  I work out of my house or, when I teach, I walk two and a half miles to Ryerson University, so the concept of spending seven hours a day commuting by car seems ludicrous to me. When I am out on the road during rush hour, I always wonder why the poor sods with daily commutes put up with the frustration. I know that there are a lot of people who claim their car is the only place they can enjoy some “alone time,” but I find it more than a little pathetic that fighting traffic for hours a day is the best way for some people to seek tranquility.

  AT GM CANADA, Odell and I climbed into a red 2007 Avalanche and he gave me a demonstration of the pickup’s rear-view camera, and then, as we drove to the regional engineering centre, of the navigation system. Determined to make the point that unlike products from outside companies—the so-called aftermarket—GM makes sure all these new technologies work together with the car; he cited remote car starters as an example. Aftermarket versions had been available for years, but GM was concerned about the warranty problems created when owners had to disable the security system and change diagnostic codes to install these gadgets. The company decreed, “Thou shalt not install remote starters,” and wanted dealers to insist that owners remove the devices before running diagnostic programs on the cars. The dealers, who knew their customers liked remote starters, responded that if GM wanted to ban them, then the company had better make one of its own. Odell’s job was to sell the idea to head office in Detroit—not an easy task given the environmental concerns about idling and the fact that modern cars don’t need to be warmed up. He succeeded in part because some Americans live through cold winters, and even among those who don’t, some liked the idea of “pre-conditioning” their car in the heat. Originally launched on the 2004 Chevy Malibu, the remote starter is now a popular option on several models.

  As Odell was showing off his high-tech toys, I asked him to define telematics for me. Strictly speaking, it’s the transmission of information from a distance. The ability of GM’s OnStar system to remotely unlock the doors of a subscriber’s car is a good example of what the term originally meant. GM liked “infotainment” to cover a lot of the goodies that didn’t fit that defi
nition, but the moniker didn’t catch on and the use of telematics has since expanded to include any technology in a vehicle that conveys information or provides entertainment. “It’s basically gadgets,” he explained, “though some gadgets, like rear parking aids, aren’t considered telematics because there isn’t a communications element. But then when we start to integrate these things, they start to blur.” And Odell is big on integration, both because it means the technology is safer and because when various features—air bags and OnStar, for example—are combined it makes the technology even more powerful. Still, he responds “in-vehicle technology” when people ask him what he does. “I don’t tell them I just do telematics.”

  After a drive across Oshawa, we arrived at the engineering centre. One of the five hundred engineers who work in this building is Pablo Carvacho, a senior control systems engineer with a goatee and two earrings in his left ear. He took us to a large cabinet that housed four banks of electronics; it had blue sides, a silver front with a black frame and a maze of wiring in the back. “Basically what you’re looking at is an ’05–’06 Equinox,” he announced. “As we see it.”

  The Chevrolet Equinox is a mid-size crossover designed and built in Canada. The engineering bench, one of four in the room, contained every electrical module in the vehicle. “Every single signal that you would find in the car, the vast majority never seen by the driver, is available to us,” Carvacho explained. He’d never counted them but estimated there were between three hundred and four hundred signals, although the driver of a real Equinox might see only ten or fifteen.

  All of the car’s electrical systems—from the transmission control to the power steering to the sound system—were here and integrated with a simulator. “We fool all of these modules into thinking they’re in a car,” he said. Once, the engineers deployed the air bag module only to receive a call from OnStar through the speakers saying, “We’ve detected your air bag, but we’re seeing you inside a building. Is everybody okay?”

  Carvacho, whose background is in mechanical engineering and who was part of a team that created the bench, said it allows the company to do pre-production testing, work on problems that pop up during production and later re-create problems customers encounter, especially in cases where testing on a real car would be impossible or exceedingly dangerous. “We can reproduce anything we want,” he said. For example, the bench can re-create skids—or, as Carvacho called them, “wheel speed events,” because the wheels spin at different speeds—that would be too dangerous for a driver to re-enact in a real vehicle. And the feedback is available immediately.

  After Odell and I left the engineering centre, we got back in the pickup and drove to where he’d parked his 2006 Buick Lucerne. We got in and he turned on the seat coolers. As my butt chilled and he gleefully drove around Oshawa showing off OnStar, I asked him what was fuelling the telematics boom: the technology or consumer demand. Odell said the carmakers generally trailed the consumer electronics industry, relieving them of the pressure to not bet on the next Beta as the rest of the world goes VHS. Bluetooth wireless technology, which allows gadgets to share information over a short-range radio frequency, is an example: for seven years, GM kept an eye on its development and tried to figure out when consumers were going to want it. “It’s just happening now,” he said, noting that GM has started introducing the feature. “For a technology like that, you want to react to demand in the marketplace. You don’t want to lead.” Similarly, the company is monitoring the three leading options for delivering video to cars’ back-seat screens. An on-demand service would allow consumers to download the movies they want when they want them, but that would be expensive. A subscription-based system would make only certain movies downloadable at certain times, resulting in less choice, and the kids might have to wait until half an hour into a trip, but it would be cheaper. A third possibility would let consumers download video from their homes to hard-drive storage systems in their cars through a Wi-Fi network or some other short-range communication system. But since the winning solution will likely be decided by the consumer electronics industry, the automakers can wait and watch, rather than gamble.

  GM learned the hard way about the risks of introducing technology for technology’s sake. In the late 1990s, it developed a product called “infotainment radio,” which was essentially a Windows CE–based system that allowed people in cars to surf the web. The idea, back in the days of the dot-com boom, was that people would be able to check stock quotes and sports scores. The development was a learning experience in itself. “What we learned was that Microsoft doesn’t think the way the auto industry thinks, so they were frustrated with the way we do things and we were very frustrated with the way they do things,” said Odell. “We cannot afford to have a blue screen of death happen when you’re driving down the road. And they were willing to put patch after patch after patch on their system. We call those recalls.” By the time the product was ready for launch, the dot-com bubble had burst and the last thing most people wanted to do was check stock prices. “We delivered it,” admitted Odell. “And we shouldn’t have.”

  A more cautious approach can mean being a few beats behind—as the automakers were after being tone deaf to the popularity of the iPod. The sound system in Odell’s new Lucerne included an AM radio, FM radio, XM satellite radio, a CD player that reads both regular audio and MP3 files and a jack for an MP3 player, such as an iPod. The next stage will be to let the driver navigate through iPod menus using steering wheel controls. Still, it’s all a little late in coming for some music lovers. In 2004, BMW was the first carmaker to respond to the iPod’s ubiquity by offering an adapter, and other companies now offer their own versions, but the roads are filled with people in late-model cars and trucks who must suffer through the hassle and poor sound quality of connecting their MP3 players via aftermarket FM transmitters.

  As fun and handy as a GPS can be, my favourite gadget, in or out of a car, is the iPod. Some people like to listen to books while they drive, but my twenty-gigabyte iPod holds more than 5,400 carefully chosen songs, so I like to plug it in, leave it on random and drive away. When I got my first iPod back in 2001, I used a cassette adapter in the car. But in the fall of 2005, the cassette player ate the adapter and I switched to an FM transmitter, which I endured until I knew I was going to drive my car to California. That’s when I bought a new car stereo—one with a jack for an MP3 player.

  Even without an expensive sound system, music is such a pleasure in a car, especially on a road trip, because we have a chance to actually listen to music—a rare treat these days. When I was younger, I would go to a store, buy an album, go home and put it on my turntable and sit down and listen. Other than reading the liner notes, I didn’t try to multi-task. Instead, I concentrated on actually hearing the music. Nowadays, I buy CDs—or, increasingly, download songs—and then play them while I do my email or surf the web. But in a car travelling down a highway, I can finally listen again. In fact, for many people, that’s one of the best things about the automobile. As one friend, who had just completed a road trip to a wedding, wrote in an email: “After driving a total of twenty-four hours in the past week (to and from Vermont) I have one main thought: music is better in the car than almost anywhere. Other than that, I kinda hate cars.”

  INSTEAD OF PLEASING iPod owners, GM opted to focus on OnStar. First introduced in the United States in 1996, OnStar combines GPS and communications technology to offer a growing range of goodies. It will notify emergency services at the touch of a button; call to offer assistance when an air bag deploys; run a monthly diagnostic of the car and email the results to the owner; allow hands-free phones calls; remotely unlock car doors for drivers who’ve locked themselves out; help the police locate stolen vehicles; activate the horn and lights for drivers who can’t find where they parked; and provide directions. OnStar was originally an expensive dealer-installed option with fewer features, and early on it didn’t have many takers, but it is now standard equipment. “What do y
ou really want to offer? Those debates go on,” Odell said. “If we want to lead the charge, it’s got to be something vehicle-centric. We don’t sell iPods, so we want to find something that enhances the value of the car and also meets either pent-up needs or develops needs by coming up with a breakthrough product.”

  Another technology the company hopes to play a leading role in is XM NavTraffic. At one time or another all of us, usually while cursing stop-and-go traffic, have thought, “If I’d only known then what I know now, I would have taken a completely different route.” Traffic updates on the radio sometimes help, especially with major tie-ups, but Intelligent Transportation Systems, or ITS, promises to offer so much more than Arnie Pie in the Sky, the traffic reporter on The Simpsons, could ever hope to. ITS takes advantage of computers, sensors and communications technology to save lives, time, money, energy and environmental damage because drivers receive immediate, up-to-the-minute route-specific information, including the traffic speed on a route; reports of accidents, disabled vehicles and bad weather; and news of construction slowdowns and road closures. First launched in 2004, NavTraffic is available in luxury cars from various manufacturers and works with several aftermarket navigation systems. Dozens of metropolitan areas in the United States already provide the necessary ITS data.

  If drivers find this information worth the money, then the technology will eventually follow the well-worn path to becoming standard equipment. Since the first cars hit the road, owners have eagerly snapped up add-ons to enhance the appearance, safety, speed and comfort of their automobiles. Horns, tail lights, speedometers, radiator temperature meters and hood ornaments all started out as accessories. Over time, they stopped being luxuries and became necessities. Ford dealer Mike Shanahan’s customers no longer come to his showroom looking for cars with air conditioning and power windows. Now they take those features for granted and ask about the number of air bags.