Drive

by Tim Falconer

  Rather than more horsepower, most buyers want comfort and safety. And the more time we spend in our cars, the more we demand. So far, automakers have been good at meeting our demands. We wanted better seating and the designers gave it to us. We wanted more places to put our stuff and many new cars have additional glove compartments, storage areas under seats and even umbrella holders. We wanted good sound systems to help us survive long commutes, and sure enough we got them. (Ford has also developed Sync, a voice-activated in-dash communications and entertainment system for cell phones and MP3 players.) We wanted to keep the kids occupied in the back seat—playing I Spy, Punch Buggy and other car games doesn’t cut it anymore—so automakers started offering video screens. David MacDonald of Environics showed a profile of minivan owners to an auto parts executive who looked at the data and said, “These people are low on the spectrum when it comes to technology, so why is it that every one of these things I see on the road has one of those screens in the back?” The father of three kids under the age of ten, MacDonald laughed and said, “That’s not enthusiasm for technology, that’s crowd control.” Shanahan agrees. “If you’re driving a car, you’d rather your kids are watching a movie than screaming and yelling and throwing food around and hitting you in the back of the head when you’re driving,” he said. “So it’s actually a safety feature.”

  Most of all, we demanded cup holders. The stories of people picking their new car based on the number and design of the cup holders are too numerous to just be urban legend. Americans have enjoyed eating in their cars at drive-in restaurants since the 1920s. Of course, drive-in patrons usually finished what they were eating before they left. Drive-thru windows—which first appeared in the 1940s and have proliferated in recent decades, especially at fastfood joints—made noshing on the go more popular. Trying to scarf down a burger while driving is dangerous, but most people were more concerned about drink spills, so cup holders first started showing up in the 1980s, especially in minivans. They weren’t just for Slurpees and milkshakes; as American society’s obsession with coffee grew deeper—and there’s probably a bit of that proverbial chicken-and-egg thing going on here—the cup holder became a beloved feature in domestic cars.

  Almost everyone agrees that foreign automakers schooled the Big Three on interiors for years. Not on cup holders, though. European designers were slow to pick up on the trend for two reasons. First, they couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to gulp coffee in a car when the civilized, and sensible, thing would be to enjoy it at a café. Second, Europeans tend to take a more focused approach to driving, and manual transmissions are far more common there, so they couldn’t imagine drinking anything while driving. Apparently, Japanese designers were equally baffled because my 1991 Maxima had no cup holders, which meant my otherwise tidy car invariably had water bottles rolling around in it and I have to admit I hoped my next car would have at least one of the handy little cavities.

  Now that cup holders are a given in most cars, the race to design better ones is on. Several vehicles come with adjustable cup holders; others offer ones that can keep drinks hot or cold and, with ambient lighting starting to show up in cars, the Ford Focus now has an option for LED lighting inside the cup holders while the Dodge Caliber has glowing rings around them.

  So, as we drive around in cars with cushy interiors, we eat and drink, listen to tunes or audiobooks, talk on the phone and let the kids watch movies on rear-seat DVD players while we get directions and up-to-the-minute traffic information from a GPS navigation system instead of pulling over to read a map. Depending on the car and the living room, the car—especially if it comes with a sophisticated sound system, seats that heat and cool, and mood lighting—may be better. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable, especially for commuters, and cool gadgets are fun, but by turning our vehicles into cushy living rooms, we’re only making it more inviting to spend even more time in our cars. Unfortunately, that means many of us will.

  7 St. Louis Sedentary Behind

  a Steering Wheel

  “HAVE FUN SITTING in a car and getting fat for two months,” my eighteen-year-old nephew taunted me before I started my trip. Now, I’m far from a health food fanatic, but I did resolve to avoid fast food as much as possible during my journey. In truth, I was worried about surviving the road food. Interstate highways encourage making time and discourage getting off to seek a good place to eat. Besides, many of the independent diners that once served real, though not always particularly healthy, food to travellers are now shuttered because of the success of the fast-food industry. When I’m on the road back home in Canada, the only place I can handle is Tim Hortons. Once a coffee-and-donut chain co-started by the great National Hockey League defenceman— who died in 1974 after crashing his De Tomaso Pantera sports car—the company has expanded its offerings to include soups and sandwiches and now has more than 2,750 stores across Canada. A friend who has toured the United States as a musician emailed me before I left: “Say hello to interstate service stations for me. It’s been too long. My only advice: Subway (y’know, the sandwich place).” And so, here I was on a Saturday night in what I now realize were the outskirts of Fenton, Missouri, with nothing appetizing within walking distance. Not even a Subway. So I reluctantly climbed back into my car to search for some dinner. Foolishly, I drove around for half an hour, not really sure where I was or where I was going, and still nothing caught my fancy. Sometimes there’s really no choice: I ended up at a Steak n Shake for the first and, I really, really hope, last time in my life. At least the name was funny. I could actually see the place from my hotel, though reaching it by foot would have meant jaywalking across several lanes of fast-moving traffic—risking my life, in other words. The suburbs were killing me.

  Whining downtown snobbery aside, cars really do kill people. Or at least make them sick, because even when drivers can avoid crashing into each other or mowing down pedestrians, our vehicles are not good for our health. Traffic noise isn’t just annoying—according to a report by the Toronto Board of Health, it may increase blood pressure, disturb sleep patterns, impair learning in children and can even lead to depression. But the assault on our ears is mild compared to what the air is doing to us. The bad news starts with that delightful new-car smell: some of the plastics and other materials, as well as the paints, glues and sealants in an automobile’s interior give off chemicals that may cause throat irritation, kidney or liver damage or even cancer. But the air outside is an even graver concern. In addition to emitting greenhouse gases, cars and trucks spew carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides and fine particulate matter. After Atlanta limited traffic during the 1996 Summer Olympics, the resulting 28 percent reduction in the concentration of ozone led to a drop of between 11 and 14 percent in the number of children who needed medical attention for acute asthma symptoms. Similarly, hospitals near Buffalo, New York, and Fort Erie, Ontario, saw fewer people with respiratory diseases in the days following September 11, 2001, because of a 50 percent cut in traffic across the Peace Bridge. And a Toronto Public Health study linked 440 deaths and 1,700 hospitalizations in the city each year to air pollution generated by cars and trucks.

  As bad as the air is, our “car first, exercise last” attitude is worse. Just as it’s healthier to eat an apple that might have been sprayed with pesticides than to scarf down a Krispy Kreme donut, for most people it’s better to stroll in bad air than to get no exercise at all. And yet we’re raising a generation of kids that never walks or cycles. They take it for granted that, as the title of the popular parenting guide Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall? suggests, the only way to get anywhere is by car. Children who walk or cycle short distances become more active and less automobile-dependent. Aside from increasing stamina, alertness and academic performance, physical activity improves kids’ overall health and fitness while reducing the chances they will be obese.

  Since 1979, obesity has more than doubled in the United States. The
rate is now over 32 percent and cheap gas is one of the culprits. When fuel prices rise, more drivers opt to walk, bike or take transit, expending more calories than if they’d simply sat in their cars. People also have less disposable income to eat in restaurants, most of which overserve their patrons. (Some fast-food burgers contain close to 2,000 calories, while the average homemade one comes in at about 420 calories. In addition, restaurant meals are often much higher in fat and sodium, which most of us are already getting too much of.) When Charles Courtemanche of Washington University in St. Louis looked at the relationship between obesity and gasoline prices, he concluded that a one dollar per gallon increase in the cost of gas would lead to a 15 percent drop in the American obesity rate.

  Unfortunately, bad urban planning means that some people will have no choice but to drive no matter what the cost because the distances between home, work and shopping are so huge. To take advantage of cheap land, some schools are so far away from where families live that no kid can walk or cycle to class—the only way to get there is by bus or car.

  And sitting sedentary behind a steering wheel is no way to go through life. Aside from packing on the pounds and inducing back and neck pain, some drivers suffer psychological damage. Cruising down an open highway may be a blast, but crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic sure isn’t. A tense commute is, at best, dispiriting and exhausting; at worst, it can lead to road rage.

  The term became popular in the 1990s after a spate of violent incidents, some involving guns, made the news. The trend coincided with an increase in aggressive driving—including following too closely, driving at excessive speeds, weaving through traffic, and running stoplights and signs—and a general drop in civility on the road. After being cut off in traffic or frustrated by a slowpoke, some drivers become incensed and seek revenge. It can start with swearing and bird-flipping, escalate to intimidating driving and end up in fisticuffs, assault with a weapon (such as a golf club or tire iron) or gunplay. Some road ragers have even used their automobile as a weapon.

  The phenomenon may not get the media attention it once did, but it certainly hasn’t gone away. One study suggested that up to sixteen million Americans experience what psychiatrists call “intermittent explosive disorder.” Not everyone agrees that the problem is medical, arguing instead that it’s cultural, but there’s little debate that as the traffic volumes increase and commute times grow longer, people become more impatient and less forgiving. Some experts speculate that drivers behave differently (read: more irrationally) in a car, which—especially if it’s a big SUV—can create a sense of isolation and invincibility. The anonymity of riding in a living room on wheels, an extension of the anonymity of suburban life, can weaken common sense and self-discipline so much that even upstanding citizens with responsible jobs do things they’d never do in a grocery store lineup. “They aren’t all Charlie Manson look-alikes,” Sgt. Cam Woolley, of the Ontario Provincial Police, told me. “They’ve timed their commute down to the last second, and if anybody goes too slow or doesn’t drive the way they’d like, they go nuts.”

  ON MONDAY, when I fled Fenton for St. Louis, I was relieved rather than filled with rage. Back home, everyone was celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving, but I wouldn’t be feasting on turkey and fixings for several more weeks. Instead, I made a detour to the Whole Foods Market in Brentwood, a low-density inner suburb that includes several shopping malls with well-used parking lots filled with more Japanese cars than American ones. Then I drove to the Central West End. I’d found a cheap hotel there, but since it wasn’t check-in time yet, I walked over to Forest Park, which is one of the largest urban parks in the United States and about five hundred acres larger than New York’s Central Park.

  The Central West End is a gentrified neighbourhood near St. Louis University, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine and Forest Park. I walked around some of the residential streets and saw plenty of lovely homes, particularly to the north, while lofts were going up to the south, closer to the hospital and the medical school. In the middle, restaurants and bars drew people out of their houses. Even on a Monday night, people were out and about, taking advantage of the restaurant patios. It all seemed good.

  The Central West End’s pleasures aside, St. Louis is a car city— and by that I mean one ruined by the car. At the turn of the last century, the Gateway to the West was the fourth-largest city in America, and by 1950 the population had grown to more than 850,000. Since then, as more and more residents headed for surrounding suburbs, the population has fallen below 350,000— about what it was in 1880. Unlike some American cities, St. Louis has not had much luck attracting many people back downtown again despite the presence of the big park, a healthy arts and cultural scene and Metrolink, the region’s light rail system. A few neighbourhoods—notably the Central West End and Lafayette Square—are doing well, but residents are still clearing out of other areas, particularly North St. Louis, and the high crime rate hasn’t helped. The region has also lost economic power, and though railway car manufacturing, some Boeing operations and Big Three plants are still up and running, it’s not the major centre for transportation manufacturing it once was.

  On Tuesday afternoon, I rode the Metrolink down to the Gateway Arch. The Central West End is about twelve miles from the arch, and as I looked out the window of the train, I saw a lot of industrial desolation. The Metrolink has the airport at one end and has stops by the domed stadium, the hockey arena and the baseball stadium, which are all close to downtown, the arch and the waterfront. And yet, it wasn’t busy. Even returning to my hotel after four o’clock in the afternoon, I had no problem getting a seat. The trains heading to East St. Louis were a bit more crowded, but they were a claustrophobe’s dream compared to the cattle cars on rapid transit at that time of day in more dynamic cities.

  Except for some gambling riverboats, the banks of the Mississippi River offer nothing to attract people to them; indeed, the St. Louis waterfront makes the pathetic one in Toronto look good. Laclede’s Landing, an old warehouse district with cobblestone streets that’s now home to shops, bars and restaurants, is nearby. But on a Tuesday afternoon, it had all the vibrancy of a morgue. I got the impression that rather than living or working there, people popped in to party, especially before a game since Busch Stadium and the Edward Jones Dome are close by. The city is trying to revitalize its neighbourhoods, so there is hope, but without people living downtown, St. Louis lacks the energy a great city needs.

  On my way back to my hotel, I got off at Union Station. Once an important railway terminal—after it opened in 1894 it was the largest and busiest passenger rail terminal in the world—and an impressive piece of architecture, it’s now a shopping mall and entertainment complex, which surely says something about our current attitudes toward train travel, on the one hand, and shopping, on the other. But in the late afternoon on a Tuesday, the place was all but empty and I wondered how the retailers stayed in business. When I went outside and walked around the old station, I found that, as is so often the case with such malls, it had failed to generate any nearby development.

  That didn’t surprise me, but the light traffic at a time of day when most cities are chock full of cars did. It also dawned on me that in the two days since I’d escaped the suburbs, I’d seen hardly any taxicabs. Obviously, I hadn’t expected St. Louis to be like Manhattan, where cabs seem to outnumber private cars (except when it’s pouring rain, of course), but I had assumed that someone on a busy St. Louis street would have little problem flagging one. Taxis flourish in dense cities where there’s effective public transit and plenty of pedestrians—places where people might walk partway and then hail a cab or take a taxi to their destination and walk back or, at night, take transit there and a cab home. One thing’s for sure: car drivers don’t flag taxis. So pedestrians go where there are taxis and taxis go where there are pedestrians. As I thought about this, I figured that I’d stumbled on a new way to measure the walkability and livability of an urban centre:
simply count the number of cabs driving around looking for fares.

  8 Route 66 (Part One)

  Kicks, Flicks and Tailfins

  AS SOON AS MY FRIENDS heard about my road trip, they wanted to join me. I didn’t invite them, they just said, “I’m coming.” Naturally, when it came down to it, work or family or a lack of cash intervened for some of them, but not for all. And so, just eight days into my adventure, I picked up Chris Goldie at the St. Louis airport. A self-described “history buff,” Chris wanted to drive Route 66 with me.

  The highway, created in the 1920s, ran from Chicago to Los Angeles and quickly became not just the country’s most famous road but also part of popular culture, inspiring hit songs, bestselling books and even, in the early 1960s, a popular television show called Route 66. The series featured two drifters driving a convertible Corvette around the country in search of “a place to put down roots,” though they had more luck finding adventure with different characters, ranging from a Nazi hunter to a dishonest beauty contest promoter to a heroin junkie (played by Robert Duvall). Shot on location, though only a few shows actually took place on Route 66, the show captured the restlessness and hunger for meaning many young Americans were feeling at the time. Chris and I are well past our youthful restlessness, but we were searching for meaning, or at least a better understanding of the history of America’s love affair with the road and its influence on popular culture.

  Despite decades of mythmaking, Route 66’s kicks couldn’t last forever. As soon as the interstates offered more efficient ways to travel across the country, most drivers forgot about the old road. Fortunately, many individuals and organizations remain dedicated to promoting and preserving this part of American history, and 80 to 85 percent of Route 66 is still driveable. But it’s a bit trickier than simply getting on the road and stepping on the gas pedal.