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In the meantime, Dunwoody expects to see a mix of technologies on the road, including ethanol, natural gas, hybrid, as well as diesel and different kinds of renewable bio-fuels. The big danger for hydrogen is that it will take so long to get to market that competing technologies will improve or new ones will emerge, but Dunwoody, who spent fifteen years working on low-emission and zero-emission vehicle programs for the California Air Resources Board, isn’t worried about battery electrics—which she allowed are fine for certain applications—overtaking hydrogen. “Fuel cell vehicles are electric vehicles,” she said, “but they don’t have the problems with batteries.”
If hydrogen ends up as this era’s winning technology, it may be the middle of the century before everyone is driving an F-cell car—and that may be too late for the planet. “One of the biggest misconceptions out there today is that there is a quick-fix solution,” said Dunwoody, who drives a Honda CR-V but takes a hydrogen car one week a month. “There really isn’t, other than to buy smaller cars and drive less. That’s the quick-fix solution.”
EVEN FACING higher gas prices, too many drivers remain reluctant to switch to hybrids or smaller cars. Nor are they keen to use their cars less. Long before making that move, they cut back on their maintenance (keeping their tires, for example, six or twelve months longer than they should). I wasn’t taking any chances with my old car, especially with such a long trip ahead of me. Before I left Toronto, I took it to my mechanic, Gord Donley, for a prelaunch checkup. “Well,” he told me, “there’s no reason why it shouldn’t make it.”
That wasn’t the most reassuring assurance, and so when it finally happened, I wasn’t really surprised. David and I woke up on a cold morning in Bridgeport, California, loaded up the car and hopped in to begin our drive to San Francisco. Click. Click. Nothing. The car wouldn’t start; it wouldn’t even turn over. But I took some silent satisfaction in the fact that this happened when I was with my agent. Originally, I’d planned to rent different iconic and innovative cars—a Cadillac, a Hummer, a Prius—as I drove across the country, but that would have been too expensive and too impractical, so I settled for my Maxima. When I’d told David about the change in plan, he’d said cheerfully, “Well, your old car should provide its own adventures.” I was secretly glad he was with me for this one.
Capricious cars have always been a huge frustration for their owners. When I asked Mike Shanahan, the Newmarket Ford dealer, what features buyers are looking for, his answer was simple: “First and foremost, quality and reliability.” Although American automakers have upped the quality of their cars over the past few years, they’re still trying to shake a reputation for selling unreliable ones. David MacDonald of Environics and his wife both had cars that were built in 1991. His was a Dodge Spirit; hers was a Toyota Tercel. “In about six years, I easily spent ten times more than she did on repairs. I could have bought the car again,” he said. “All she ever did was change the oil and the brakes. But my car—the goddamn transmission went, there was a distributor arm problem, suspension problems. Every year it was six or seven hundred dollars. She said, ‘I will never, ever buy domestic again.’”
Being in the industry, MacDonald reads the data and knows that some domestics are high quality while others aren’t. But most people aren’t knowledgeable enough to know which are which, so that inconsistency has created the negative perceptions that are the big challenge for the Big Three. “There are a lot of people who won’t be won over, or it will be a long time before they’re brought back.”
People who see the automobile as an appliance will be the toughest to bring back, but people with an emotional attachment to their cars are more easily wooed by style and design and brand meaning than by brand reputation. “They’re like Volkswagen people,” said MacDonald, pointing out that for some people there’s just something about owning a German ride. “Talk to Volkswagen owners: they love their cars, but they have some of the worst repair problems. Our accountant had a lot of trouble with his Jetta. What’d the guy do? Traded it in, and got another Jetta.”
Even the best-made and best-maintained cars may occasionally require time at the shop. “Anything that’s emotional or passionate goes both ways,” said Shanahan. “The love side of the automobile is what it is. The hate side is that it’s not perfect, so it breaks or something goes wrong with it.” He explained that dealers have two different relationships with customers—one on the sales floor and one at the service desk. And though a successful dealer has to master both of them, it’s a lot easier to keep the buyer happy than the owner whose car needs to be fixed. A service department customer wants a friendly person dressed like a doctor to pull out a screwdriver to make a quick adjustment, right away, at no charge. Instead, a service technician with greasy hands and dressed in dirty coveralls must hook up the car to expensive equipment to diagnose what’s wrong. Then, before he can fix the defect, he usually has to order the part. “It becomes an unpleasant experience because, right off the bat, what they want they can’t have,” admitted Shanahan. “So we’re managing a relationship of disappointment.”
Sitting in Bridgeport, I felt more helpless than disappointed. Rather than asking if anyone had booster cables, I foolishly assumed the worst. But the only mechanic in the tiny town was a Jehovah’s Witness and would not be working on a Sunday. So I called AAA, and a mountain of a man in a big yellow truck eventually showed up. He wore wraparound shades, a blue AAA ball cap and a big plaid shirt over his overalls. The handles of his moustache hung down four or five inches. He immediately assumed it was the battery and had us driving away in no time.
We kept the engine running all the way to San Francisco, except when we had to refuel near Sacramento. The car restarted and we drove into surprisingly heavy Sunday afternoon traffic as people returned from weekend excursions. (On Monday, my car wouldn’t start again and I had to get to Sacramento. I quickly hailed a taxi—easy to do in Frisco—and took it to a car rental outlet where I picked up a Toyota Corolla. I found it lighter and tinnier than my Maxima, and since it didn’t have an iPod jack and I hadn’t brought any CDs, it mostly reminded me why I hate commercial radio.)
As we’d crawled along Interstate 80 late Sunday afternoon, driving into the sinking sun, David and I had grown increasingly excited just seeing our destination. It was the first really impressive skyline I’d seen in weeks. San Francisco is one of America’s greatest cities: beautiful, vibrant and livable. With almost 750,000 people living on a chunk of land that’s just seven by seven miles, the place has a population density of close to 16,000 people per square mile. Even if it’s an accident of geography—being perched on the tip of a peninsula means there’s no room to sprawl—San Francisco stands out as an ideal advertisement for the joys and benefits of density. Traffic can certainly be thick, especially on the highways leading in and out of the city, but people have so many other options, including regional commuter rail, a light rail and subway system, streetcars, trolley and diesel buses, ferries and the famous cable cars. Biking is also popular here: forty thousand people cycle to work and the city has forty miles of bike lanes, twenty-three miles of bike paths and ambitious expansion plans. And even with the steep hills, it’s an inviting walking city.
Nothing illustrates this success better than the reclaimed waterfront. The Embarcadero Freeway was a wide double-decker elevated expressway originally destined to connect the Bay Bridge with the Golden Gate Bridge. After the first part, from the Bay Bridge to Broadway, opened in 1959, a citizen’s revolt against inner-city freeways put an end to any further construction. But what remained of the expressway was ugly, noisy and sooty and cut the city off from San Francisco Bay, and for years some citizens wanted to raze the depressing concrete eyesore. Others, predictably, argued that drivers needed to get around in their cars and, in 1987, they defeated a proposal to tear it down. But two years later, in fifteen seconds of seismic violence, the Loma Prieta earthquake revived the issue. Although plenty of people wanted to rebuild the damaged monstrosit
y, common sense and the vision of Mayor Art Agnos triumphed, and the city now has a street-level boulevard called The Embarcadero. Each direction offers three car lanes, a bike lane and a parking lane, and the old Ferry Building— once stranded and unwelcoming, but now refurbished—is full of upscale shops and restaurants. With improvements to the piers, the waterfront is a place where San Franciscans and tourists go not only to catch a ferry, or even just to shop or eat, but to stroll, jog and cycle. On Saturday mornings, the farmers’ market is packed. The waterfront is a triumph and people want to live and work near it, fuelling further development of both commercial and condominium buildings.
The major downside to San Francisco’s high density is the lofty cost of housing, but that’s just the free market finding the true value of residing in such a livable city.
DAVID AND I STAYED at the Royal Pacific Motor Inn on the edge of the Chinatown and North Beach neighbourhoods. The old motel, which surrounds a courtyard parking lot, is around the corner from the City Lights bookstore. Co-founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the shop soon became holy ground for the Beat Generation, many of whom spent a lot of time a few steps away—just across what is now Kerouac Alley—at Vesuvio. We watched the election results at the old bar, and all the customers and staff seemed delighted to see the Republicans spanked so hard.
The next day, I walked downtown to visit the offices of the Sierra Club. The group, which has been around since 1892, bills itself as “America’s oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization” and claims to have 1.3 million members and supporters. Its battles include fighting to increase CAFE standards and promoting the development and adoption of alternative fuels, but it also advocates in favour of smart growth as a way to reduce sprawl.
One of the leaders on this issue is John Holtzclaw. A tall, thin man whose hair and moustache are going from grey to white, he is a mostly retired consultant who does research for environmental groups. He also serves as the chair of the Sierra Club’s Transportation Committee. Though he grew up in the car culture of suburban Tulsa, he now lives in North Beach and hasn’t owned a car since 1978, a not uncommon boast in his neighbourhood. He moved there in 1971 after completing grad school at UCLA, but after seven years of rarely using his car he decided to see if he could get along without it. “It was,” he assured me, “pretty easy.”
He talked excitedly, was quick to laugh and occasionally pounded his desk when making a point. Though he abhors sprawl, he never says there’s an ideal density and, in fact, argues for a variety of densities. “We’re not saying, ‘You’ve got to move into a high-density area.’ And we’re not saying we’re going to tear down all the suburbs. They’re built, let them exist,” he said, adding that what he wants to see is new housing going up in the centres of existing cities and towns, particularly around the transit lines. “Give people those kinds of alternatives they don’t have now, except at extremely expensive rents and house prices.” For Holtzclaw, the high cost of real estate in central neighbourhoods is proof that Americans don’t want to live in sprawl and will pay to be able to walk and take transit. “People want to live in convenience rather than density,” he said, “but you need density to get that convenience.”
Developers who once constructed little but sprawling subdivisions—and defended it by saying, “I have to build this because people don’t want to live in density”—are increasingly turning to denser projects, such as condominiums. But they often run afoul of politicians and bureaucrats who obsess about parking, which is a subsidy for the car, wastes space and increases building costs. Several years ago, a developer wanted to put up a mid-rise residential building west of the Transbay Terminal and proposed including half the usual amount of parking. When the planning department, which was less enlightened than it is now, said that wasn’t enough, the developer counter-offered with the idea of unbundling the cost of parking from the cost of housing—he’d put in only a half a space per unit and then charge for the parking rather than offering it for free. If enough people were willing to pay, he promised, he would hire a service to park the cars more densely. “The planning department agreed,” said Holtzclaw, “and he’s never had to hire that service.”
To learn more about the new attitude among developers, I took a trip out to Berkeley to meet Tim Frank, a land use consultant and chair of the Sierra Club’s Challenge to Sprawl Campaign Committee. Berkeley sits on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay and is home to a little over one hundred thousand residents at a density of nearly ten thousand people per square mile, but maintains a smalltown feel. The city, perhaps best known for its long history of activist politics, is well served by public transit, and both cycling and walking are popular. Frank walks most places around Berkeley, but drives his Subaru Outback when he needs to go to Sacramento or somewhere else out of town. To get into San Francisco, he walks a mile and a half to the BART station. “When we think about transit-oriented development, we really aren’t usually talking about development that’s a mile and a half away, because a lot of people won’t walk quite that far,” he admitted. But he likes the idea of getting a brisk walk in and finds it doesn’t really take much longer than driving because of the time it takes to find parking. “So I get to BART and I’ve had a little bit of exercise and when I get to the other end, I’m a happier person.”
Frank lives in a small, bluish-grey bungalow filled with old furniture, including a grandfather clock. Wearing a fleece vest, blue jeans, white socks and white penny loafers with no pennies in them, he sat in a blue chair and happily reported, “Developers actually want to do this good, old-style development again. People may react to the word ‘density’ but you show them pictures of really good density and they like it.” Some examples would make anyone cringe, but others prompt even people who think they don’t like density to say, “Wow. Boy, would I love to live there.”
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 Fra
nk. 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.