Drive

by Tim Falconer

  18 Los Angeles

  Suburbs in Search of a City

  I’D HEARD A LOT about the car culture in Los Angeles long before I arrived. “You are your car,” was a typical warning. “In LA, you’re centred in your car,” Montreal art curator Peter White told me. “You live in your car and you get out here and there. Your car is where you are and other places have a secondary role. There’s this inversion that takes place.”

  It didn’t take me long to see how that could happen. I was staying in the Hollywood Hills with Amy Spach, a friend since we went to McGill University together. She showed up in a Camaro for second year, even though downtown Montreal is not a place anyone, especially a student, needs a car. But it wasn’t like that where she grew up—car-conquered suburban New Jersey. (In third year, she took me home for American Thanksgiving: I’d never seen a drive-in bank before, and found the thought of one completely preposterous.) Amy obtained her driver’s licence on her seventeenth birthday, the first day she was eligible to do so. All her friends drove; in fact, I was the first person she ever knew who didn’t. But later, while living in Manhattan and London, she went nine years without wheels. “I fantasize about that time,” she admitted. That’s because she moved to LA in 1989.

  Today, she must drive ten to twelve minutes down a steep and winding canyon road just to get to the nearest store. She can’t get a pizza delivered. And she has to drop her son off at the car pool because none of the other parents wants to drive up to get him. Much to her son’s embarrassment, she gets around in a 2002 Nissan Altima. While functional, the car is far from glamorous in a city where everyone else seems to be driving Porsche Cayenne SUVs, Jaguars and other luxury cars. It’s also old: most people she knows rarely keep a car longer than two years. “I am in the minority in LA because I don’t love my car,” she said, adding that she resists the peer pressure to take her ride to the car wash every few days. Though she works from home, she spends at least an hour a day in her car and it’s far from uncommon for her to be behind the wheel for four hours. “Initially, the car was my liberation,” declared the one-time Jersey girl, “but now it feels like my entrapment.”

  If LA’s car-obsessed excess were a vehicle, it would be a Hummer. The in-your-face monster appeals to some people but, as the numerous anti-Hummer websites attest, is despised by others. And few sights are as ridiculous as an extremely thin woman driving one of these massive machines.

  My non-driving wife, Carmen Merrifield, is a Hummer-hater; in fact, she believes that it’s the duty of every right-thinking citizen who sees one to give the driver the finger. So I accepted General Motors’s offer to let me test-drive one for a couple of days with wry amusement. As it turned out, Carmen was flying into LA to meet me on the same day I was to pick it up. My mischievous plan was to pick up the beast, then surprise her with it at the airport. But it wasn’t going to be ready in time. So we went together to pick it up in Torrance and then headed to the coast. Luxurious and fully loaded—with leather seats, XM satellite radio, built-in GPS—the H3 is smaller than its predecessors, but it didn’t take long to get a reaction from someone other than my wife. At Redondo Beach, while we waited at a stoplight, a driver in a Toyota Prius sneered at me and my Hummer as he made a left turn in front of us. That scene said it all: a hybrid built by a Japanese company versus a behemoth built by Detroit. Both have their fans, of course, but one seems like the future and the other reeks of the past.

  LOS ANGELES ONCE APPEARED to be the future of the American city. From 1920 to 1940, with the movie business and the aviation industry booming, two million people moved here, tripling the area’s population. Since many of people arrived by car, it was no surprise that they wanted to stay in their vehicles. The endless summers also helped make Southern California a perfect incubator for a lifestyle built around the automobile.

  Because most Eastern cities started with a dense core and then expanded in a radial pattern, especially after the arrival of the automobile, most people blame the suburbs on the car. But there were railway and streetcar suburbs long before the car arrived. “The automobile didn’t create suburbs,” argued the Chrysler Museum’s Barry Dressel. “Suburbs were a preoccupation all during the nineteenth century. But what the automobile did was allow people to gratify that urge by dispersing the population farther out.” Even if it’s true that the suburbs helped create the car rather than the other way around, the old streetcar suburbs had the benefit of being denser than the new ones. And once the car led to housing developments farther and farther away, the easiest way to move people around was to build highways.

  In the East, that meant destroying downtowns, but most of LA’s significant growth came after the car, so it developed differently. If Henry Ford wasn’t thinking about LA when he said, “We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city,” he should have been. Certainly writer and renowned wag Dorothy Parker was when she quipped, “Los Angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.”

  All those suburbs have given LA an unenviable reputation for sprawl, and the smog that inevitably goes with it. And yet, the Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana urban area, which has a population of close to twelve million, has a density of more than seven thousand people per square mile—denser, in other words, than the New York area. “Turns out LA is not really the paradigm of sprawl,” said the Sierra Club’s Tim Frank. “You have to go to someplace like Atlanta to find that.” There, developers are still building plenty of houses on one- and two-acre lots out on the periphery of the city. LA doesn’t have that option because it has mountains and the Pacific Ocean constraining it, which has tended to mean smaller lots and more in-fill development.

  And yet LA doesn’t always benefit from its density. “LA is a conundrum,” mused James van Hemert of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute. “People say they don’t want to be like LA because it’s sprawled, but in fact the average population density in the LA metro area is almost twice Denver’s. But it’s still very auto dependent, so you have high density with cars.” That’s because cramming people into an area won’t make a difference to the amount they drive unless there are workplaces as well as shops, restaurants and other places worth walking to nearby. The ideal urban form isn’t just dense; it encourages a mix of homes, retail outlets and offices.

  IF LOW-DENSITY SPRAWL begets congestion, auto-dependent high density begets even more congestion. No one likes being stuck in traffic, but the thing about people who complain about it is that they are the traffic. Except for a couple of days in the H3, I was driving a convertible and I was there for only a week anyway, so I didn’t complain too much, but I was shocked by how few miles I travelled for all the time I spent in the car. One evening, it took me ninety minutes to drive from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills—a distance of just twelve miles. There I was stuck on Santa Monica Boulevard, late enough in the day that I could no longer bask in the mid-November sun, and unable to move even though the light was green. We were in gridlock.

  The irony is that when we choose the “freedom” of driving, we are captive to the actions of the many—more captive, in fact, than the people who take public transit. Perhaps because their freedom is so often compromised, Angelinos tend not to be the most courteous drivers. When we first arrived in LA, Mike was amazed at how no one would let him in after he found himself in the wrong lane. For the rest of my week there, I tried to let other cars in whenever possible—it was my small act of subversion.

  While LA is famous for its traffic jams, congestion is a problem in cities all over North America. And it’s not just frustrating and time-consuming; it’s expensive and bad for the environment. Between the 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel, traffic costs the U.S. economy $78 billion a year. On an individual basis, each year the average peak-period driver spends an additional 38 hours in the car and burns another 26 gallons of fuel, most of it greenhouse gas–producing fossil fuels. Not surprisingly, the situation is worst for Angelinos—at a cost of an extra 72 hours
and 52 gallons every year.

  Before I left on my road trip, I paid a couple of visits to the University of Toronto, where Baher Abdulhai and Eric Miller are engineering professors who have offices next to one another—but very different perspectives on traffic. To get to work, Abdulhai drives his Mercedes E320 into the city from the suburbs; Miller walks about forty minutes and feels guilty when, after walking home, he hops into his Toyota Sienna minivan to drive his sons, through rush-hour traffic, to a hockey arena out in the suburbs.

  When I asked each of them about the Spadina Expressway, which Jane Jacobs and other citizens stopped, I heard two opposing opinions. Miller thinks it was “absolutely” the right decision. If Toronto has a reputation around the world as an interesting place, he pointed out, it’s not because of what’s going on in the suburbs; it’s the older downtown neighbourhoods, which would have been wiped out, that impress people. “We didn’t need it. People don’t need freeways to get downtown, and I think that’s one thing we’ve proven,” he argued. “Toronto has boomed because we put transit in and we’ve encouraged people to live and work downtown.”

  His colleague disagreed. Though Abdulhai grew up in Egypt and didn’t arrive in Toronto until nearly three decades after the battle over Spadina, he thinks killing it was a mistake. “Freeways are arteries, so you can’t say, ‘I don’t want to depend on my artery going to the heart, I’m going to clog it and rely on the tiny little vessels to feed the heart.’ No, it doesn’t work that way,” he said, adding that a city’s arteries are essential for moving people and goods. “Extremes are bad in either direction: no highways whatsoever, you’re going to choke the city; highways everywhere, it’s expensive, you’ll hurt the environment and they create overconsumption. So balance is the key.” Because he believes in balance, he sat on the board of GO Transit, the region’s commuter rail and bus system, and is a big proponent of investing not just in roads but also in public transit.

  Abdulhai is also the founder and director of the University of Toronto’s Intelligent Transportation Systems Centre and Testbed. ITS takes advantage of information and communications technology to manage traffic in order to ease congestion, increase safety and reduce pollution. By monitoring traffic using cameras, global positioning systems and detection devices built into roads and then feeding the information into computers, it’s possible to detect collisions and anticipate congestion, forecast how long the tie-ups will last and disseminate information to drivers or use it to decide to control access to roads, change traffic lights or even adjust speed limits. “All of these things are simply algorithms that are sitting in a computer sniffing the numbers and deciding how to play with them,” he explained as we sat in a conference room with a glass wall that gave us a view of the lab, which consisted of rows of computers and a wall of television screens showing different roads and highways.

  I hoped Abdulhai would be able to answer a question I’d long had about traffic. I’d heard that even hours after the police have cleared away a crash, traffic continues to slow down in that spot. So, I wondered, does traffic have a memory?

  “Yes,” he said, “we teach this to undergrads.”

  Since a little traffic flow theory is necessary to understand the concept, he explained that the three main variables for describing traffic are speed (the rate the cars travel on the road), volume (the number of cars that use the road) and density (the number of cars on the road at a given time). In the wee hours of the morning, a highway is likely to have little volume and low density, but as rush hour approaches, both the density and the volume increase until the road reaches capacity. At that point, because the cars are so close together, drivers will start to slow down, resulting in a drop in volume but an increase in density. Eventually, so many cars squeeze onto the road that the traffic reaches critical density, breaks down and results in a traffic jam. As more cars arrive, the boundary of the congestion moves farther and farther up the road like a shock wave. Once traffic starts moving again, there’s another shock wave as the cars at the front of the congestion start speeding up. But it takes five to ten times longer than the original disruption for the second shock wave to catch up with the first one and the congestion to completely dissipate, meaning that if two cars collide and it takes the drivers six minutes to get their cars to the side of the road, it can take up to an hour before all traffic is moving again. It also means that if I come along forty-five minutes after the collision, I will hit the congestion much sooner than I would have had I travelled on that stretch of road half an hour earlier. “The whole highway is like an accordion,” he explained. “Whenever you pass through congestion, you don’t need to see a burning car at that location—it could be another location another time and that congestion is spreading.”

  He sketched a diagram on a piece of paper as he talked, but then went to get his laptop so he could demonstrate the theory on a computer simulator and show me how traffic engineers can ease congestion by controlling signal lights at the entrances to highways. Often called “ramp metering,” it’s common in many American cities, especially in California. First, he let me see typical nighttime flow. “Everything is hunky dory,” he said. “It’s fast, and when a few people join in from the on-ramp, life is rosy and nice.” He then increased the main flow to capacity so that the little black cars on the screen slowed down but continued moving, though he kept the ramp closed so no cars could join the main flow. Even so, he explained, demand was high enough that something as simple as a jittery driver jumping on his brakes could create congestion. Then he opened the ramp, overloading the road and bringing the little cars to a halt.

  But if cars flow onto the highway at a controlled rate, they don’t create congestion. While he acknowledged that ramp metering is not popular with drivers, Abdulhai assured me that it is effective and pointed out that when highways are clogged, drivers can’t enter them anyway. “So these guys,” he said, pointing to the cars on the simulator’s ramp, “are better off if those guys move.”

  But humans are funny creatures, and that means they’re often the weak link in ITS. Many cities use signs to alert drivers about clogged routes—some even send the information to cell phones or directly to cars—but there will always be those who try to outsmart everyone else. If the sign on Toronto’s Highway 401 indicates that the express lanes are moving slowly and the collector lanes are moving well, some drivers will inevitably conclude: “Hmm, everybody’s going to the collectors now, so I’m going to take the express lanes.” One way to reduce this problem is to offer more explicit information such as specific travel time estimates for each route.

  Another ITS technique, currently being tested in Europe, is dynamic speed control, or adaptive speed limits, which promises to reduce congestion by using signs that can change the speed limit on a road so cars won’t simply roar up to a traffic jam at full speed. Drivers approaching a jam at one hundred kilometres per hour will only add to the congestion and be stuck longer. But if they reduce their speed to sixty kilometres, the slowdown may have a chance to dissipate before they reach it. This would be safer and reduce both gas consumption and driver aggravation.

  As costs drop and more technology starts showing up in cars, ITS will become even more powerful. A traffic department could, for example, use beacons to communicate to vehicles about a hazard or collision ahead. “The ITS guys have been doing all kinds of wonderful things in isolation, and we’ve been doing things in isolation,” GM’s Tom Odell noted. “Someday, very soon, we’re going to start to talk and this magic will start to happen.”

  WHAT FRUSTRATES DRIVERS the most is the unpredictability of their travel time, according to Shashi Nambisan and Walter Vodrazka, both transportation engineers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They live in a city where the traffic is bad and getting worse: Vodrazka commutes a little over four miles, each way, in his Ford Taurus and sometimes it takes him six or seven minutes. Sometimes it takes as long as half an hour. So to avoid being late— and to spare himself a lot of aggravatio
n—he tries to leave home no later than 7:45 to ensure he’ll get to campus in plenty of time for his 8:30 class, even if many of his students are tardy.

  When it comes to easing congestion, there are two opposing approaches. One view says we need to tame traffic, making do with the roads we already have; the other says we have to add capacity to serve the demand. Nambisan would prefer to avoid either extreme but knows that will require some behaviour modification, including changing when we travel and the routes we take. Employers must also play a role by allowing more flextime and letting people work from home more often. (Just think: if everyone who now drives to his or her job could work from home one day a week, it would mean a 20 percent drop in commuter traffic.)

  For their part, transportation experts can introduce car-pool lanes, ramp metering and adaptive speed limits, but they are in a tough spot because they’re trying to reduce congestion even as they know that they could do much more if the problem grew much worse. London introduced a congestion toll only after traffic slowed so much that people were willing to accept such a drastic measure. “But is that our role in society, as transportation professionals?” asked Nambisan. “To get the system to a breaking point before we can get it better?”

  Of course not, but we are hurtling toward that point nonetheless. Abdulhai favours using a variety of weapons—including ITS, the expansion and better management of transit, and road expansion. But for economic and environmental reasons, new roads are likely to be increasingly rare. Besides, adding more roads just attracts more cars. “You don’t have to provide more capacity for cars; they’ll go away, they’ll find something else to do,” said Miller, citing Jane Jacobs. “You expand the road, you attract more cars; you shrink the road or keep it the same, you don’t get more cars. People will adjust.”