Long road ahead
MJ Stone
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Drive, by Tim Falconer (Viking Canada), 339 pp.
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Even this indictment of the automobile falls short of admitting we need to change our ways fast
You have to hand it to Tim Falconer for his even-handedness. Drive: A Road Trip Through Our Complicated Affair With the Automobile is a bittersweet testament about his love-hate relationship with the car.
Falconer confesses early on that his own addiction to the car is a complicated mix of desire and disgust. So much so, that the author chose to research his comprehensive investigation of the automobile's shortcomings while enjoying a road-trip down Route 66. So while Falconer may savour the freedom and speed that the open road inspires, he is acutely aware that the combustion engine that hurls him forward is a guilty pleasure that is increasingly undermining our collective well-being.
On the one hand Falconer sells us the romance of the famed Route 66. As he navigates the legendary American highway, he tempts the reader with the call of the open road, but at every turn, in every city and town he visits, he reminds us of how automobiles have ultimately defined the design of our cities and reduced their capacities to create organic, healthy communities.
Falconer laments how the car has literally driven people out of the inner cities into the suburbs. He notes how Canadians are spending more and more time in their cars: "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 in Statistics Canada... 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."
Throughout Drive, Falconer hammers home the point that we will not survive our current addiction to the automobile. He fears that as China's and India's growing middle classes begin to purchase more automobiles, soon billions of people will design their day around the commute.
Drive is a wide-ranging examination of automobile culture that will leave you shaking your head in dismay. Falconer brings humour and clarity to a perplexing problem that is devoid of utopian solutions. But despite the daunting challenges that we face in the future, Drive won't let you forget what a hell of a ride it's been so far.
I think the Chinese and Indians will be driving more cars, that is a certainty and I am hopeful that in the next decade we will be opting for more public transport...at least. Will there be more bicycles on the road with the installation of bike routes on de Maisonneuve?Who knows. The book sounds like an interesting doomsday read with nostalgia woven in. Nothing like a frive down route 66 to consulate that nostalgia.
One sad point you make is how we have spread our pollution over the past fews decades to wider urban networks and given up forested areas in the city to do so. Forget how many trees it takes to supply sufficient oxygen for a human being, not that Chrysler or Ford ever cared. There is a long road ahead in more ways than one.
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Martin Dansky
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