Drive (24 page)

Of course I did, though I thought that was a weird question to ask out in the middle of nowhere. But Scott, who is one of the few people I know who is more serious about his espresso than I am, had spotted a sign for the Mirage Trading Co. that advertised, “Antiques, Espresso, Gallery.” (It was also a Wi-Fi hot spot.) We weren't expecting much, especially since homemade jerky was the only food the place appeared to sell, but the espresso was great. Turns out the guy behind the counter had worked in a coffee bar for ten years and knew what he was doing with his machine.

After 17 merged into 285, the valley narrowed, and as we approached Poncha Pass, the blue skies gave way to some flurries. For a long time we skirted a snowstorm, but at Fairplay, the model for the town in the
South Park
cartoon series, we drove right into it and noticed lots of Jeeps and pickups—good mountain vehicles—on the road, which quickly became treacherous.

Rather than a car guy, Scott is a Jeep and truck guy. As a boy, he lusted after the Corvette Stingray. At sixteen, he learned to drive from an obese and unpleasant instructor in a Ford Maverick with a three-speed gearshift on the steering column, otherwise known as “three on the tree.” His first car was a Honda Civic hatchback, followed by a Honda Prelude, but since then he's had five Jeeps (including a Golden Eagle, a YJ and a CJ), three Ford Expeditions, one Land Rover Discovery and one Land Rover Defender 90. His favourite vehicles were the Defender 90 and the Ford F-150 King Ranch he drives now, though he also has a soft spot for an old orange Jeep he owned for many years. “I don't drive for fun, but if I have to drive, I'd like to do it in something that's enjoyable,” he insisted, adding that he wished we were in his wife's convertible Thunderbird. “It's a fun car. Perfect for this drive.”

We talked about our love–hate relationship with the automobile, and at first he said the only thing he hated was paying the insurance premiums. But it didn't take much prodding before he was giving me a longer list. “I hate traffic. And construction. I hate rush hour,” he groused. “I hate other drivers. I think the
majority—a great majority—of them are shitty drivers.” People who are too lazy to use their turn signals to indicate a lane change disgust him, but few things enrage him as much as those who sit in the passing lane and make other cars overtake them on the right or not at all. Left-lane hogs are indeed rude and dangerous scofflaws—and shockingly common. In the more than nine weeks of my road trip, the drivers in Minnesota were the worst I encountered for this transgression. True, I wasn't in the state long, and it was a Sunday, but as I skirted Minneapolis-St. Paul, I saw more cars in the left lane than even the middle lane, let alone the right lane. And north of the Twin Cities, I saw an old black Saturn nearly cause a collision as it moved into the left lane without looking and then stay there for more than half an hour. (We all have our own ideas of where to find the worst drivers, but rather than rely on anecdotes and curmudgeonly opinion, in 2005, Allstate analyzed two years' worth of crash and claim data from 196 U.S. cities. The insurance company discovered that Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was the safest city in the nation, while Washington, D.C., was the most dangerous because, on average, drivers there are involved in one collision every 5.2 years.)

“I also hate speed limits,” Scott concluded. “I think they're stupid because I don't think it's the speed that you're travelling that's the problem, it's how you drive and your ability as a driver.” Let's face it: going fast is fun. In fact, part of the reason we love cars is the sense of speed and power we feel as we roar down the road. That's why so many North Americans with a little lead in their right foot talk about the German autobahns with a certain reverence because stretches of these roads have no speed limits and other drivers know their lives depend on staying in the right lane.

And yet, while the autobahns are no more deadly than other European highways, it's a mistake to argue that speed doesn't kill. I asked Sgt. Cam Woolley about speeding, because it seemed to me that with modern cars on modern highways, Ontario's top speed limit of 100 kilometres an hour (62 miles per hour) was too low,
especially since several states have speed limits of 75 miles per hour (120 kilometres an hour).

“I've studied that whole issue internationally, and basically the problem is the speed differential,” he said. “There's a theory that 85 percent of the traffic will find a safe speed.”

“So if it's a clear day, good weather, good road conditions, and 85 percent of the people are going 130 kilometres an hour, that's fine?” I asked hopefully.

“Well, no, I can't say that. We're not allowed to give permission for anybody to break the law. What I can tell you is we have lots of days out there where there's good weather and good traffic conditions, where the average speed is higher than the limit and there are no collisions.” While new technology may make ideas such as variable speed limits possible, the problem is that with higher speeds, stopping distances increase, and given the huge range in the ability of drivers, something as simple as a wide-load truck taking up a lane and a half would result in people making sudden lane changes at speeds they can't handle. Even curves are more difficult at higher speeds: a third of all the fatal crashes on U.S. roads involve speeding, and about 40 percent of these take place on curves—double the number for non-speeders.

Unfortunately, the laws of physics mean that the higher the speed, the worse the crash and the higher the fatality rate: the chances of being killed in a vehicle travelling at 120 kilometres per hour are four times higher than at 100 kilometres per hour. Crash at 200 kilometres per hour and it's all over but the funeral.

THE CAM WOOLLEY SHOW
started at six o'clock on a Friday morning. Easily the best-known member of the Ontario Provincial Police, the sergeant had gathered all the props to attract reporters and crews from local television and radio stations at a service station on Highway 400 north of Toronto for the OPP's long-weekend kick-off. A couple of days earlier, when I'd met him in his cluttered
office, he'd told me, “It'll be like O.J.'s trial.” Not quite, but along with lots of local media, the scene included fire trucks, a police boat on a trailer, paramedics with a dummy to be rescued, a driver who'd hit a moose and an officer who'd seen the collision and had some advice for how to avoid such crashes, representatives from the Ontario Safety League and the Ontario Trucking Association, and a booth with anti–drinking and driving bumpf. Even Elmer the Safety Elephant, who has been teaching kids for six decades, showed up.

Officially, May 24 (or the closest Monday before it) is a holiday to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday, but to most Canadians— many of whom can't understand their country's anachronistic colonial ties to a foreign country's royal family—the long weekend in May is the start of summer. Often called the May Two-Four Weekend because a “two-four” is a case of beer, it's an opportunity to open the cottage after the long winter, go camping or just get out of the city to party. In all the excitement, some drivers also see it as an invitation to do stupid things, so the OPP held its first highway blitz of the summer to nab people for everything from improperly installed child seats to speeding and aggressive driving to operating unsafe vehicles (including what Woolley calls “Fred Flintstone cars” because they have no floors). Highway 400 is the most heavily travelled route for people heading to cottage country—up to a million cars drive it over a long weekend—so it's the logical spot for a command post.

Six foot two inches tall and weighing in at 280 pounds, Woolley is really just a super-sized version of Tom Hanks in
Big
. He's got an eager grin, a goofy sense of boyish humour and a tendency to call everybody Buddy. A self-confessed car nut, he attended Upper Canada College, a prestigious private school for boys that churns out far more investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other lucre-chasers than cops. Since his father was a corporate lawyer who owned an interest in some GM dealerships, he drove demos—or, as he referred to them, demolitions—
to school. His first one was a Chevy Vega he called The Veg-omatic. Later, he had a Nova, a Camaro, a Buick wagon, a Cadillac Eldorado and, in his last year of high school, a Corvette. After graduation in 1976, he bought a blue-and-white Blazer “when SUVs were still utility vehicles, not a fashion statement.” Over the years, he has owned about 150 cars. And he's a partner in a company that rents cars for film and television productions (he also moonlights as a movie consultant and occasionally acts). Today, he's the proud owner of close to twenty vehicles, including a Rolls-Royce, a convertible Mercedes, a Range Rover and a Porsche 928—all of them purchased used, and usually with some story behind the sale. The walls of his messy office are filled with awards and photographs, including one of his wife, a service manager at a GM dealership, on an armoured military vehicle called a Ferret. “It does a hundred kilometres per hour off-road and it's bulletproof. It is all one hundred percent, except the machine gun is welded up. But the grenade launchers work good.” He buys hundreds of dollars' of European car magazines every year, hasn't taken public transit since high school and believes, “You are what you drive.”

A cop since 1978, Woolley put in many years as a traffic accident investigator but now spends as much as 90 percent of his time doing media work. And this was the sixth year he'd helped make the highway blitz a high-profile event. As if fines, demerit points and lost plates weren't enough of a deterrent, part of the sergeant's strategy was to get the force's message out to the public by gleefully dishing details on the miscreants for reporters. His anecdotes were just too good to make up, and they would have been hilarious if they weren't so scary, so naturally the media lapped them up: several broadcast outlets showed up at the kickoff, and all four Toronto papers ran articles based on his stories.

Even with such widespread coverage of the increased police presence on the roads, the close to two hundred officers who took part in the blitz never had trouble finding drivers to ticket or
material for Woolley's colourful cautionary tales. Some people drive right into the service station parking lot breaking the law. “We've had people pulling in smoking dope and drinking and”— here he made the sound of someone drawing on a joint and adopted a stoner voice—“‘Whoa, the cops, man.'”

Television reporters frequently introduced him as someone who has seen it all, but the fact is he's constantly amazed at what people do. Some of the more memorable Woolley chestnuts include the teenager who was trying to impress his girlfriend by doing 212 kilometres per hour in his mom's Lexus and ended up having to take his date home on the bus; the man clocked at 180 kilometres an hour who claimed he'd forgotten his wife's birthday and was rushing to get her a gift; the woman who said she couldn't wear her seat belt because she wanted to pet her lapdog; the truck driver who stepped out of his rig waving a bottle of vodka and wearing nothing but his underwear; and the Volkswagen Golf with the sign that read, “For sale, needs brakes.” That one prompted the sergeant to quip, “Well, there's truth in advertising. Needed brakes. Needs a tow truck now.”

The tale he finds most staggering may be the time a couple of detectives in an unmarked car saw a Volkswagen Jetta swerving all over the southbound lanes of Highway 400. They assumed the driver was drunk, but when they caught up to him, he was furiously playing a violin. The musician, who was in his fifties, had a concert in Toronto that night and wanted to practise along the way. “If I knew classical music,” one of the detectives said, “I could have guessed what he was playing just by the way the car was moving.”

Woolley thinks people are so pressed for time, especially as commutes get longer and longer, that some drivers try to multitask. “We're seeing a lot of folks who want to own the house of their dreams and are willing to commute from farther and farther away and they're forgetting about the drive, so the time has to come from somewhere.”

Lately, the most common distraction for drivers has been the cell phone. Three researchers at the University of Utah found that yakkers were as impaired as drunks on the road. Their study showed that the cell phone users were 9 percent slower to hit the brakes while also showing 24 percent greater variance in how closely they followed the car in front of them because their attention shifted between the road and their conversation.

Some jurisdictions—including much of Europe, a few states and Newfoundland and Labrador—have made it illegal to use a hand-held phone while driving. In other places, it's standard operating procedure for many drivers (even, bizarrely, in manual transmission cars). Several studies, including the University of Utah one, have suggested that hands-free units aren't really any safer because the real distraction is the driver's concentration on the conversation. But just let me say this about that: if I'm on the road and another driver has to react quickly, I'd really prefer that he or she had two hands available to put on the wheel.

Talking on the phone is dangerous enough, but OPP officers have also seen drivers preparing their lunch, doing their makeup, shaving, reading, checking their email, watching television and countless other activities that mean they aren't focused on the task of driving a vehicle. Still, while Woolley's chronicles make great copy, what causes most crashes is far more mundane. “Just being stressed out at work or home, or just daydreaming can do it, plus the actual fatigue,” he said. “The highways aren't very forgiving.”

AT 6 A.M.,
the temperature was still a crisp seven degrees Celsius and the morning sun hadn't quite burned off all the mist on the surrounding fields, but Woolley didn't seem to mind at all. Dressed in his dark blue uniform, complete with jacket and widebrimmed hat, he was clearly enjoying himself as he bounded around, greeting shivering reporters by name and joking with fellow officers.