Drive (41 page)

Wider sidewalks and mixed-use development are right out of Jane Jacobs's playbook, but Zane confessed he hadn't read much more than fifty pages of her writing. “This was not applied theory. This was just practice, addressing local issues and local dilemmas about traffic.”

Two decades later, the pedestrian mall is busier than ever. Carmen and I ate lunch there after we picked up the Hummer, and even on a Wednesday afternoon, the place thrummed with people. The project exceeded expectations, in part because so many Angelinos who don't have their own local options drive to it. Some residents lament the hordes of tourists, and it's true that on Saturday nights, especially in the summer, the crowds can be overwhelming. But Zane's satisfied with the demographic mix.

“Weekend nights are younger than other times, but there are enough middle-aged people,” he said. “We're like the control rods in a nuclear reactor. The young adults are more like the fuel rods—they've got all the heat and energy and razzmatazz. They're kicking about, having a good time and stuff. But us middle-aged guys keep everything cool and under control.”

Commercial gentrification is also a concern here. Success attracts corporate retailers who wave money around and drive up rents. We just happened to be sitting on the patio of an independent café called the 18th Street Coffee House, where Zane was eating a piece of cheesecake and drinking a mocha.

“So you get a Starbucks instead of something like this?” I asked.

“
A
Starbucks?” he said incredulously. “I think there are four Starbucks on the Promenade. What the hell is that about? There used to be a wonderful café like this—very cool—but they couldn't pay the rent.”

The lefty independent bookstore is also gone, replaced by both a Borders and a Barnes & Noble, and the usual suspects— including Gap, Pottery Barn and Apple—now dominate the mall. But the farmer's market is popular, and it even offers free valet parking for bicycles on Sundays.

The most gratifying sight is people walking their dogs because Zane knows no one drives to Santa Monica to do that. The best thing that could happen is for other communities to develop similar projects, so people wouldn't have to cram onto the Third Street Promenade. In fact, Zane told me—only half joking, I think—that his original motivation for wanting to revive downtown was that Old Mahoney's, his favourite bar, closed and he didn't want to have to travel to Hollywood to enjoy a drink. “You shouldn't have to drive halfway across LA to find a restaurant or a movie or whatever,” he said. “But of course we hadn't figured that all those other people out there didn't have something either.”

Soon, representatives from other cities started showing up to see how Santa Monica had done it. “In some ways it became the
template for what we later learned was smart growth,” he said. “But we were just being smart about our own problems, both political and planning.” Unfortunately, many places bastardized the template. A common mistake is to opt for a theme. “If you want a short life,” he insisted, “that's what you do.” A theme might prove popular for a couple of years, but the fickleness of the marketplace will make sure it doesn't last long. “People come to the Promenade because it's real life, not because it's theme life. People live here. It's real life happening, warts and all.”

In Southern California, sprawl has always been possible because of the ready availability of cheap land, but developers are running out of buildable land that doesn't have some nearby political resistance, so communities and developers must look for other options. “This is the convergence of necessity and good judgment,” he said. “The smart thing to do now turns out to be the only thing to do.”

My fear is that even if the urban planners, designers, developers and politicians all get together and create the perfect urban form—and that's a hell of a big if—it doesn't mean that drivers will get out of their cars. As Kushner had told me a day earlier, “The hardest part will be for people to just get past the love of the automobile. There's a culture in this country where you grow up looking at cars, looking at the cars you can't afford, remembering the car that you lost your virginity in. It's part of the American myth.” We've taken that myth and added convenience and comfort and a sense of control to induce a hardcore addiction.

But Zane argued that we don't need everyone to leave the car behind because incremental improvements can make a huge difference. He argued that if as few as 2 or 3 percent of drivers started taking transit, it would help. “The air pollution would be much better, the congestion would be much better. In a way, you don't have to give up the car culture; you just have to add to it. The car gets to do what it does well and the transit system does what it does well, and they can happily do very well together.”

Of course, this can only work if politicians start taking public transit more seriously—and throw some serious money at it. While LA is adding to its network of light rail lines and subways, it's still not enough for such a car-oriented city. Kushner admitted that he gets frustrated at the slow pace of transit development. “If we went full-bore with that, I think we'd have something amazing pretty fast.”

But at least attitudes are changing. Just fifteen years ago, when he talked to his students about transit-oriented development and similar ideas, he'd get nothing but puzzled looks and fierce arguments. Now, even the conservatives agree with him. The environmentalists, the Christian movement, the real estate developers, the corporate community, the Democrats and the Republicans may finally have something they can all agree on. “In this country, we've had split politics for as long as anybody can remember, and now we're finally seeing a consensus beginning around these issues of urban growth and design, and that's why I'm probably most optimistic about the future,” he said, “I can't give you an exact timetable, but as I see new developments, as I go around the country and look at what cities are doing, I am optimistic that great changes are occurring under our eyes.”

Although Kushner praises the transformation of Portland as the most successful rejuvenation of a downtown in the United States, he doesn't think the answer is simply for everyone to move downtown again. For one thing, not everyone wants to do that; for another, it can just create a new set of problems, including what to do with brownfields, with the homeless, with concentrations of poverty and, in some places, with still-simmering racial tensions. Instead, he'd like to see the development of attractive and walkable high-density mixed-use nodes connected by public transit: “I see the future as being this kind of concentrated suburbanism that offers an urban lifestyle in suburban nodes.”

If Kushner is right, then all those suburbs that make up Los Angeles may finally find their city—and provide a sustainable model for the rest of the world.

19
The Road Home

Avoiding Carmageddon

FOR SEVEN WEEKS,
I had enjoyed near-flawless weather. A morning of heavy rain in Detroit, a torrential all-day downpour in Oklahoma and a blizzard in Denver—but other than that, I'd been travelling under clear skies for longer than I deserved. But that all changed the morning I left San Francisco for the second time. Carmen and I had driven back up the Pacific Coast Highway and then she flew home. I planned to join her there in two weeks and headed north on the Redwood Highway. The rain didn't stop me from enjoying downtown Portland or Thanksgiving weekend in Seattle, but I arrived in Vancouver just in time for the first few flakes of what would turn out to be the largest snowfall in twenty years. My wife and mother wanted me to sell my car in Vancouver and fly home to avoid driving across the continent in the winter. But I wasn't about to cut and run.

Besides, all those hours in the car were going to give me time to digest what I'd seen and heard on my road trip. I'd witnessed a hard-core addiction to the automobile—even when people who knew their habit was bad for them, they felt helpless. “I live here, my job is there and a car is the only feasible way to get between the two,” they reason. “And what's one more car on the road?” But every car on the road contributes to sprawl, environmental damage, traffic congestion, health problems and the decline of civic involvement.

And it's getting worse, not better. Decades ago, when the husband worked and the wife stayed home with the kids, a man could live near his job, though usually he didn't, especially after the flight to the suburbs. But today, with the two-career family so
common, living near two different jobs is not even a possibility for many couples, especially in polycentric cities. In 2005, 74 percent of Canadian adults made all their trips by car, up from 70 percent in 1998 and 68 percent in 1992. The lower the density of the city, the higher the automobile use: 77 percent of Edmontonians rely exclusively on the car, while only 65 percent of Montrealers do. The density of the neighbourhood and the distance from downtown also make a difference: 74 percent of people who live fifteen kilometres or more from the city core are car dependent, compared to only 43 percent of residents within five kilometres.

Most people my age started driving in their teens, but before that they walked to school and to visit friends. So they know how to walk, even if they rarely do it now. Worse, they drive their kids everywhere. Part of it is fear; no parent today would do what mine did: send me to school on public transit from the age of ten. James van Hemert of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute told me that he and his wife made their kids walk or bike to school—to a lot of disapproving incredulity. “The implication was we were cruel, uncaring parents,” he said. “We're not. And now I have kids who walk for miles.” Just because we now live in an overprotective society doesn't mean we have to drive our kids everywhere—and we should be as vigilant about childhood obesity and the other health risks associated with car culture as we are about pedophiles. (A walking bus—a group of children accompanied by two adults, one in the lead, one bringing up the rear—is one way to deal with the fear factor while letting children walk to school.) As soon as they're old enough, we buy them cars even though the crash rate for teenagers is horrifying. We are training a generation of kids to never be pedestrians or transit users.

North America isn't the only place on a bad automobile jag. I'd seen it in Argentina, and a few months after my road trip, I flew to London to get a sense of the car culture there. As every tourist knows, it is a great walking city; the famous black cabs, while not cheap, are easy to flag down; and there's an extensive public transit
system consisting of buses and the Underground, better known as “the tube” (though it is old and, in the summer, can be unbearably hot). And yet Londoners, like all Britons, are car crazy.

I stayed with my sister and brother-in-law and niece in a mews house near Sloane Square. This has always been a posh area, but the amount of money here, and in surrounding neighbourhoods, is staggering. Even before I heard about the real estate prices or paid for a meal in a local pub (a typical example: US$100 for a Sunday pub lunch for two), I could see it in the cars. Normally, the sight of a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley or a Lamborghini is a rare treat; not here—the place is lousy with them. And since most people park on the street, many of these fancy cars are always on display rather than hidden away in garages. Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches, Jaguars and BMWs are standard rides. Anyone who drives a Lexus, a Volkswagen or one of the many Minis is not really keeping up with the Joneses. Smaller cars predominate here—which makes sense given the narrow roads, tight parking spaces and high gas prices—and I saw a lot of Smart cars and plenty of Priuses. Even away from this rarefied neck of the woods, American cars aren't plentiful and I didn't see one pickup all week. But SUVs, which Londoners call “Chelsea tractors,” are surprisingly common. Mostly, though, the people here prefer the stylish and luxurious to the simply big and brutish.

While in London, I watched two very different television shows. The first was
Top Gear
, a hugely popular BBC series hosted by car lover Jeremy Clarkson. The second was the first episode of a four-part BBC documentary called
Are We There Yet?
, in which journalist John Ware described the car culture in his country this way: “It's mad, it's bonkers, it's a sort of mad carmageddon, it's ugly, it's smelly, it's grim, it's Britain.”

But as much as Europe, like South America, struggles to cope with the automobile, if there really is going to be carmageddon, it's likely to be in India or China. Shashi Nambisan, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, transportation engineer, emigrated from
India two decades ago. When he returns to his native country, he finds driving in the overwhelming congestion a white-knuckle experience and is convinced that the American love affair with the automobile is contagious. “It's spreading across the world,” he said. “I see far more problems coming up in China and India and Indonesia than we will ever experience here because cars are becoming more affordable to a larger section of the populace.” The recent release of the Nano, a $2,500 model from the giant Tata Motors, will mean a lot more drivers in India.

The automobile obsession in England was scary because that country has far less sprawl than North America does, so it has alternatives, including an excellent train system. In addition, a quarter of all the trips people take are shorter than two miles, making them ideal for walking, biking or taking transit. That just fed my fear that even if planners could come up with the ideal urban form—comfortably dense with wide, inviting sidewalks, plenty of safe bike lanes and an extensive and efficient public transit system—too many people still wouldn't get out of their cars. The only solution may be to make people pay for their decision to drive.

A FEW MONTHS BEFORE
I left on my trip, I visited the Toronto Traffic Management Centre. At 7:30 a.m., the room—which had fiftyseven television monitors—was quiet; in fact, only one employee was at his post. Les Kelman, Toronto's director of transportation systems, assured me that the place was not like that when there were problems on the roads, but it was the morning before the Canada Day holiday, so traffic was much lighter than usual. With so little going on in the command centre, we moved to his office, where he kept an orange safety vest on the back of the door. Short and bearded, Kelman is an impish man with a wry sense of humour, a Scottish burr and a great love of soccer. “One day,” he predicted, “road space is going to be more valuable than gold.”