Tim Falconer takes readers on a wild fossil-fuelled odyssey
Book projects have a long gestation period roughly the same as a Hollywood movie — a couple of years. As author Tim Falconer sits in a Calgary restaurant and discusses his new book Drive: A Road Trip Through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile (Viking Canada 339 pp.) he clearly enjoys its remarkably good timing. Outside the lofty signs perched above Calgary’s gas stations display the grim news: $1.29 a litre for regular gas and climbing.
Drive is a journey an adventure and an odyssey. It’s also a cautionary tale about the high cost that we as a society and as individuals pay for the luxury of getting around on four wheels whenever the fancy strikes us. This cost has been thrust on all of us gasoline buyers in a most inconvenient way this year.
The price shocks have mostly come since he finished his manuscript but there were signs all along that a day of reckoning was at hand says Falconer who lives in Toronto and teaches magazine writing at Ryerson University. “This issue was bubbling under the surface anyway” Falconer says but he thinks that some good will come of it if a decline in fossil-fuel use helps the environment. “I arrive in Montreal to do some media and on the front page of the paper is a picture of a gas station and it’s $1.44 a litre. You guys [in Alberta] are saying ‘$1.29 that sucks’ but in Montreal well…. It has made people realize they can’t afford to drive as much as they used to and that reduces traffic and greenhouse gases.”
The book isn’t a lecture even if it could be used to bolster one. It focuses on Falconer’s decision to gas up and hit the road in a 1991 Nissan Maxima one of the world’s 500 million vehicles and cross North America looking for stories about our car culture.
Though a fellow journalist described the roads as “a mad carmageddon” Falconer ended up enjoying the experience. He followed the old Route 66 for a while hung around with guys in car clubs stayed in modest motels dropped in on muscle car legend Caroll Shelby in Vegas breathed the Rocky Mountain air of Denver saw the decay of Detroit and chronicled hundreds of memorable experiences.
Falconer saw the downside of our car culture. He already knew the damage that car exhaust does to the environment but he was amazed by what he learned about the way vehicles affect our cities and suburbs when they’re not even moving — specifically when they’re parked.
Nobody knows for sure how many parking spaces there are per car in North American communities but it’s somewhere between four and 13. Free parking considered a fundamental right by many people causes as much sprawl as freeways if not more so.
Free parking “remains the blind spot in urban and transportation planning” he writes. “The typical driver has a parking spot at home and one at work (usually bigger than the cubicle he or she spends all day in) as well as shared spots at malls stores restaurants and even churches. We’re so accustomed to abundant free parking that we resist paying for it hate looking for it and most of all dread getting tickets.”
Falconer notes there are some persuasive arguments for widespread parking charges company bonuses for employees who give up their parking space at work and an increase in toll roads.
The whole adventure was also a journey of self-discovery for a man who got his driver’s licence comparatively late in life and who confesses he has always viewed a car as a mere “appliance.” In the end he says he liked his car (the only one he has ever owned) more than he did going in. “Starting off on this trip” he says “I thought I would get really sick of driving. I never got tired of driving although the hotels were killing me by the end.
“Also hanging out with car club members — even though I couldn’t talk to them about the engines and stuff like that their passion for the car was quite infectious” he adds. “I guess I started to understand [their passion]. Even though I got my first car late I had a relationship with the car. And doing the research into the culture of it made me more into them.”
