Straphanger: saving our cities and ourselves from the automobile

352 Pages·2014·2.68 MB·English

by  Taras Grescoe

STRAPHANGER
Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile
TARAS GRESCOE

Dedication
To Desmond,
who arrived, unexpectedly, after his parents rode the 80 bus to the
hospital for a routine ultrasound.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Confessions of a Straphanger
Prologue
Shanghai, China
1. The Subway That Time Forgot
New York, New York
2. Only Connect
Los Angeles, California
3. The Highway to Hell
Phoenix, Arizona
4. The Salvation of Paris
Paris, France
5. The Copenhagen Syndrome
Copenhagen, Denmark
6. Fools and Roads
Moscow, Russia
7. City of Trains
Tokyo, Japan
8. The Revenge of the Loser Cruiser
Bogotá, Colombia
9. Good Bones
Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, British Columbia
10. The Next Great City
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
11. The Toronto Tragedy
Toronto, Ontario
Conclusion
Montreal, Quebec
Sources
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
PRAISE FOR STRAPHANGER
Also by Taras Grescoe
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Confessions of a Straphanger
Any man of forty who still rides the métro is a loser.
—Salvador Dalí
A man who, beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus can
count himself as a failure.
—Margaret Thatcher
I
admit it: I ride the bus.
What’s more, I frequently find myself on subways, streetcars, light rail,
metros, and high-speed trains. Though I have a driver’s license, I’ve never
owned an automobile, and apart from the occasional car rental, I’ve reached my
mid-forties by relying on bicycles, my feet, and public transportation for my
day-to-day travel. If you credit the U.K.’s former prime minister Thatcher, that
makes me a failure of almost two decades’ standing. Dalí, who depended for
locomotion on a fleet of chauffeur-driven Cadillacs, is kinder: according to him,
I’ve only been a loser for a couple of years. Far from being ashamed of my fare
card, I consider it a badge of honor: I’m a straphanger, and I intend to remain
one as long as my legs will carry me to the corner bus stop.
I’m not alone. Though there are 600 million cars on the planet, and counting,
there are also seven billion people, which means that for the vast majority of us
getting around involves taking buses, ferryboats, commuter trains, streetcars, and
subways. In other words, traveling to work, school, or the market means being a
straphanger: somebody who, by choice or necessity, relies on public transport,
rather than a privately owned automobile.
Half the population of New York, Toronto, and London do not own cars.
Public transport is how most of the people of Asia and Africa, the world’s most
populous continents, travel. Every day, subway systems carry 155 million
passengers, thirty-four times the number carried by all the world’s airplanes, and
the global public transport market is now valued at $428 billion annually. A
century and a half after the invention of the internal combustion engine, private
car ownership is still an anomaly.
And yet public transportation, in many minds, is the opposite of glamour—a
squalid last resort for those with one too many impaired driving charges, too
poor to afford insurance, or too decrepit to get behind the wheel of a car. In
much of North America, they are right: taking transit is a depressing experience.
Anybody who has waited far too long on a street corner for the privilege of
boarding a lurching, overcrowded bus, or wrestled luggage onto subways and
shuttles to get to a big city airport, knows that transit on this continent tends to
be underfunded, ill-maintained, and ill-planned. Given the opportunity, who
wouldn’t drive? Hopping in a car almost always gets you to your destination
more quickly.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Done right, public transport can be faster, more
comfortable, and cheaper than the private automobile. In Shanghai, German-
made magnetic levitation trains skim over elevated tracks at 266 miles an hour,
whisking people to the airport at a third of the speed of sound. In provincial
French towns, electric-powered streetcars run silently on rubber tires, sliding
through narrow streets along a single guide rail set into cobblestones. From
Spain to Sweden, Wi-Fi–equipped high-speed trains seamlessly connect with
highly ramified metro networks, allowing commuters to work on laptops as they
prepare for same-day meetings in once distant capital cities. In Latin America,
China, and India, working people board fast-loading buses that move like
subway trains along dedicated busways, leaving the sedans and SUVs of the rich
mired in dawn-to-dusk traffic jams. And some cities have transformed their
streets into cycle-path freeways, making giant strides in public health and safety
and the sheer livability of their neighborhoods—in the process turning the
workaday bicycle into a viable form of mass transit.
If you credit the demographers, this transit trend has legs. The “Millennials,”
who reached adulthood around the turn of the century and now outnumber baby
boomers, tend to favor cities over suburbs, and are far more willing than their
parents to take transit. Part of the reason is their ease with iPads, MP3 players,
Kindles, and smartphones: you can get some serious texting done when you’re
not driving, and earbuds offer effective insulation from all but the most extreme
annoyances. Even though there are more teenagers in the United States than
ever, less than a third have a driver’s license (versus half a generation ago), and
half say they would rather own a smartphone than a car. Baby boomers may
have been raised in the suburbs, but as they retire, a significant contingent is
favoring older cities and compact towns where they can walk and ride bikes.
Seniors, too, are more likely to use transit, and by 2025, there will be 64 million
Americans over the age of sixty-five. Already, dwellings in older neighborhoods
in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Denver, especially those near light-rail or
subway stations, are commanding enormous price premiums over suburban
homes. The experience of European and Asian cities shows that if you make
buses, subways, and trains convenient, comfortable, fast, and safe, a surprisingly
large percentage of citizens will opt to ride rather than drive.
For those who prefer their lives bubble-wrapped in gated communities, sports
utility vehicles, and security-patrolled malls, public transport will probably
always seem seedy, dangerous, and inconvenient. But around the world, there is
a revolution going on in the way people travel. It is rewriting the DNA of
formerly car-centered cities, making the streets better places to be, and restoring
something cities sorely need: real public space.
The Great Oil Shock
The United States is the most extravagantly motorized nation in the history of
the world.* At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the country
was home to 255 million registered vehicles, but only 196 million licensed
drivers; in other words, cars and trucks now outnumber drivers by a factor of 5
to 4. The average American household owns 1.9 cars, and spends $16,700 a year
keeping them running—not counting parking and tickets—more than it spends
on food and health care combined.
In the summer of 2008, the price of a barrel of crude oil spiked to $147, an
historic high. Since then, a gallon of gas, which could be had for under a dollar
for most of the 1990s, has routinely retailed for $4.50 at some pumps. The shock
waves produced by this price hike have been as dramatic as any initiated by the
energy crises of 1973 and 1979. Two of the world’s largest automakers went into
bankruptcy; General Motors, once the world’s largest corporation, is, after
receiving $50 billion in taxpayers’ money, now part owned by the U.S. Treasury.
While the causes of the late-2000s financial crisis were complex, and included
financial deregulation and subprime mortgage lending, many economists believe
skyrocketing gas prices provided the critical body blow to consumer confidence
that deepened the crisis into a worldwide recession.
Demotorization, which for twenty years has been a fact of life in Japan, may
now have come to the United States. In 2009, Americans bought ten million
cars, but scrapped fourteen million; this net loss of four million vehicles was the
first time the total automobile fleet has shrunk since the Second World War. (In
Canada, whose economy has weathered the recession better, car sales have not
declined as dramatically as they have in the United States but are still down 20
percent from their turn-of-the-century peak.) Per capita vehicle miles traveled,
the most reliable indicator of automobile dependence available, began to decline
in mid-decade, and are now at their lowest levels since 2000. On the
manufacturing side, the cradle-to-grave security of the auto sector is a thing of
the past: with unemployment in Detroit near 20 percent and thousands of homes
being bulldozed, parts of the onetime Motor City are returning to wilderness as
beavers build dams in abandoned subdivisions minutes from downtown.
The automobile sector is showing signs of recovering from the crisis of 2008;
the industry has responded by launching more fuel-efficient cars, and
governments are finally getting serious about mandating higher emission and
better mileage standards. Fears about “peak oil”—the notion that the world was
on the verge of using up half its reserves—have lately been quelled by the
realization that there are monstrous deposits of unconventional crude trapped in
at least twenty major geological formations in the United States alone. The
problem, unfortunately, is that its extraction is costly. The long-feared arrival of
peak oil has been delayed, at least for the time being. What we are now
experiencing is a new phenomenon: the onset of the era of peak cheap oil.
As old, easily accessed fields are sucked dry, oil from such unconventional
sources as Alberta’s tar sands is coming on line; the extraction process, which
requires enormous amounts of water and natural gas, is energy-intensive and
punishing to the environment. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in which
highly toxic chemicals are used to extract natural gas and oil from shale deposits,
is already a suspected cause of groundwater contamination and even earthquakes
across North America. The Deepwater Horizon spill, which blackened the Gulf