“I guess I should have known
by the way you parked your car sideways it wouldn’t last...”
In Little Red Corvette, Prince sings about a romance
that’s doomed from the start. His metaphor of a car
parked lengthwise, hogging several parking spaces,
conjures a precise image in our minds. We know exactly
the sort of person his paramour is. We wouldn’t want
to date her either.
Cars are everywhere. We take them for granted
because they penetrate nearly every aspect of our lives.
Giving rise to highways and malls, they have shaped our
cities. They power our economy both directly and indirectly.
They affect our health — and the planet’s.
The impact of cars extends beyond their literal presence
in our lives. They permeate our culture, too. We’ve
experienced freedom on the Beach Boys’ California freeways
(“fun, fun, fun, till her daddy takes the T-Bird away”).
We’ve felt the exhilaration of escaping from the grind of
Bruce Springsteen’s working-class New Jersey (“the highway’s
jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power
drive”). And where would Batman be without his
Batmobile? Would Jack Kerouac have defined the beat
generation without the road trips that became the
basis for On the Road?
We’ve mythologized cars because they symbolize
freedom, mobility, escape. A fresh start as you race toward
the horizon.
But what about traffic congestion? Smog? Global
warming? Road rage? As the dark side of car culture
begins to make its way into our collective consciousness,
we have to ask: have the tools of our freedom become the
agents of our oppression?
START YOUR ENGINES
The North American romance with the car makes
sense.We live on a big continent and cars have freed
us: from needing to live where we work, from long
journeys to shop or visit family.They’ve freed us to eat
food grown elsewhere and trucked to us, to vacation
relatively inexpensively.
“The automobile is the most important technological
innovation in our society,” says Dr. Peter Frise, CEO and
Scientific Director of AUTO21, a network of centres of
excellence established by the Government of Canada.
“The car enables you to do things you can’t do any other
way. I started the day yesterday in Toronto, attended several
meetings, and finished in Windsor with my family.”
It’s no surprise, then, that cars have become important
engines of our economy or that the auto industry is
Canada’s largest manufacturing sector.
But how did we get here?Why are we so dependent
on cars? There are many interrelated answers to this
question, says Steve Penfold, an assistant professor of
History who teaches a fourth-year seminar on the history
of the car in North America. Causes include the
advent of Henry Ford’s assembly line, which
made cars cheap, and the way advertisers in the early
and mid-20th century succeeded in getting people to
imbue cars with cultural meaning.
A big part of today’s auto-dependency, though, has
to do with the suburbs,particularly a set of circumstances
in the post-World War II era that entrenched the car as
central to life as we know it.
“The car produced its own geography,” says
Penfold, explaining that many researchers look to postwar
housing and transportation policies as drivers of
suburbanization. For example, consider government
backing of mortgages for new suburban residential
development, expanded funding for highways, even
international trade decisions like the Auto Pact of
1965, which created a continental auto market.
It is easy to look back with critical eyes,says Paul Hess,
an assistant professor in the Department of Geography
and Program in Planning. He explains that postwar
decentralization was not seen as a problem at the time.
“The planning system was extremely successful at creating
exactly the environment we wanted.”
Penfold agrees. “We look back and ask what structural
forces shaped the decisions people were making.
You could list things like government policies that
called for widening roads and building highways, but at
the same time, people were hungry for automobility.”
As an example, consider our nostalgia for the golden
age of streetcars in the 1940s. Penfold reminds us that they
were smoky and dirty and there was often tension
between male commuters and female shoppers, the latter
group generally not seen as legitimate users of transit.“If
I’m a woman in 1947 and I can drive, it’s an attractive
option,” says Penfold. “In the historical moment of the
1940s there were lots of good reasons to want off trolleys.”
The chicken-and-egg question of cars and suburbia
may never be answered.“Did people move to the suburbs
because they like to drive or did they move to the suburbs
and discover they had to drive?” asks Penfold. It’s not
a question he expects to answer definitively, though he
believes the truth is probably a complex interplay of individual
decisions and broader social and economic forces.
DOUBLE PARKED
The effect of this interplay continues to be felt today.
Hess explains that as housing and employment
became increasingly suburban in the post-World War II
era, dependence on driving solidified, so much so that
today even people who want to drive less are often
forced to remain in their cars by the economics of
urban form. “Once you have urban form totally oriented
around the automobile, you can’t make transit work
economically,” he explains.
What might alternative, less car-dependent land use
patterns look like? Much attention has been paid
recently to creating new neighbourhoods not centred
around the automobile. This philosophy is often called
New Urbanism and it calls for homes to be built on
smaller lots and mixed in with shops so that residents
can walk to corner stores.
Garages in New Urban developments are generally
detached and situated on laneways behind houses, as in
prewar urban areas — the idea being that the car should
not be the focus of a household. Narrow streets and town
squares are meant to get people outside socializing.
Hess conducted a study that suggests that despite
our best efforts, the car reigns supreme, even in areas
designed to minimize its influence.He surveyed residents
of three neighbourhoods in the Greater Toronto Area
about how they used the land around their homes. In
New Urban areas (where the car was out back) he found
that roughly three-quarters of respondents used the back
door rather than the front to access their houses. This
number was much lower in an urban neighbourhood he
surveyed for comparison. His hypothesis — “if the car is
out back, people are too” — proved true. Why? Because
even if they lived in walkable communities, these communities
were embedded in a wider suburban context
that demanded a car.
Being locked in a system that depends so heavily on
the car presents a host of challenges, the greatest of
which might be environmental. Public attention is
increasingly focused on the environment and it’s clear
that at least some of the blame for the current environmental
crisis belongs to cars.
“There’s a growing sense that climate change is a serious
problem,” says Hess. “For many people there’s a connection
to how much they drive. But most people can’t
imagine how they could live any other way.” And indeed,
his research suggests that perhaps they can’t live any
other way, barring dramatic social and urban change.
THE CASE FOR A CARBON TAX
JOHANNES VAN Biesebroeck, assistant
professor in the Department of Economics and
the Institute for Policy Analysis, suggests that
the most efficient way to solve environmental
problems exacerbated by driving is with a
carbon tax.
“Current regulations require manufacturers
to sell more fuel efficient vehicles, but wouldn’t
it be simpler to give people incentives to
buy vehicles that burn less fuel?” he asks.“It
is often suggested that raising fuel taxes is
political suicide in North America. The
Canadian public says their number one concern
is the environment, but they’re still buying SUVs.
Revealed preference tells me that they don’t
care about the environment, they care about
being seen as caring about the environment.”
He gives an example of an existing tax credit
for those who buy the hybrid Toyota Prius.
“Relative to the Corolla, the Prius is saving 2.2
litres per 100 kilometres in mileage. Toyota sells
109,000 Priuses in North America, mostly in the
U.S.But GM’s latest full-size pickup trucks
gained more than a litre mileage per 100 kilometres.
GM sold 930,000 of those last year.
So the amount gained by GM when it made its
pickup truck more efficient was vastly more
than the impact of the Prius. Yet every Prius
owner gets a $4,000 subsidy from the Ontario
and federal governments.
“Touting your environmental credentials
is a consumption value. I don’t think we should
use tax money to subsidize it.Raise the price
of gas and the problem solves itself.”
GASSING UP
According to fuel consumption ratings published by
Natural Resources Canada, if you drive a 2007 Hummer
H3 4x4, you’re using 16.3 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres
in the city and your car is responsible for 6,720 kilograms
of carbon dioxide per year. If you drive a 2007 Honda
Civic you use 7.8 litres per 100 kilometres and discharge
3,312 kilograms of carbon dioxide.
The simple math of fuel efficiency is one way to
measure the environmental impact of driving. Heather
MacLean, an associate professor of Civil Engineering,
wants us to move beyond calculations like this when
considering the impact of our cars.
We think of cars generally as producing emissions, but
it’s important to distinguish between air pollutant and
greenhouse gas emissions. Exhaust missions like carbon
monoxide and particulate matter come from the combustion
of fuel and contribute to smoggy skies. Greenhouse
gases like carbon dioxide are not usually classified as air
pollutants but there is scientific consensus that human
production of greenhouse gases is associated with global
climate change.While exhaust emissions on a per-vehicle
basis are much lower than they used to be, greenhouse
gas emissions are on the rise (see sidebar at left).
MacLean considers the environmental and economic
impact of cars by using a lifecycle assessment
approach, which accounts for every step of the supply
chain that sees cars delivered to the dealership, and
then continues tracing their impact after purchase.The
result is the car’s net impact from the first extraction of
the iron ore used to fabricate it to its “death”when it has
to be scrapped and shredded.
“A vehicle has a lot of implications over its lifetime,
versus, say, a desk,” she says. “How much fuel does a car
use? And what are the environmental implications
throughout the supply chain of producing that fuel?
How much maintenance does it require? What new parts
does it require? How much energy does it require to
scrap the vehicle?”
Her recent work involves conducting lifecycle assessments
of vehicles powered by alternative fuels,particularly
ethanol.Rather than focus only on feasibility and efficiency
of ethanol once it’s in the car, she’s interested in how the
ethanol is produced.
Ethanol is usually produced from corn and as such is a
renewable fuel.But,she says,when considered from a lifecycle
perspective, it has limited environmental benefits
because corn production requires lots of inputs — fertilizer,
which itself requires lots of energy to produce, fuel to
power tractors and harvesting equipment.
Research has begun into alternative ways to produce
ethanol and MacLean is applying lifecycle assessments
to these methods. Her work suggests that a
product called lignocellulosic ethanol shows some
promise. It can be produced from the entire plant, not
just the grain as in the production of conventional
ethanol.This means it can be produced from stalks and
leaves once the grain has been removed, providing a
use for what is essentially an agricultural by-product.
Even if dedicated crops — called energy crops — are
grown for lignocellulosic ethanol production, they
require far less fertilizer than conventional corn.
The result: substantial greenhouse gas reductions
compared to corn ethanol.
Ethanol isn’t a panacea, she cautions.“Right now in
the U.S. they’re producing about five billion gallons of
ethanol a year, but they’re using around 150 billion gallons
of gasoline.To produce those five billion gallons of
ethanol, they’re using about 16 per cent of the corn
crops in the country.”
Other alternative fuels like biodiesel and hydrogen
present similar barriers to widespread adoption. Even
batteries used in hybrid vehicles require energy to
produce and charge. “My analyses of a large number
of different options shows that there’s always some
type of cost in environmental or economic terms,”
says MacLean.
“Many people think biofuels are wonderful. They’re
renewable fuels and that’s as far as they go.There is clearly
a need for some bigger-picture thinking so people are
truly aware of the implications of their choices.”
STUCK IN TRAFFIC
Eric Miller of the Department of Civil Engineering is
exploring what the collective result of all our individual
choices is — and whether we’ve reached the limit of what
the car can do for us.
He has spent years building a model of travel
behaviour in the Greater Toronto Area.The model begins
with data on people’s weekday trips and imports the
transportation network of roads and subways, yielding
information about congestion, loading on transit lines,
pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. In other
words, by figuring out where people are going and
how they’re getting there, he can predict the collective
social, environmental and logistical outcome of millions
of individual trips.
Miller has been testing this ambitious model against
historic data by recreating travel patterns based on surveys
and the census. If testing is successful,the model can
be used to forecast the interplay between urban form
and transportation into the future.He will be able to input
the changes that a given policy prescribes and see how it
affects the system as a whole.
He gives the example of congestion pricing, recently
adopted in London, England, to reduce driving trips
to the central district. “That could have as much land
use impact as it has transportation impact. If you
charge to come into the downtown in the short run,
people may switch to off-peak hours. They may use
transit. But in the longer run they may move. Jobs may
flee the downtown.We just don’t know.
“One of the problems we have in public policy is we
can’t envision alternative paths,” he says. “Most people
can’t envision not having two cars.Yet if we think about
what they’re trying to accomplish in their lives with
those two cars, there may be other packages of transportation
and land use that could meet those objectives.
But it’s difficult to envision what those are, so
we’re trying to build tools that are powerful enough to
explore those kinds of things.”
Miller’s modelling work has inspired him to think
about whether the car is providing us with diminishing
returns. “We see cars as freedom, flexibility, convenience.
But the promise of the car, beyond a certain
point, becomes nullified by the congestion and pollution
it generates.”
Miller also wonders if we have thought about all that’s
wrapped up with car use in our society.“If we could snap
our fingers and turn all cars into electric cars that were
somehow being powered by a magical source of electricity
that didn’t involve burning coal, natural gas or oil,
would we still be happy with the role of the car?”
ACCELERATING INTO THE FUTURE
U of T researchers have different ideas about where we
should go from here.
“There’s not any one thing that solves every problem,”
says Heather MacLean. Even as she investigates the costs
of alternative fuel, she says,“I think we’ll be using gasoline
for quite a while.”
Paul Hess, the planner, expresses concern over a
society that sees only one way to live.“I worry about an
urban environment that’s set up solely for the car. If at
some point in the future we don’t want to rely on the
car — or can’t rely on it — we’ll have no other choice.”
Eric Miller’s work calls for increased spending on
mass transit, but he wonders about the likelihood of that
happening. “We haven’t put our money where our
mouth is,” he says.We want a high quality lifestyle, but
we’re not willing to pay for it.”
Alternative fuels, redesigned suburbs,more spending
for mass transit: if there are solutions, they are likely to be
some combination of these and other prescriptions (see
sidebar for an economist’s take on the situation).
But only, says Miller, if we have the collective will.
“The car brings us benefits,” he says. “It’s been
adopted because we are mobile people. But I think in
urban areas our use of it has become an addiction. At
some point it’s not good for you. That’s not to say that
we should give up cars, but as a society we have to take
a good hard look at this.”
RESEARCH AND INNOVATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO · SUMMER 2007 · VOL.8, NO.2