a crank's progress

Reflecting on my disappointment with Why We Drive, a few ideas for the enthusiast driver.

It seems to me that if lovers of recreational driving, be it track days or simply cruising through the canyons, are serious, they should really be working to minimize functional driving — the daily commuting cycle and the school run, the shopping trip. Consider how many times we have had to drive to a store to pick up an item, maybe a prescription weighing ounces, and driven a two ton car a handful of miles to do it. Or how many commutes are across built-up areas, not across fields or undeveloped land, and the resulting congestion that could be served via some kind of transit network?

This history of the electric car is interesting, noting a few points that I think still hold up.

This —

In the years that followed, as more people bought private cars, electric vehicles took on a new connotation: they were women’s cars. This association arose because they were suitable for short, local trips, did not require hand cranking to start or gear shifting to operate, and were extremely reliable by virtue of their simple design. As an advertisement for Babcock Electric vehicles put it in 1910, “She who drives a Babcock Electric has nothing to fear”. The implication was that women, unable to cope with the complexities of driving and maintaining petrol vehicles, should buy electric vehicles instead. Men, by contrast, were assumed to be more capable mechanics, for whom greater complexity and lower reliability were prices worth paying for powerful, manly petrol vehicles with superior performance and range.

— aligns with my own observations of the first few Tesla Model S cars I saw. They were all driven by women in their 40s or 50s and it made sense to me: I haven’t known many women (or men these days, to be honest) who care about torques or horsepower or know anything about maintenance intervals. They just want to get in and go: that’s reasonable, given that cars have been a mass-market product for 100 years. And now of course we see the Tesla as the car no one wants to drive…their enthusiasts can simultaneously laud the performance while they wait for the car to drive itself. If self-driving was the goal all along, why does it look like a car that requires a driver?

I’m not sure this gets it right:

The future of urban transport will not be based on a single technology, but on a diverse mixture of transport systems, knitted together by smartphone technology. Collectively, ride-hailing, micromobility and on-demand car rental offer new approaches to transport that provide the convenience of a private car without the need to own one, for a growing fraction of journeys. Horace Dediu, a technology analyst, calls this “unbundling the car”, as cheaper, quicker, cleaner and more convenient alternatives slowly chip away at the rationale for mass car ownership.

I don’t think there is a model for the urban car: for me, you can build a city for cars or for people but you can’t have both. Cars take up a lot of room as they are, and they require far too much land when in motion and when stored/parked. We’ve all seen the comparisons of how many more people can be carried by increasingly dense forms of transport, from bicycles to buses. Even a car with all seats occupied doesn’t come close to what a bus can carry and there is no real difference in speed in the city. If you were to log your journeys in a city, you would likely find, as I have, that you rarely average more than 30 miles an hour, and generally closer to 20. And for that you don’t require 200 horsepower to move two tons of sheetmetal. An e-bike, a scooter, an as-yet undesigned urban utility transport — a driver and some room for passengers or cargo, in a much smaller footprint and a top speed of 30 mph — would be all you needed in the event a bus or bike didn’t work.

So the enlightened petrolhead would be all in on transit and bikes and grade/use-separated roads, to preserve her enjoyment of the hobby. Arguing for safer roads with fewer cars aligns really well with being a enthusiast. Fewer and better drivers, more options to get around that don’t put cars on the road means fewer hoonigans with “MOVE RIGHT” window decals. Not sure we’ll have fewer fartcan exhaust mods but we take the rough with the smooth, I guess.

Addendum: you don’t have to do a lot of ciphering to see how low average travel speeds are, from surface streets to highways. A sampling of trips logged by my insurance company’s widget…the bold numbers are highway trips, with a 55 mph speed limit. The rest are surface streets, 35mph in most places.

 

Looked at this book today and was struck by the artist’s statement that Seattle was chosen as America’s most livable city. Maybe in 1983…

I wish the people who talk about the Seattle they remember, when there was no street crime or homelessness or anything but blue skies and gentle rains (with plenty of parking) remembered this:

In 1983 Mary Ellen Mark began photographing a group of fiercely independent homeless and troubled youth who were making their way on the streets of Seattle as pimps, prostitutes, panhandlers, and smalltime drug dealers. Initially published in July of that same year in Life magazine, this work culminated in the 1988 publication Streetwise, and the 1984 documentary film of the same name by Mark’s husband, filmmaker Martin Bell.

[…]

Tiny’s story also insists that we consider the roots and cycles of poverty, addiction, and homelessness—and their potentially destructive manifestations and effects: even the safest and most secure family life may suddenly feel terrifyingly vulnerable. An already unstable family situation may implode.

Maybe Seattle — the city that introduced Ray Charles to heroin — has always had some inequality but no one saw it until the gap between rich and poor became more visible. Poor is easy: start at zero. But rich…is rich a rambler with a garage or a high-rise apartment with a car elevator?

The author of Why We Drive is a recreational driver, an enthusiast. I didn’t see any references to his own experience with Marchetti’s Constant. This would explain why I found I could summarize the main thrust of the book as a haiku, distilled from the very end of the book:

i was never an
athlete but watch me knee drag
this sunlit canyon

Matthew Crawford is younger than I am but makes a convincing showing as the youngest “old man yelling at clouds” I have seen in some time. His “Why We Drive” is an incoherent muddle that could have been so much better and even more useful 10 or 20 years ago.

The book purports to be a paean to the at-risk skills of driving, as if there is something so unique to a set of behaviors we have only been able to express over the past 100 years that we will be diminished as a species if they are lost. He never really defines what he means. He mentions spatial/situational awareness but does he really think we would have survived the savannah without that? Has he seen the restored videos of public streets before cars and as cars entered the picture? Chaos…people walking everywhere, horses, carriages, often a streetcar, and sometimes a car or motorbike…does he not think we possessed spatial awareness then? There is some value to feedback through the senses, as one feels in a car — or on a bike or even on foot, as a trail runner might find when going from an open grassland into a woodland path, switching from gravel to packed mud interspersed with roots. There is nothing unique to driving about any of this other than speed, and as the author himself admits, speed kills.

What he refers to as skills is actually experience. He enjoys the experience of going faster than he should in places where perhaps he shouldn’t. He likes twisty roads or open vistas through a car window, ever-changing and new. And while the experience might be enabled or enhanced by some skills, he doesn’t make a convincing case for driving as some innately valuable or universal experience.

He objects strongly to traffic cameras and speed limits, while citing a few examples of his own inability to adhere to them. More tellingly, he objects to his own behavior being policed, even as he tells of two separate incidents where he was compelled to remonstrate with distracted drivers and almost rear-ended another vehicle. Twice. I can’t tell if he is being honest with us or a raging hypocrite: being a left lane camper or other self-appointed traffic enforcer is one of the most dangerous behaviors on the road, something he fails to see, even as he writes about road rage elsewhere in the book.

For all the references to skill and the praise for those who possess them, the author seem to forget something so basic as training/licensing:

Today, Germany has one of the lowest rates of traffic fatalities in the world, despite (or because of?) the discretion granted its drivers. Germans had to learn how to drive fast, over the course of decades. This involved not just acquisition of a technical skill, but a kind of moral education that took place during the postwar peace.

I suspect the more intensive training and rigorous licensing has a lot more to do with the discretion afforded German drivers than any moral education. The cost alone — around $1,800 — would serve as a deterrent for many non-serious drivers here in the USA where one can take the license with no training at all. Driving in the UK and Europe is both more rigorously licensed and more expensive. His only other mention of driving anywhere but the USA is his discussion of the London cab driver’s exam — The Knowledge. The hope is to equate that to the skills he thinks we need to retain but learning a mental map of a unique and historically dense city has little in common with the open roads of the USA.

There are quite a few inconsistencies that jumped out at me. He spends a lot of time carping about technology he doesn’t like or understand but neglects to accept his own agency. He complains about having to install Microsoft Word with a several page harangue about his interactions with the tech support person he was assigned, who he assumes is either a robot or a slave. He never mentions why he has to have the product, other than “for writing.” To which I say bullshit. I am writing now and it’s not in Word. I am not a lauded philosopher/mechanic with several books in print but I do write and Word is never my choice of tool. Seems like knowledge and choice of tools is right up his alley, so it’s puzzling how he simply ignores a discussion or exegesis of his writing tools.

Perhaps he needs to submit his work in Word format? Easily finessed with a trip to the local library…bring the text, copy/paste/save. Are there features he needs? He doesn’t say. What happened to the version he used on previous books? Obsolete? Or simply out of date? Again, no details but this is all part of the old man yelling at clouds schtick, where you bring up relatable gripes and your peers will just nod along, like the tiresome Boomer/Millennial garbage. Again, I am older than he is but he talks like he is 20 years older.

His mention of planned obsolescence was later refined to “forced obsolescence” to refer to the various government programs to remove old cars from the highways. But that’s not really obsolescence to much as removal. Anyone spending the time and money the author has on a 1975 Super Beetle restoration needs to better define obsolescence. There is little about the Super Beetle (disclosure: I had a 1973 whose neck I wrung cheerfully on a regular and frequent basis) that makes it suitable for today’s roads, though I suspect skill will be proffered as the equalizer. I suggest physics will have the last word there.

He spends a lot of time talking about surveillance capitalism, as if we don’t know what that is or how it works. Lots of talk of a dystopian future where we are tracked and marketed to, with no awareness of how things can be turned off or ignored or how long this has been going without automakers getting into the mix. We don’t yet have the sort of fully-automated car/personal assistant he excerpts from a TC Boyle story so it’s hard to argue against something we may never see.

Institutional power that fails to secure its own legitimacy becomes untenable. If that legitimacy cannot be grounded in our shared rationality, based on reasons that can be articulated, interrogated, and defended, it will surely be claimed on some other basis. What this will be is already coming into view, and it bears a striking resemblance to priestly divination: the inscrutable arcana of data science, by which a new clerisy peers into a hidden layer of reality that is revealed only by a self-taught AI program—the logic of which is beyond human knowing.

What a philosopher could point out here is that algorithms are codified biases, the opinions and beliefs of their creator turned into rulesets and decision trees. Algorithms are no more inherently evil than the speed cameras he hates: any tool can be misused, as any mechanic would understand. Surely using speed cameras is safer than high-speed pursuits, even if it denies the driver the chance to debate with the highway patrol.

Then he finds the setting on his iPhone that turns on “do not disturb” when it detects movement it associates with driving to be intrusive and yet gleefully subverted by pressing the “I’m not driving” button. It never seems to dawn on him that the iPhone might be in the hand of a passenger in a car or bus or train and that’s why there is the option to turn that off. That seems like a very sensible and user-focused algorithm…switch to “do not disturb” when motion is detected but give the user the power to turn it off, in case they are not actually driving.

And that’s part of the problem. There isn’t a lot of “we” or even “you” in the book: it’s all about him. In his world, there would be no distracted drivers, distractions, or even any other drivers at all, just a man carving canyons at 45 in a 25 or getting his sideways drift on.

This would have been a better book and more in line with the argument he claims to be making if he acknowledged that driving is rarely a recreational activity for most people: it’s a necessary evil and often more evil than necessary. So to get the world he wants, he needs fewer drivers, something I wrote about in 2009.

He needs more people riding buses, bikes, and trains. And he needs more electric cars so he will still have access to gasoline in the years of motoring he expects to enjoy. But he doesn’t seem to understand that driving as recreation is a very niche interest. He is making the same mistake that city and state transportation departments have been making for decades, putting the needs of cars ahead of those of people. Again, an opportunity to talk about tools and solutions…what are the choices for how to get to work or shopping and why do some places manage to offer different choices? Wouldn’t he rather drive on a grade-separated roadway where bikes and pedestrians were physically screened off from cars? Wouldn’t he rather his daughters had that choice?

How much public land in our cities has been carved out for the use of cars vs people? Quite a lot…the amount of land devoted roadways and parking in the U.S. can cover the entire state of West Virginia—that’s about 24,000 square miles or 62,000 square kilometers. He forgets or ignores that we don’t drive all the time, even as he inventories how many cars — running or otherwise — he owns. Car storage, generally subsidized by tax payers as street parking or as downtown lots that could be used for any number of better purposes (housing, in our increasingly expensive cities comes to mind), is completely ignored in his adulation for the not-so-open road.

Many cities no longer have room for cars. Many no longer have room for single family homes, which would put a crimp in the style of anyone who keeps a few non-running cars as parts donors. It’s hard to make sense of this book in the early part of a century that will see so much needed change. A better book would have steered a path through those changes with a plan to preserve the experience — not the skills — Crawford places so much value in. But he chose instead to fulminate against some as-yet-unbuilt nanny state, even as he demonstrates the need for it.