Drive by Tim Falconer Read Free Book Online Page B

it’s mostly love. It’s not the first year of lust, it’s like a marriage: there are spats along the way, but it’s not hate,” he said. “Definitely not hate.”
    IF THAT WAS TRUE IN CANADA, then I was excited to find out what it was like on the other side of the border. When I finally rolled to the head of the line, the guards were in the midst of a midday shift change. A tall, thin older man was just finishing up, and a youngerwoman with dark hair was taking over. The man started the questions, and when I explained that I was driving to Los Angeles to research car culture, the woman asked why I needed to do it in the United States.
    â€œWhen it comes to cars,” I responded, “America’s the place, isn’t it?”
    â€œNo,” said the man, as he walked away from the booth. “It’s Japan.”
    Now, it’s no secret that the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—are facing some hard times even as several of their foreign rivals go from strength to strength, but I didn’t expect to hear something so treasonous, so soon, from someone who works so close to Motor City. And yet it didn’t take long before I began to wonder if he wasn’t on to something. I knew I would see cars from around the world in big cities, especially LA, but I expected there’d be little but American cars in Michigan and the heartland. As I drove through the suburban sprawl around Detroit, it became clear my expectation of a steely allegiance to American cars in Michigan was positively naive. I saw a lot more Cadillacs than I see in Toronto, but I also saw many Toyotas, Hondas, BMWs and other non-American cars—rides that not too long ago many people considered un-American. That was my first surprise.

3 Detroit
    Motor City Sadness
    SHORTLY AFTER 5 P.M. on the first day of my road trip, I drove from Sterling Heights to Novi, Michigan, along roads and highways that were in surprisingly bad shape. Back home, I would do just about anything to avoid being in my car—especially on a highway—at the peak of rush hour. So I was thrilled to be able to bomb along at or above the speed limit, which much to my delight was seventy miles per hour—a speed I’m not legally allowed to travel anywhere in Ontario, where the top speed limit is one hundred kilometres per hour (about sixty-two miles per hour). But while the light traffic may be a pleasure for drivers, it says a lot about the health of the Detroit area. As director of transportation systems for Toronto, Les Kelman has a tough job, but he’s glad he does: “Never wish congestion away,” he warned me, “because if you want to see a city without congestion, you’ll find a city with high unemployment rates, high vacancy rates and an incredibly depressed economy. Congestion is a sign of success.”
    Detroit was once one of the most successful cities in the United States. In 1950, when cars were American and no one thought that would ever change, close to 1.85 million people lived there. Even in 1970, after the population had slipped to just over 1.5 million, Motown was the fifth-largest city in the country and an essential engine of the national economy. When I was in Detroit in 2000, on a road trip to Tiger Stadium before it closed, a cab driver pointed to an abandoned train station and said that when he first arrived in the city as a ten-year-old, the place was so crowded that his mother made him hold her hand. But the downtown diaspora started long before foreign automakers became a serious threat tothe Big Three. As in many other American cities, new suburban freeways made nearby communities more attractive while the construction of inner-city freeways made the core less appealing. Worse, although the city boasted the highest rate of home ownership among blacks in the country, many of the communities destroyed to make room for the expressways and so-called urban