Americans’ love affair with the car may be headed for divorce
court, according to a new survey done by the Pew Research Center.
It found that the number of people who still enjoy going for a
drive has dropped from eight out of ten back in 1990 to just under
seven out of ten today. Inescapable traffic and the rudeness and/or
general incompetence of their fellow motorists were cited as
causative factors.
With more cars than licensed drivers out there — more than 200
million at last count — and with residents of some major urban
areas like L.A. spending the equivalent of almost an entire week
per year stuck in traffic jams, it’s no wonder the bloom’s begun to
fall off the rose.
People are feeling literally boxed in.
Driving, after all, is as much about freedom of movement as it
about freedom of expression — and if you can’t move, there’s not
much freedom. What good is a 500 horsepower sports car like the
185-mph Corvette Z06 when it’s impossible to drive it faster than
60-something mph, except every once in a while? (And even then, for
brief and furtive spurts at best.)
It’s not mentioned in the Pew study or the news coverage of the
study, but it’s an interesting and cruel irony that cars have never
been more powerful, capable, and safe — even at very high speeds
— than they are right now. Even middle-of-the-road family sedans
like the Toyota Camry V-6 and Honda Accord can hit 130-plus on the
top end and are quicker 0-60 than many of the V-8 muscle cars of
the 1960s. And today’s V-8 sporty cars — models like the Mustang
GT, Dodge Charger and its kin — offer what was once six-figure
exotic-car performance levels for around $30k.
Yet as the power/capability of cars has tracked ever higher,
these automobiles are increasingly throttled by external realities
such as chock-a-block traffic that rein them in more effectively
than Joan Claybrook’s wildest midnight fantasies or any mere law
ever could.
Twenty-some years ago, the 55 mph National Maximum Speed Limit
was the law of the land. Yet one could violate it with impunity if
one had the hardware — and an indifference to the authority of
Roscoe P. Coltrane and his radar gun. Fast driving was very
possible. It was just a matter of putting your foot down.
Today, most state highways have considerably higher lawful
maximums — as much as 75 or even 80 mph in some places — but it’s
getting harder and harder to actually drive that fast. The D.C.
Beltway, for example, slows to a crippled crawl for several hours
every day. Ditto the I-95/395 corridor that runs from Richmond to
Alexandria, Virginia. Similar stories — and worse — can be told
by the unlucky denizens of Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York and
Boston.
Drivers of crusty old Subarus jockey for position with brand-new
BMWs, neither of them able to do much more than 45 mph. The minute
a hole opens up and you put the pedal down, a minivan plastered
with soccer ball and “I care” (put your cause here) stickers
appears in your path — ending the epiphany.
It begins to get on your nerves after a while. You pay all this
money for a car with more built-in capability than some pure race
cars had just a few decades ago, and you might as well be driving a
primered and rust-pocked Ford Festiva with 257,000 miles. The sole
bennie — more precisely, the one usable thing you do get for your
$30,000 or $50,000 (or more) that you didn’t get in a clapped-out
70-horsepower Festiva — is a better radio, maybe GPS and, of
course, your cell phone with Bluetooth hook-up. Electronic
soporifics to keep you distracted, to keep your mind off the mobile
Skinner Box in which you spend 2-3 hours or more of your life each
day. Two to three hours of your life going short distances, very
very slowly.
Back in the '80s, rock crooner Sammy Hagar cut his signature
track, “I Can’t Drive 55,” which contained the lament, “… what
used to take two hours now takes all day… it took me 16 hours to
get to L.A.!”
Sammy may not have realized how prescient he was being — albeit
from an entirely different angle. The Drive 55 crowd may ultimately
win the battle for a slow-mo society by dint of sheer numbers.
