by Tim Falconer
Researchers who looked at drivers in Washington State confirmed this fear when they found that while safety-conscious people were the most likely to buy cars with air bags and antilock brakes, these devices had little effect on the rate of collisions and injuries, suggesting that drivers trade off enhanced safety for speedier trips. The study’s authors weren’t optimistic that the new generation of safety features, including sophisticated collision detection and avoidance technologies, would end up enhancing drivers’ safety. “Vehicle manufacturers and Federal policymakers may attempt to promote these systems to the public on safety grounds,” they concluded, “when, in fact, drivers may respond to them by traveling closer to other vehicles at higher speeds or paying less attention to their driving.”
No matter what futuristic technology the manufacturers come up with, the weak link in car safety will always be the people operating the machinery. Carlos Tomas has been teaching people how to drive since 1977 and started Shifters, a manual shift driving school, in 1987. He would rather see better drivers than better cars. “We’re relying too much on technology to fix these things up for us. If we screw up, the car will take care of it for us. But at some point that’s bound to have some dire consequences.”
All the technology is separating the drivers from the driving. Bare-bones cars once demanded that the person behind the wheel stay actively involved in operating the machinery. Now, vehicles with automatic transmissions, power steering and power brakes, and bursting with safety equipment and protective armour make driving seem easy—so easy that some drivers talk on the phone, check their email on their CrackBerrys and attend to personal grooming even though greater congestion and higher speeds are actually making the roads more dangerous.
“THERE’S SOMETHING about a man who is a good driver: calm, good reflexes, knows where he’s going, gets in and out of situations gracefully, knows when to speed up and slow down,” according to “12 Things You Don’t Know About Women,” by actress Dana Delany in the December 2006 issue of Esquire magazine. “Invariably, he’s good in bed.” Even before I read that, I wanted to be a better driver. Specifically, I wanted to relearn how to drive stick before I started my road trip.
Like most sixteen-year-olds, I took driving lessons, but I never bothered to take the test to get my licence. I obtained four yearlong learner permits and spent some time behind the wheel of the manual transmission Volkswagen Rabbit my mom owned as well as in some beat-up pickups when I worked for my cousins’ farmfencing business. I finally got my licence, but I knew I’d be at a total loss if I were ever to find myself in a car with a stick shift again. I certainly didn’t want to be like my friend who rented a car in France. Although he’d actually learned on a manual transmission, it had been a couple of decades since he’d driven one and, well, to make a long story short, let’s just say he ended up returning the lurching and smoking car to one of the rental company’s outlets in another city, much to the embarrassment of his teenage children, who insisted on walking the last few blocks. When he told the staff there was something wrong with the car, they suggested he might want to take an automatic. I wanted to avoid that fate but couldn’t remember much more than that there was a clutch involved.
Bernard Doerner promised to change all that. A former Formula 3000 racer in his native Germany, he had curly white hair and a trim moustache and had a hearty laugh. Twenty years ago, while he was working as a structural engineer, his employers sent him to Canada to check out a company they wanted to buy. He met a woman and stayed. When the company closed the Canadian operations, he began teaching people to drive stick.
He showed up at my house in a blue Mazda 626 LX with a “Shifters” sign on it, and I hopped in the passenger side and he drove to Rosedale, a ritzy residential area that’s not too busy. After he pulled over to a curb and stopped, he reached into the back seat of the car, grabbed a shoebox, opened it and pulled out a LEGO model, which he used to show me how the gears, the clutch and the flywheel work.
The model could have been just a gimmick, but I found it quite helpful. And if he hadn’t told me he’d been an engineer, I might have guessed because he also liked to pull a little pad out of his pocket to draw, for example, a graph showing how torque increases, then plateaus, then declines as the revs increase. He relished the opportunity to cite studies such as the one that found that people driving manuals make four times as many decisions as those who drive automatics. By the end of the first lesson, I was starting to get the hang of it, but stalling the car is just part of the learning process. In my second lesson, I stalled after stopping on a slight hill at a red light. The guy behind me started honking at me, though he could obviously see the driving school sign on the car. I wondered why he was in such a rush to get on with his no-doubt dreary existence. As Doerner said, “There’s something wrong with his life.”
For my third lesson, I drove down to an industrial area near the waterfront where I could work on downshifting and handling curves. That’s when I understood why it’s so much fun to drive stick. There was little traffic, and as I downshifted before entering curves, accelerated after the apex and then zoomed along the straightaways, I started to become one with the car in a way I never had before. It reminded me of something I’d heard in Argentina, a country where automatics are rare. Manual transmissions are better, a man told me, because, “the car needs the driver.”
A week later, when I met Doerner and his boss Carlos Tomas at my favourite espresso place, I learned that my reaction to my third lesson was not uncommon. One Shifters student, who was feeling a lot of peer pressure to buy a Porsche but was reluctant because he didn’t know how to drive stick, was totally stiff and clearly not enjoying himself for the first two lessons. But when they drove down to the docks, everything changed. “All of a sudden he lit up,” said Doerner in his thick German accent. “He grew a foot that day.”
Both men teach about thirty-six hours a week, but while Doerner enjoys helping good students get better, Tomas prefers working with students who are struggling because then he has to use his wits, his knowledge and his creativity—and he learns more about teaching. The two instructors also have different reasons for recommending that people master a clutch. Tomas cited greater control and cost-effectiveness (cars with manual transmissions are less expensive and cheaper on gas and maintenance if driven properly). Doerner simply said: “If you want to have fun, then learn stick.”
After ten years with the same driving school, Tomas became dissatisfied because his bosses wanted to standardize all in-car lessons. “The problem I found is there’s nothing standard about people,” he explained. So he started Shifters. Lately, he’s seen interest in driving stick grow and believes that manual transmission cars are increasing in North America while automatics are increasing in Europe. Forty percent of his clients want to buy a manual car or already have. In some cases, people seek lessons after burning out a clutch. The day after one father gave his son a new Celica, the car was in the shop and the father was on the phone to Tomas. About 10 to 15 percent of his students are travelling or moving abroad; one Ford executive who was transferring to Europe flew to Toronto to do five lessons in one weekend. Sixty percent of his clients are women, in part because machismo prevents some guys from seeking lessons. Even those who do can sometimes have trouble checking their egos at the curb. When Doerner pulled out his LEGO model for a Ferrari-owning student in his mid-thirties, the man said he just wanted to drive. So Doerner let him. After the student stalled the car in the middle of heavy traffic, and became the victim of a lot of impatient honking, he said, “Okay, show me the model.”
Although Tomas previously offered courses for beginners, he now focuses on in-car instruction for licensed drivers. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell the difference. “It boggles my mind that someone with a driver’s licence has to be treated like a beginner,” he said. “We shouldn’t be having to re-teach steering skills, how to turn, how to change lanes, how to use mirrors—those things you would assume a license
d driver would already know.”
“So you have to do major remedial work?” I asked.
“Major, major,” chimed in Doerner.
Tomas, who believes that too often the government issues death certificates rather than driving permits, explained that people aren’t being taught proper decision-making skills or how to obtain the necessary information to make good decisions— problems that will only worsen as the population ages and drivers’ eyesight and reflexes deteriorate. “If their driving skills are weak to begin with,” he worried, “they’re going to be really, really weak in the future.”
As someone who was a passenger for a long time, I’ve had a chance to see a lot of my friends behind the wheel. Some are very good drivers, even if they do speed more than they should; others follow too closely, are prone to jackrabbit starts and other errors and sometimes engage in what can only be called aggressive driving. But if I was skeptical of most people’s driving skills, these two instructors were completely pessimistic. Doerner said the major difference between driving in North America and in Europe is that people follow too closely here. Tomas attributes this to poor observation skills; not looking far enough ahead is rampant and leads to poor lane changes, bad turns, loss of control in slippery conditions and failure to recover after losing control. “The number one sin of people who are following too closely is tailwatching,” he said. Instead of looking down the road, too many drivers look only at the bumper in front of them, and once they become fixated on that car, their mind begins to wander and too often that ends badly. “The most common crash is the rear-end collision and it’s the most easily preventable crash.”
Just as driving skills are deteriorating while automobile technology improves, drivers are becoming more discourteous as the roads get more crowded. Tomas compared the situation to hockey, a game that saw a lot less stick work before players wore helmets and face shields. “There was a certain level of respect on the road. Perhaps people sensed there was a certain vulnerability.” As more cars feature more safety equipment, we forget how vulnerable we still are in a car. So many people seem blind to just how dangerous cars really are; in fact, although plane crashes are rare, far more people are afraid to fly than drive, and even many of those who are afraid to drive think little of getting in a car as a passenger.
Nor does Tomas find it encouraging that nine out of ten drivers rank their skills as above average, meaning that a lot of them think they’re better than they really are and presumably aren’t working too hard at improving. “The general population basically handles their cars like baboons,” he said. “There’s very little thought involved, and most of the time they’re just upset that there’s somebody in the way.”
AFTER SPENDING TWO DAYS eating, drinking and hiking in Santa Fe, Scott and I left for Denver. If we took Interstate 25, we could make the trip in as little as five hours, but we opted to drive a blue highway, US 285. We immediately detoured to Abiquiú and the area that bewitched painter Georgia O’Keeffe. As the passenger, Scott got to fully enjoy the breathtaking views of the arid mountain country; as the driver, I had to devote at least some of my attention to the road, but all the curves and steep inclines, combined with little traffic, made the driving a lot of fun.
After Abiquiú, we headed to Taos, but as soon as we crossed US 285, we hit a road trip turning point. Since we were going to a Denver University hockey game that night, we could check out Taos, but then we’d have to take I-25 after all. Or we could turn around and head north on 285. I kept driving east as we debated the pros and cons. Scott said he’d be happy either way, but I’ve known him since grade nine and could tell he was really keen on a good lunch in Taos. After my Route 66 experience, though, I was pumped for 285. And since he wasn’t adamant, I turned the car around.
North of Alamosa, Colorado, the traffic and the trucks increased, and Scott took the wheel. We had the sunroof open and were travelling through the broad, flat San Luis Valley between the San Juan Mountains on our left and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on our right. We made a detour to the impressive Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, home of the tallest dunes in North America, but we calculated that we didn’t have time to do a hike. So we drove back to State Highway 17 and north again. We passed a UFO watchtower just north of Hooper and then, by the tiny town of Moffat, Scott asked, “Do you want an espresso?”
Of course I did, though I thought that was a weird question to ask out in the middle of nowhere. But Scott, who is one of the few people I know who is more serious about his espresso than I am, had spotted a sign for the Mirage Trading Co. that advertised, “Antiques, Espresso, Gallery.” (It was also a Wi-Fi hot spot.) We weren’t expecting much, especially since homemade jerky was the only food the place appeared to sell, but the espresso was great. Turns out the guy behind the counter had worked in a coffee bar for ten years and knew what he was doing with his machine.
After 17 merged into 285, the valley narrowed, and as we approached Poncha Pass, the blue skies gave way to some flurries. For a long time we skirted a snowstorm, but at Fairplay, the model for the town in the South Park cartoon series, we drove right into it and noticed lots of Jeeps and pickups—good mountain vehicles—on the road, which quickly became treacherous.
Rather than a car guy, Scott is a Jeep and truck guy. As a boy, he lusted after the Corvette Stingray. At sixteen, he learned to drive from an obese and unpleasant instructor in a Ford Maverick with a three-speed gearshift on the steering column, otherwise known as “three on the tree.” His first car was a Honda Civic hatchback, followed by a Honda Prelude, but since then he’s had five Jeeps (including a Golden Eagle, a YJ and a CJ), three Ford Expeditions, one Land Rover Discovery and one Land Rover Defender 90. His favourite vehicles were the Defender 90 and the Ford F-150 King Ranch he drives now, though he also has a soft spot for an old orange Jeep he owned for many years. “I don’t drive for fun, but if I have to drive, I’d like to do it in something that’s enjoyable,” he insisted, adding that he wished we were in his wife’s convertible Thunderbird. “It’s a fun car. Perfect for this drive.”
We talked about our love–hate relationship with the automobile, and at first he said the only thing he hated was paying the insurance premiums. But it didn’t take much prodding before he was giving me a longer list. “I hate traffic. And construction. I hate rush hour,” he groused. “I hate other drivers. I think the majority—a great majority—of them are shitty drivers.” People who are too lazy to use their turn signals to indicate a lane change disgust him, but few things enrage him as much as those who sit in the passing lane and make other cars overtake them on the right or not at all. Left-lane hogs are indeed rude and dangerous scofflaws—and shockingly common. In the more than nine weeks of my road trip, the drivers in Minnesota were the worst I encountered for this transgression. True, I wasn’t in the state long, and it was a Sunday, but as I skirted Minneapolis-St. Paul, I saw more cars in the left lane than even the middle lane, let alone the right lane. And north of the Twin Cities, I saw an old black Saturn nearly cause a collision as it moved into the left lane without looking and then stay there for more than half an hour. (We all have our own ideas of where to find the worst drivers, but rather than rely on anecdotes and curmudgeonly opinion, in 2005, Allstate analyzed two years’ worth of crash and claim data from 196 U.S. cities. The insurance company discovered that Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was the safest city in the nation, while Washington, D.C., was the most dangerous because, on average, drivers there are involved in one collision every 5.2 years.)
“I also hate speed limits,” Scott concluded. “I think they’re stupid because I don’t think it’s the speed that you’re travelling that’s the problem, it’s how you drive and your ability as a driver.” Let’s face it: going fast is fun. In fact, part of the reason we love cars is the sense of speed and power we feel as we roar down the road. That’s why so many North Americans with a little lead in their right foot talk about the German autobahns with a certain reverence because stret
ches of these roads have no speed limits and other drivers know their lives depend on staying in the right lane.
And yet, while the autobahns are no more deadly than other European highways, it’s a mistake to argue that speed doesn’t kill. I asked Sgt. Cam Woolley about speeding, because it seemed to me that with modern cars on modern highways, Ontario’s top speed limit of 100 kilometres an hour (62 miles per hour) was too low, especially since several states have speed limits of 75 miles per hour (120 kilometres an hour).
“I’ve studied that whole issue internationally, and basically the problem is the speed differential,” he said. “There’s a theory that 85 percent of the traffic will find a safe speed.”
“So if it’s a clear day, good weather, good road conditions, and 85 percent of the people are going 130 kilometres an hour, that’s fine?” I asked hopefully.
“Well, no, I can’t say that. We’re not allowed to give permission for anybody to break the law. What I can tell you is we have lots of days out there where there’s good weather and good traffic conditions, where the average speed is higher than the limit and there are no collisions.” While new technology may make ideas such as variable speed limits possible, the problem is that with higher speeds, stopping distances increase, and given the huge range in the ability of drivers, something as simple as a wide-load truck taking up a lane and a half would result in people making sudden lane changes at speeds they can’t handle. Even curves are more difficult at higher speeds: a third of all the fatal crashes on U.S. roads involve speeding, and about 40 percent of these take place on curves—double the number for non-speeders.
Unfortunately, the laws of physics mean that the higher the speed, the worse the crash and the higher the fatality rate: the chances of being killed in a vehicle travelling at 120 kilometres per hour are four times higher than at 100 kilometres per hour. Crash at 200 kilometres per hour and it’s all over but the funeral.