The Power and the Money

The beginning of the end of parking?

Mexico City is creaking under the number of cars on its streets. For details, see this post. So what to do about it?

The metro is already a modern miracle and is being expanded. Notably more middle-class people appear to be riding it. It should be expanded faster, but there are practical limits to how fast that can be done. 

Road-pricing is a distinct possibility, but would be politically, administratively, and technically extremely difficult in this town. Mexico City is much nicer than it was, but it still ain’t London. Although they have managed to close off major streets in the city center on Sunday.

Which leaves you with ... limit parking! In a brilliant move, the Ciudad de México just moved to limit parking spaces in new residential construction. Current regulations mandate minimums, on the assumption that people will drive no matter what. (For offices, it was one spot for more-or-less every 300 square feet.) The newest office tower downtown, for example, has more than 3,000 parking spaces.

Now there are no minimums. The maximum is three per apartment (which is rather high) or one per 300 square feet of office space. (See pages 7-8 of the new regulation here.) You can build more, but you need to pay a tax. 

The literature says that this should discourage driving. European cities have de facto parking limits, and they do indeed have fewer auto trips than American ones. The question for Mexico is whether this is enough to keep all of the future middle class from commuting by automobile. The question for the rest of North America is whether this policy can or should be emulated.

Thoughts?

Border adjustment, the Mexican peso, and Hoyt Bleakley

It now looks like the administration won’t (for now) be using its Economic Powers Act authority to impose a tariff on Mexican goods. Instead, he is going to ask Congress to create a border adjustment tax, which would stop American companies from deducting imports from their taxable income. At the same time, it would leave their exports untaxed. (Full explainer from Forbes, here.) 

So what would that do to the auto industry? Well, let us proceed in two stages.

1. What is the immediate impact on an American auto producer? Well, the border adjustment tax is less harmful than a tariff. The auto companies would not be able to deduct the cost of goods coming in from Mexican affiliates and suppliers, but they also would not be taxed on the cost of goods going out to Mexican affiliates and suppliers. But they would still have an incentive to source more inputs at home.
2. Except that the peso would fall (or the dollar would rise, same thing) in response to the tax. A 20% depreciation in the peso puts the auto company back where it started. 

But would Mexico allow the peso to fall that much? In the past, the Mexican central bank has acted terrified that depreciation would hammer Mexican corporations that had borrowed in dollars. That is a reasonable fear ... in theory.

In practice, it might not be. My friend and colleague, Hoyt Bleakley (with Kevin Cowan) looked at 450 non-financial firms in five Latin American countries. 

We consistently find that, contrary to the predicted sign of the net-worth effect, firms holding more dollar debt invest more than their counterparts in the aftermath of a depreciation. We show that this result is due to firms “matching” the currency denomination of their liabilities with the exchange rate sensitivity of their profits. Because of this matching, in equilibrium, the negative balance sheet effects of a depreciation on firms holding additional dollar debt were more than offset by the larger competitiveness gains of these firms.

In other words, depreciation might not be that harmful.

The other reason the central bank might not want to let the peso fall is fear of inflation. But that depends a lot on the reputation of the central bank and the structure of wage bargaining. Banxico is very credible and Mexico has weak unions, so while a fall in the peso will lead to a one-time increase in costs, it seems likely that Mexican workers would just have to suck up the fall in their living standards. It is hard to see how they could demand the kind of compensating wage increases that you would need to set off an inflationary spiral.

So yes, the peso could fall.

In short, the Trump tax would likely make Mexicans poorer with no compensating gains for American workers. But also no losses for fans of big American cars like the amazing Dodge Challenger, like my son. In other words, a gratuitous punch in the nose of those perfidious foreigners! And you can pretend that the tax flows are coming from those foreigners, when they are really coming from American consumers. 

Yeah, I can see why this might actually happen. 

The Trump tariff and the American auto industry

I have no idea if the Trump administration plans to impose a 20% tariff on Mexico. It seems now that the surprise announcement had to do with plans for a border adjustment tax, which is a different thing. But who knows? This is the Trump administration! Why are you asking me to make predictions?

Anyway, yesterday I mentioned that any tariff would impose serious problems on the American auto industry. The big problem is twofold: first, Mexican suppliers provide a large chunk of the inputs into American auto production. Second, many of those parts in fact cross the border multiple times. The end result is that a tariff would raise the cost of producing domestic cars by quite a lot. 

Some figures: in 2012, the state of Michigan published a report on the Ford Motor Company’s Michigan Assembly Plant. The report found that the plant purchased about $3.1 billion from Tier I suppliers; of that, $831 million (or 27%) came from Mexico. (Roughly $3,800 per vehicle.) In 2014, the U.S. auto industry consumed $42 billion in intermediate inputs from Mexico (pages 10-11), approximately $3,500 per vehicle. So at first glance, the tariff would raise the cost of American-built small cars by $760 and all vehicles by about $710.

That is a lower bound, however. In the course of making a motor vehicle, auto parts cross the border as much as eight times. If the tax was applied at each crossing, the cost would go up commensurately. If you assume that components cross from Mexico four times, doubling in value-add each time, then the total cost per vehicle would rise from $710 to $1,300. 

The cost increase would hit small cars more than large ones ... but consumers would see the price hike in the large car sector. The reason is that auto companies in the United States need to sell a certain percentage of small cars in order to hit their fleet fuel economy standards. They will therefore hold down the price on small cars, transferring the impact to their larger vehicles.

The problem is that the U.S. producers more larger vehicles than small cars. 

How much would production shift back to the United States? I suspect less than the current studies predict. Why? Well, the Mexican peso would likely fall. The real exchange rate would go down and stay down. Mexican workers, who consume a lot of imports, would become poorer but they would also become cheaper. A 20% nominal decline in the peso means a drop from 22 per dollar to 26 per dollar. That is certainly conceivable. Hell, 30 per dollar is conceivable. A messy drop would potentially hurt the Mexican economy, if it turns out that Mexican companies have a lot of hidden dollar liabilities, but would nonetheless increase competitiveness.

And so, you would have a temporary increase in the price of large automobiles and light trucks, followed by a drop in Mexican costs. Some production would return to the U.S. (in order to avoid uncertainty) but in unsteady and unpredictable way. It would not be an economic apocalypse for the United States, but it would cause havoc across the Mexican economy with little (if any) employment gain in the USA and big losses for shareholders. And unless the tariff is extended to all countries, the big winners would be car manufacturers from Europe and Asia. 

That said, this is all theory. Who knows what the Administration will do?

Ford is not moving jobs to Mexico

Head, hits desk. Eric Loomis (hat tip: Andrew Reeves) just repeated the Trump lie that Ford is moving jobs to Mexico. Ford is expanding production in Mexico, it is true. But Ford is keeping up production in the United States and Ford would be expanding production in Mexico even without NAFTA. 

The biggest piece of evidence for this is that Ford says so. But hell, don’t trust them. Look at what NAFTA changed.

Before NAFTA, the U.S. tariff on small cars was only 2.5%. That is not nothing, but nor is it enough to compensate for lower labor costs. Note that the real exchange rate of the peso has fallen by 5.4% since the beginning of the year. 2½ percent is barely a speed bump. Now, if you want to argue about NAFTA, you can argue about the 25% tariff that the United States imposed on trucks. That was a real tariff. But Ford isn’t moving truck production; it’s moving small cars. And NAFTA has fuck-all to do with that.

There is a discussion to be had about NAFTA. But I must wonder if Loomis is willing to have it in good faith.

Washington drivers have to stop with the goddamned honking

 We have bemoaned the honking around this city here and here. Now comes Dr. Gridlock at the Washington Post with confirmation. A reader writes in with exasperation to tell her fellow DMV residents to “Stop honking, you are not in New York.”

Dr. Gridlock tells her, “I’m from New York City, and had a New York driver’s license for more than a decade. Never heard as much car honking there as I have in the land of Southern hospitality.”

Damn skippy.

More on the mystery of Maryland drivers

 I’m in New York City without my pen-and-paper journal, so I suspect I’ll post some musings about the trip over the next few days. Why not? Reading over this blog, I like some of the early travelogues the best.

But until then, a brief thought about Maryland drivers, courtesy of a senior traffic engineer who worked in both the District and Prince George’s County. His explanation for the disregard given pedestrians is simple: “Maryland has no cities and therefore no municipal laws about pedestrian safety. Therefore, drivers are not sensitized by local regulations.”

It is strange that the urban counties around D.C. have not passed such laws, but they haven’t. The explanation does have the benefit of comparing like-with-like. 

There is one other possibility: the District, unlike, say, New York or Chicago, has gone out of its way to suburbanize traffic signals. For example, streets that look just like someplace in downtown Brooklyn will force pedestrians to wait for left turn signals ... even from one-way streets. Cars with D.C. plates (to further cite my traffic engineer friend) are likely driven by relatively upper-income people who also spend much time as pedestrians; they will therefore be more respectful than suburban drivers who (unlike somebody from Long Island driving into Queens) neither spend much time on foot nor have to adopt a different driving style when in the city.

I admit to a preference for non-cultural explanations, because they are falsifiable, so I like this one.

I also asked him about all the honking in the DMV. The difference with New York is striking. For three days I have been driving all over the counties of New York, Kings, Queens, and Nassau, plus the trip here and a long stop in Philly. Since leaving the Beltway the only horn sounds I have heard since then was (a) at a turnpike exit in New Jersey; (b) directed at me; and (c) thoroughly deserved. 

So why the honking?

Well, that, he says, is cultural. “That is the District and Virginia too. People scoring self-importance points. Drives everyone nuts.”

Help one American colony, and you gotta hurt another, or something, plus Maryland drivers suck

 Speaker Ryan may be helping the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico against the wishes of his caucus, but man is he letting them fly their freak flag when it comes to the District of Columbia. One Republican basically said that if Washingtonians did not like it, we could go join Maryland.

Bah. I do not like the idea because of a profound culture difference: Maryland drivers are terrible. And I mean terrible in a unique nowhere-else-in-America kind of way.

I just got into a yelling match with an asshole in an SUV who pretended to threaten to run me down when my kids and I were walking in an alleyway that he had turned into illegally. Fucking idiot, by the way, had a goddamned parking enforcement vehicle behind him when he revved his engine and lunged at me and my kids as we were walking. Pendejo. It ended poorly for him, as you can imagine. 

I have had conversations with Marylanders in bars who admit to thinking pedestrians should get out of their way in crosswalks. Add that to the way they honk at anything, and it makes you almost long for Virginia. Really, the craziness drops a lot among cars with District plates and dries up across the Potomac. Unfortunately, I only live a few blocks from Maryland, so I have to deal with them.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with drivers in that state? Disrespecting pedestrians and honking at everything. Where are we, Egypt? Brazil? Mexico City is becoming better than Maryland in this respect.

Note that I have lived in Boston and Miami. Marylanders do not drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. I drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. (Well, not Floridians.) Marylanders drive fine when it comes to signalling and stop signs and situational awareness and speed limits and respecting other vehicles ... well, except for the bloody honking. 

But while the honking is annoying, Marylanders deserve their own circle of hell for the way they treat pedestrians. WTF?

But despite these strong cultural differences with Maryland (do not get me started on their traitorious racist anthem) the actions of Congress are beginning to make me think that maybe retrocession would not be such a bad idea. 

Air pollution in Mexico

 OK, so when I flew into Mexico earlier this month I was astounded to see the brownish murk as my plane descended into the Valley of Mexico. The horizon disappeared, the mountains were invisible. After landing, the sky had a strange greyish tinge that persisted even when you looked straight up. My eyes watered. It was awful.

Back to the 1990s, I thought! The government declared a smog emergency, ultimately taking most cars off the road. By the time I flew out on the morning of Saturday, May 7th, the sky had gone back to a normal blue and you could see the mountains. Ozone levels had dropped from almost twice the safe limit (0.11 ppm) to “only” 2% above. 

But it took heroic measures. The cutback on the number of cars in circulation was herculean. 

Naturally, I wanted to see if things were really back to the 1990s. How bad was this smog emergency in historical perspective? Sadly, the data wasn’t easily available in one place. So I decided to get it. And after much looking, I managed to put together a complete series on the average maximum daily ozone reading for the Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México (ZMVM). That is to say, it takes the highest reading from all five metropolitan sectors for every day, then averages that across all the days of the month.  The data from 1992 to 2010 (save 2003) are from INEGI, with the caveat that they changed the calculations in 2006 in a way that I do not fully understand. The data from all the other years are taken from hourly readings downloaded from the Atmospheric Monitoring Board of the D.F. government. I had to write some annoying Excel code to extract the data that I wanted, so I wouldn’t bet the bank on it having no errors.

Caveats aside, the numbers give a good idea of the trend:

Air quality has deteriorated markedly in the last three years, with spikes in May 2013, March 2014, April 2015 and ongoing for this year. But ... things are still better than they were when I left to work with Uncle Sam in 2002. And that despite an almost threefold increase in the number of motor vehicles in the metro area since then. 

I was told several competing (but not necessarily exclusive) hypotheses. The obvious one is that the number of vehicles on the roads has finally outrun the decrease in smog per car. A complimentary one notes that congestion has markedly gotten worse with the increase in the number of vehicles ... and idling cars pump out more smog. Finally, the D.F. mayor decided to allow any car that could pass the smog check to get the coveted permission to hit the road every day of the week. It used to be that only newish cars could qualify; once the car got past a certain number of years, you could only drive it four weekdays out of five. That reform meant both that older cars could legally put out 25% more smog ... and, of course, some cars that should not have passed the smog check did with a little baksheesh. 

And then there is the climate change hypothesis, but that is really a worry for the future.

But the future is coming fast. Even if things aren’t really back to the 1990s, it is clear that the government is going to have to do something fairly soon. The roads may be becoming saturated, but there is still lots of room for the number of vehicles on the road to increase. Traffic isn’t going to get better. And 2016 isn’t a fluke: as the data show, things have been getting worse for three years now.

Uber in Archiebunkerland

 So Uber and the NYC government have been battling it out. I will admit to having sympathy with the government. Not because I support the taxi monopoly: reader JKR, if he would be so kind, will attest that I railed against it at somewhat annoying length as far back as the 1980s. Rather, it is because of my general fear of a “gig economy” in which social insurance is still tied to employment ... only in which the “gigs” are not counted as employment. 

But I come to praise Uber, not to bury it. When I go to New York, I tend to stay either in Midwood, Brooklyn, or more-often in the beyond-the-subway reaches of Queens. LIRR service from Queens Village is usually hourly, so it usually makes more sense to go to the main LIRR station at Jamaica, where trains run at subway frequencies. Except Jamaica is several miles away. Now, the recent creation of the green taxis that do pick-up only in the boroughs means that it is easy to get a cab from Jamaica. But calling a cab to take you to Jamaica (or the airport, for that matter) has always been nearly hopeless. Half-hour waits and disappearing cars were the standard.

But then came Uber! And now, we have never waited more than ten minutes and we have only once had a cab agree to come and then cancel. (Yes, that happens with Uber in Queens. It’s still Queens. We walked down to Jamaica Avenue and caught a dollar cab instead.)

(Parenthetical comment inside a parenthesis: in Queens, the dollar cabs are fixed-route taxis. They ply a major street, picking up and letting off people along the way. They are cars, not vans, and often, but not always, painted black.)

So while not perfect, this Uber-financed study passes the smell test. The service really has improved taxi service in the outer boroughs beyond the subway, even if it costs about the same.

The Philippines move right!

 Carlos Yu and I have a long-term plan to write a book on the Philippines under American rule. But it won’t be done until 2018 at the earliest.

One thing that we discovered while writing our book on the Panama Canal was that Panamanians drove on the left until April 15, 1943. The reasons for the changeover are obvious; less so is why Panama started out on the left. The influx from the British West Indies is often cited. (Colombia did not start to regularize its traffic codes until Panama had already seceded but appears to have always driven on the right.) Argentina drove on the left between 1889 and 1945. The first traffic code, from 1872, mandated driving on the right but the country switched to the left in emulation of the British-built railroads. (You can still see this in the Buenos Aires subway.) It moved back to the right on June 10, 1945.

But neither of us had any idea that the Philippines also drove on the left until March 10, 1945! That is more than slightly amazing. The vast majority of cars were imported from the United States. So how did the rule survive so long? Even more amazing, the reason for the shift given in the text of the executive order implies that imported cars had been physically reconfigured to right-hand-drive before the switch:

EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 34: AMENDING TRAFFIC REGULATIONS FOR VEHICLES

WHEREAS it is deemed advisable to change the existing regulations providing for the driving of vehicles on the left side of the road so that the vehicle traffic in the Philippines shall conform with the practice of driving on the right side of the road obtaining in most countries of the world;

WHEREAS such a change would bring about certain economic advantages to the people of the Philippines in that it would reduce the price of motor vehicles imported into the Philippines from the United States;

WHEREAS during the present emergency the great majority of the motor vehicles of the United States Army used on the roadways in the Philippines are right-hand driven and the drivers thereof are accustomed to driving on the right side of the road; and

WHEREAS the present affords the most propitious opportunity to effect this desired change;

NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the powers vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, particularly Commonwealth Act No. 671, I, Sergio Osmeña, President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, do hereby order;

1. That section 60 of the Revised Motor Vehicle Law, Act No. 3992, be amended, as it is hereby amended, to read as follows:

“SEC. 60. Drive on right side of road.—Unless a different course of action is required in the interest of the safety and security of life, person, or property, or because of unreasonable difficulty of operation in compliance herewith, every person operating a motor vehicle or guiding an animal drawn vehicle on a highway shall pass to the right when meeting persons or vehicles coming toward him, and to the left when overtaking persons or vehicles going the same direction, and, when turning to the left, in going from one highway into another, every vehicle shall be conducted to the right of the center of the intersection of the highway.”

2. That all other sections or parts of the said Revised Motor Vehicle Law and amendments thereof shall be considered as amended or modified as they are hereby amended or modified accordingly so as to conform with the provisions of the Executive Order; and all other provisions of law inconsistent with or contrary to the provisions of this Executive Order shall be considered repealed as they are hereby repealed.

Done at the City of Manila, this tenth day of March, in the year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and forty-five, and of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, the tenth.

SERGIO OSMEÑA
President of the Philippines

Unless most American imports had been reconfigured before sale in the Philippines, then there is no reason why switching the side you drive on would make imports cheaper. Today the Bahamas drives on the left but enforces no such rule; neither does the U.S. Virgin Islands. Was there a mechanics lobby group in the Philippine Islands that insisted on reconfiguring imports before 1945? 

There has got to be a story here.

Two cool links

I wish that Typepad had a “blogroll” function that I could put on the sidebar. Because you all should check into the Dragon’s Tales ever so often.

Two cool links today. Link #1: proof that I am not complete Luddite. Yeah, I worry about the robots. And I worry about the panopticon. But I do not worry about the flying cars and it is serious awesome that Advanced Tactics of El Segundo, California, is trying to build one for the U.S. armed forces.

Link #2: By age 23, 49% of black, 44 % of Hispanic & 38 % of white males have been arrested. That is fucking amazing. I came close to being arrested on two occasions, but it did not happen. My friend Guy can say the same, only more so. It is a good thing to be white in this country ... so I am surprised that the disparity in arrest records is as small as eleven percentage points.

What I am curious about is the result of the arrests. My null hypothesis would be that the consequences are far more serious for black arrestees than for white ones, but I do not know that for certain. Does anyone know of research?

I would also like to know if anyone has looked into how cumulative cohort arrest rates have varied over time. Were men who turned 23 in 1953 or 1973 or 1993 as likely to have been arrested as those who turned 23 in 2013?

I think a good social science history of crime in America is sorely needed.

Do U.S. agents really drive black Suburbans in northern Mexico?

 When I last tooled around the violent areas of northern Mexico, I did so in a green Infiniti. Before that, a bright red 2002 Ford Focus SVT. Why those cars? Well, they were the ones we had on hand ... but we could also be pretty sure that nobody would be gunning for us, even with Texas and California plates.

So I read this post with some incredulity. Not the story. I completely believe that the Zetas would apologetically release USDA officials that they had accidentally detained on suspiscion of being narcos. What I do not believe is that the U.S. government would actually be dumb enough to put its officials in black suburbans. Caray.

This is not to say that it is impossible to travel incognito through cartel territory. It is not hard to project the impression that you are not involved in organized crime. In fact, it is rather easy. The secret, as you can see above, is to not try to hide ... while avoiding the obvious markets of a sicario or cartel honcho. Dress like a gringo sartorially aware Argentine or Spaniard normal person and you will likely be fine.

I want one!

  Yes, it is an environmental atrocity.  Sure, the purported safety of all the extra power exists only in my imagination.  Indeed, while quite comfortable, the cupholders are in a weird place and the dashboard looks kind of cheap.  And it's noisy as hell.

But it is fun to drive, and that growl makes up for any and all inadequacies you might have.  Would it really be a problem to get a child-safety-seat in and out of the back?  The front seats fold way forward.  Hell, people, I'm under forty, recently married, and we don't drive enough for it to cause an appreciable increase in our gasoline consumption over, say, the Fusion hybrid or a Prius.  And it isn't a convertible.  Plus, my wife loved driving it around Maine last weekend.  So it wouldn't be that pathetic.  Would it?

I really am wondering about those child safety seats in a two-seater.  Hmm.

Back to Santiago

  The last time I was in Santiago de Chile was in 1991. It was a bad year.  The First Gulf War ended in February. The U.S. economy was in the toilet.  Unable to afford school fees, saddled with a large short-term debt dumped on me due to a bit of ... ah ... creative financing by a ... hmm ... unrelated family member, and needing to save to pay for my long-anticipated trip to South America, I stopped out of school and wound up doing odd jobs that paid enough to keep me sleeping in my car. Which was a 1980 Plymouth Champ.  If Marcia still comes here, she can probably say more about this period than I remember.  Or necessarily want to.

It wasn't the greatest time to decide to go gallivanting off to Santiago, but I managed to get enough money together enough to go.  I don't remember a whole lot.  I have a journal from the period, but the young fellow who wrote in it seems quite alien.  (At some point around 1995 the writer becomes a recognizable version of me.  Stupider and ignorant, but clearly me.  Before that ... who was that guy??) 

So now it turns out that I'll be headed back to Santiago for a few days next month.  It will be interesting to see all the changes.  In that vein, I'm going to begin an intermittent series of posts about Chile, starting with the following chart (you can click on it to have an expanded version pop up): 

It shows the PPP-adjusted GDP per worker (in 2000 dollars) for the United States and Chile between 1950 and 2008.  The data come from the Penn World Tables through 2003; afterwards, the U.S. data are from the Global Financial Statistics database (dividing real GDP by total employment) while the Chilean figures are derived from the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, under the somewhat heroic assumption that the growth in Chilean GDP per worker in 2004 pesos is the same as its growth in PPP-adjusted 2000 dollars.  Anyway, the approximation is good enough for a blog post, and unlikely to change this picture much.  (Besides which, I know how the PWT figures are produced, and they're not much more accurate.)

The data show that Chile had an economy about half as productive as the United States at the middle of the last century.  Chile more-or-less maintained that ratio until the economic collapse that hit at the tail end of the Allende presidency and the first few years of the Pinochet dictatorship.  There was a rapid recovery afterwards, but the economy went right into another tailspin in 1982.  The solid growth rates since then have only taken the country back up to the same relative position that it held at the end of World War 2. 

That said, the place is lot richer than it was when I was there in 1991.  Your average Chilean worker produces more than half again as much as he or she produced back then.  But what does that mean on the ground?

Right about now, Doug would probably turn to the human development indices.  Infant mortality, life expectancy, income equality, that sort of thing.  Me, I make like Gary Numan and look at cars.  The following chart ...

  

... shows the number of private automobiles per 1,000 people for various countries around the time that they reached the same level of auto penetration that Chile enjoyed in 1991.  That would be Italy in 1960, France in 1952, Britain in 1951, and Argentina in 1968.  All saw their car ownership grow more quickly thereafter than Chile. 

There is some reason to believe that Chilean income inequality has widened.  Since 1993, average wages have risen 40 percent, in line with labor productivity growth of 42 percent.  That said, the real wages of high-level managers have risen 58 percent, while those of unskilled laborers have risen by 36 percent.  Personal service workers — e.g., maids and security guards — have seen their real wages rise only 29 percent, and skilled machine operators wages have gone up just 25 percent. 

I'll put up more sporadically, as I look into the economic and social situation of the country I'm going to revisit soon.  Is there anything in particular that anyone out there is curious about?

Cars of Februaries past

  After World War 2 ended, pent-up consumer demand meant that the auto manufacturers could pretty much sell whatever crap their factories could churn out.  It took, in fact, four years for the carmakers to start selling new products incorporating all the technological advances of the Depression and war years. 

Oldsmobile kicked it off with the restyled Futuramic Rocket 88.  It included the Hydramatic automatic transmission and a brand-new V-8 engine.  Now, neither was new.  Olds introduced the automatic transmission in 1940 and it had been building V-8’s since 1932, but the two things hadn’t been put together in a designed-from-the-chassis up vehicle.  In addition, the Rocket V-8 was the first overhead-valve design, allowing the engine to take up much less space and producing less vibration when accelerating.  It also had an AM radio that could sorta kinda be heard with the top down at cruising speed maybe if you had lots of imagination. 

My father, therefore, wanted one.  But they were hard to find in February of 1949.  Yet the above pic from 1949 shows that he got one.  (Well, actually the Rocket 76 with the Big Six engine.) Only wanting is not having.  How did he make that leap? 

Cars

 So I was just in Washington on business.  But I managed to get in some fun, visiting the Auto Show on Saturday evening.  Very cool.  In one sign of the recession, they have put all of the spokesmodels in more clothes than is usual. 

Here's the car I want.

Here's the car I don't want, but would feel very patriotic to have.

Here's the car I really want, but can't possibly justify.  As in, its existence.  On any level.

And here's the car I really really want.  It even has a five-point safety belt and a racing roll bar, which I'm sure would make my wife much happier about spending $39,990 on a tricked-out death machine.

What I'm going to get, however, will probably be either a Mini Cooper Clubman S or the Honda Insight.  Unless I think of something better.  What car do you want?

Manejando el auto en la madre patria

Haven't driven a car in Europe since 1986, and that probably wasn't legal.  Closest I came this trip was taking a taxi from the Barcelona airport (which is less than necessary, since the train is quite good), and while the taxista made great conversation — “Both parties are the same.  But that's fine!  The country is going well, so why change anything?” — his driving was quite boringly professional. 

 

Same thing for Sevilla.  The most interesting thing that cabbie from the airport did was explain that the green-and-white flags we saw waving from all the buildings on the outskirts of town were either the Andalucian provincial flag (the striped one) or the flag of the Betis soccer team (the one that vaguely looked like Saudi Arabia's). 

I can, though, say something about being a pedestrian in the madre patria, which is:  good, but frustrating.  Good, because this is one of those countries where drivers don't seem to want to kill you.  (Well, unless you're a jaywalker in Barcelona.)  Frustrating, because Sevilla (Barcelona, not so much) is one of those places where pedestrians will stand and stand and stand and wait for the light to change, regardless of oncoming traffic.  Now, I'm from New York, so on my own I made like Eminem and just didn't give a ****, but when I was with Amma we hewed to local customs ... it wasn't easy.

And I can say something about scooters.  Don't.  Ride them.  Vehicular craziness in Sevilla seems to be reserved for motor scooters.  And Barcelona leaves me at a loss for words, but thankfully still with my life. 

On the whole, I found car-people interactions to be far superior to Boston, where the f****** drivers honk at pedestrians.  That says more about Boston than Barcelona, though, because cars don't routinely honk at pedestrians anywhere else in the United States. 

What's the matter with Boston?

Let's Talk about Roads

 

We have readers!  Chido, ¡y bienvenido!

For a person of my tastes, the photograph below is best appreciated to Mötley Crüe.  In a pinch,  Steppenwolf works.  And when feeling less Jurassic, most pop-punk will suffice, as will Kid Rock's "Son of Detroit" or anything from the Donnas’ first album.

So, roads.  In a blatant attempt to whomp up comments, I’ll start by quoting Jonathan Edelstein: 

[Super]highways have come to Puerto Rico in the past generation, and the main intercity routes are well maintained, but once you get off the autopistas, things get wiggy in a hurry. The two-lane roads that aren't quite wide enough for two cars, and the signs in all the wrong places and none of the right ones, are the least of it. Roads in Puerto Rico have a way of suddenly ceasing to exist or being closed without a warning or detour sign, and changing their names without apparent reason.

The city streets are even worse, with many of them built before automobile traffic and the shortage of off-street parking (even the hotels have postage-stamp lots) choking things off even further. The method of choice to control urban traffic - one-way streets - has been implemented without a great deal of rhyme or reason, giving urban driving a distinct similarity to a maze from the rat's point of view.

These were his first impressions.  Do they match mine? 

The rural roads, yes; the urban streets, no. 

Rural roads first:  they can get ridiculously narrow, just as Jonathan says.  Sometimes these tiny roads run through densely-populated exurbs, which can make for some amusing situations.  Now, not all the roads are like that.  In fact, most are not.  But plenty are, and that's not something you'll see much of in the continental United States. 

The signage isn’t particularly good, although it's not particularly bad either.  I only had trouble at that Route 10 detour that I mentioned in the last post.  I, however, have two advantages.  First, I’m accustomed to (if not quite skilled at) driving in signage-deficient situations.  Second, Amma is a truly excellent navigator.  In addition, you can easily buy superlative road maps in Puerto Rico (or download them into a GPS system), which is not true for many other places. 

I didn’t think the roads were that badly maintained.  We drove around the island quite a bit—not hard to do, since the entire place is only about 2½ times the size of Long Island—and there aren’t many potholes you could use to shelter a small family. 

That said, "good maintenance" is a relative concept, and I have very low standards.  I’ve driven in Trinidad, where the roads are worse.  I’ve also driven in Chiapas, where they are much worse—and often unpaved.  In fact, I’ve driven in Afghanistan, parts of which take "worse" to a whole 'nother level: imagine driving an armored pickup truck to the Pakistani border along a "road" consisting of the rutted tracks of the jingle trucks that preceeded you.   

My experience of the urban roads, however, is the diametric opposite of Jonathan's.  I thought that they were as good as New York and better than Boston. 

My guess is that Jonathan was talking about Old San Juan, not the rest of the city.  The thing is, Old San Juan is small.  You can walk across it in ten minutes:  by the time you hit Puerta de Tierra, the streets are as broad and modern as any American metropolis.   

The lesson, I suppose, is this:  when travelling to cities in the Western Hemisphere, you’ve got to visit to the suburbs.   

I have a request for our readers:  Any good road stories from outside your home country? 

Dáme mas Carolina

Roadside diners are fun. 

So is driving off-the-interstate in rural Puerto Rico.  At least for the driver.  Passenger, not so much.  Amma got carsick, which is not surprising considering the combination of the winding road and my driving.  I’m not a very good driver. 

I’ve wrecked two cars, one just recently.  In addition, Carlos has ridden with me across Mexico.  So we have evidence and witnesses to keep me from fronting on the Mario Andretti tip.

As a result, we detoured to the far straighter Route 10.  Unfortunately, Route 10 isn’t quite done yet, so we had to get back on 123 for a while at a jury-rigged intersection near a strip mall.  I missed the sign the first time around, but it was blindingly obvious on the second pass.

The cool thing was passing under the viaducts that will eventually turn Route 10 into an interstate-quality road.  Sadly, we couldn’t get pictures, but I’ll give you Amma’s reaction:  "A wonder that human beings can build such things!"

That was the beginning, but not the end, of our off-the-Interstate adventures around Puerto Rico.  I won’t go into all the details.  There are only a few highlights, anyway.  Roadside diners in Puerto Rico—they’re not diners, really, much smaller and usually open air—are great places to meet people, all of whom seem to have spent time in Brooklyn; the cows in the central cordillera are very well fed and very hostile; Arecibo is something every American should see before they die; and I drive like a chilango when I’m on the island. 

Puerto Ricans don’t like the way chilangos drive.  Being polite and patient people themselves, at least on the road, they don’t appreciate illegal left turns or the way I barging ahead to change lanes in stop-and-go traffic, and they don’t understand using your blinker to pass. 

Truth be told, I don’t like the way chilangos drive either.  I wish I knew what’s triggering my Mexico City driving instincts, because Puerto Rico doesn’t look like Mexico; Puerto Ricans don’t sound, act, or drive like Mexicans; and we’re not, you know, in Mexico. 

I’ve heard other Americans claim that Puerto Ricans are risk-taking, rude, and aggressive on the road.  I live in Boston, so my reaction to those claims is an unprintable two-syllable word beginning with the letter "p."   It's simply not true. 

Maybe it's living in Boston what's the problem.

We ended our road tripping in Carolina, a very nice suburb of San Juan.  To be fair, Carolina is a big place and it’s got some not-particularly-pleasant caseríos, but what’s not to like about hanging at the beach in Isla Verde? 

An African-American couple was getting married on the sand right in front of the hotel when we arrived.  It was a pleasant little ceremony; very few people, very good music. 

Amma enjoyed watching it, too, but she turned to me as I munched on (bad) ceviche and sipped a girlie drink of some sort, and said, "The preacher is wearing a maroon shirt [under a cream-colored suit] and a big gold chain."

And I'd been thinking that I kinda liked the idea of having the preacher wear that same outfit at our wedding.  Note to self:  thank God at least one of you has taste.   

Welcome to Earthport!

And now, for the second installment in our continuing series about el Caribe.  Hopefully, this will keep you entertained and edified as the real owners deal with, well, life. 

 

Outside the walls of Old San Juan lies, well, mostly ocean.  But go east along the island, past the grandeur of the Capitolio, and you enter the unpleasantly named "Puerta de Tierra."  It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.  It isn’t, unless the movie in question is Class of 1984.  It’s a run-down area full of housing projects, homeless shelters, and a Catholic school with a grand building in dire need of reconstruction.  But the Archivo General de Puerto Rico is there, and so am I.

Over on the north side of Puerta de Tierra there are a bunch of nice hotels.  A massive tourist complex is going up on the northeastern edge.  There are also a lot of signs advertising new high-rise condos but not a whole lot of condos themselves. 

The south side is mostly housing projects.  The first one on the island, El Falansterio, was built in 1937 and could be in Miami Beach ... architecturally-speaking, at least.  El Falansterio aside, Puerto Rican housing projects, called "caseríos," mostly look like they were built on an assembly line somewhere in central California and shipped here in a pod.  Most of the ones in Puerta de Tierra don’t look all that bad, until you notice the bars on all the balconies and windows. 

At least they demolished the tower projects back in 2000, as part of an urban renewal program that’s still underway.

In other words, the government got rid of the arrabales by building caseríos, and now they’re replacing the caseríos with condos.