Driving in Detroit and Ann Arbor
The first time I visited the Detroit area, I was struck by the incredibly auto-oriented nature of the area - not surprising, perhaps, but when one is coasting down the freeway at speeds that would be hard to maintain in the crowded Northeast, noting that the slow lane is moving at an easy 70 mph, it’s hard to miss. Practically every vehicle on the road is American; there are scatterings of Jaguars (Ford executives?), shaggy Hondas, and Volkswagens (their HQ is in the area too), but they are a clear minority. The national market shares of 1978 are alive and well, to a good degree, in Detroit and associated cities.
The Detroit area is quite spread out, a model of suburban sprawl. You have to drive long distances to get to most places, and the country is pretty flat. The roads are generally quite straight and have high speed limits. Stop signs tend to be three-way or four-way, for reasons I will probably never understand, coming from a region where only one road ever gets a stop.
What makes all the high speeds possible is a focus on actually driving which is notably absent from many parts of the country, particularly my home states of New York and New Jersey. I haven’t noticed any truly inane drivers during my stay in Michigan - albeit just five days now, but it only takes one trip to the grocery in Bergen County to encounter several weaving, aggressive, and reckless cell-phone drivers. Even the relatively reckless drivers in the Detroit region (so far, exclusively commercial vans and full-size SUVs for some reason) seem to be more “with it” than those at home. I wonder if the high speeds force people to focus, or if the focus allows people to drive at high speeds. Either way, roads are often rated at higher speeds than they would be in New Jersey or New York, and they get away with it. People come to full stops at stops signs, instead of the Bergen County “I might slow down a little for the stop,” and close calls seem fewer and farther between.
Ann Arbor is an interesting contrast to nearby Detroit, largely, I suspect, because a number of people from out of the area end up there. You can easily find a Honda dealership, and the Toyota technical center is right in town, so there are more Toys, too. Ann Arbor is seen by some in Michigan as a place where the far-out left-wingers hide, and the foreign cars seem to play into the “America-hating liberal” stereotype so many seem to get, but frankly I’ve never found political views to correlate with domestic-vs-foreign purchases outside of Michigan. The foreign car invasion is more likely due to Ann Arbor’s unique (for the area) economy, depending, as it does, less on General Motors than on the University of Michigan; and even though auto parts and technologies are a big part of the area’s employment, the parts suppliers do business with more than just the Big Three (though to be fair, I suspect the great majority of Delphi’s parts go to GM and Chrysler). Still, the conflicting ethics of buying American and free trade without regard to consequence have not been resolved on a national cultural level. Many conservative and liberal Americans agree on the overriding value of free trade, period-end-of-story, without consideration of environmental impact, slavery, intellectual property rights (in the case of China, mainly), employee health and safety, civil rights, etc. Most people also agree that a free international market is the best way to “raise all boats” and that anything else is somehow wrong — I’m not saying that view is true, just that I believe it is implicitly believed by an overwhelming majority of Americans. I try to explain to people that when they buy American, they are saving their own jobs and working towards their own financial benefit, but they stare blindly at me as though I’m proposing a Communist state. We’ve been told by our leaders for decades that international free trade is the only good way to do anything, after all. (Let’s not even get into trying to convince people to use civil rights and environmental impact in their buying decisions. That’s just not happening. People won’t even use antibiotic-free milk…)
Anyway, coming back to the East coast was wrenching at best. In Ann Arbor I didn’t see anyone fail to stop at a stop sign, though admittedly coming off exit 177 people in the left lane made right turns on red; that’s just weird. On my first trip after coming back, no less than three people ignored the stop signs and pulled out in front, to maintain 15 mph below the speed limit in front of me. (People wonder where road rage comes from.) Then on my second trip a guy in a Lexus tried to pull out from a stopped lane of traffic right in front of me, with no warning, and with no distance… skidding to a halt just before I reached him (and this, in front of a cop!).
Frankly, I have to wonder what’s wrong with us out here. We need to take care of the loose nuts behind the wheel in a big way. It’s time to put down the phones and drive, and I wonder if only a car culture can make us do it. Or is it the famous midwestern politeness that makes Michigan easier? Wausau, Wisconsin is also far easier to drive around in, but they drive so slowly I feel that I missed out on the free ‘ludes.
