Flaneurs at Forty Miles Per Hour: Experiencing Boston by Car

An under the radar oddity of my college experience has been the almost complete absence of automobile travel. This is something I rarely stop to think about, but for virtually my entire life I have been in a car at least once a day. I did not have a car to bring to college, and as a result Boston is a city I have explored entirely by other means. This all changed when my friend Laura came to visit for a weekend. She had never been to Boston before and had brought her car, a happy coincidence seemingly designed to push me onto the road for a weekend of drive-by sightseeing. Over the next few days, I became acquainted with the strange liminal space of the urban highway.

To drive around Boston is to engage with a number of frustrating paradoxes. The first and most apparent is the way traveling by car compares to riding the T. The way the train lines are laid out means that huge swaths of the Boston area are much more accessible by car, even in traffic. We drove from Tufts to visit friends in Jamaica Plain in about half an hour, a journey that can easily take an hour on the T. The trip was less than pleasant- Boston drivers lived up to their notorious reputation, making merging lanes nearly impossible and cutting us off without warning. Even so, I was amazed by

the extra time we had gained- i felt like I was discovering the actual distance between Tufts and Jamaica Plain for the first time, and in a way I was. To get to Jamaica Plain on the T, one must go in and out of downtown Boston, while the highway allows for a more direct route. On the way back, we stopped at Inman Square, a place I had never been to before simply because there are no direct public transit options from Tufts. Inman is only a 15 minute walk from the Central Square T stop, but after taking the red line so much I had acquired the mindset that the only places worth going to had their own stop. Even with the annoyances of persistent traffic and a constant shortage of parking, driving had given me a sense of geographical freedom. All locations were now equal, regardless of their distance to a T stop or bus stop. As often as Boston is praised for its compact size and expansive public transit system, having a car grants the driver a much more complete level of access to the city.

Despite the increased mobility the car had given us, not once during the weekend did we feel like we were truly in the city while driving. To drive in a city is to remove oneself from urban life. Part of this stems from the liminal nature of auto travel- cars are both public and private spaces. Within Lauras car we could make the temperature as hot or as cold as we liked, play any music we wanted, and talk about anything at any volume. We created an environment for ourselves that could exist anywhere in the world

and still be exactly the same. In the car, we experienced the city only by looking at it through the windows. Its sounds, smells, and textures were entirely outside of our grasp. The citys people were also out of our zone of concern. Instead of rubbing shoulders and exchanging glances with them as we would on a bus, subway, or sidewalk, we looked upon them as features of the landscape or obstacles to be avoided in crosswalks. Although the car impressively equalized Bostons locations, it had stratified its people. Laura and I were suddenly different from those on the sidewalk- we were drivers, they were pedestrians. They may have had the right of way, but we were sitting inside a 3000 pounds machine and would surely come out on top in any confrontation. However, as distant as we felt from the reality of city life, we were an essential part of it. Although we could not smell or hear any of the outside world, the cars engine and exhaust were helping to make those smells and sounds. We were not trapped in a traffic jam, we were a part of a traffic jam, creating an eyesore and detracting from everyone elses urban experience. Even though the interior of the car was a private space, the exterior was indisputably an element of the cityscape and affected changes in its surroundings.

In many ways, urban highways interact with the city in the same way cars do. Although they are physically in the city, they are separated from it and maintain a type of

space very different from any conventional definition of urbanism. Cities are places of big buildings and big numbers of people. On a highway like the Mass Turnpike, the people are nowhere to be seen. The presence or absence of traffic creates a strange visual binary in which the skyline either flies by or lurches along with the cars, distorting the scale of the buildings. It is impossible to observe the larger city at high speed, and other cars dominate the field of vision when stuck in traffic. Furthermore, the view presented to drivers by the sides of major roadways is hardly representative of what the city is actually like, because the vast majority of people do not want to work or live immediately adjacent to a highway. Our drive to Jamaica Plain was flanked mostly by parking lots, strip malls, and vacant lots. Granted, our route did not go directly through downtown Boston, but it cut through some of the most developed parts of Cambridge. Of course, the problem here is not that highways provide bad views for drivers, its that they are a toxic force on neighborhood and community development. Although Boston does not have as grievous an example of this as New Yorks South Bronx, many areas of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford are blighted by an excess of big roads that makes driving much easier but stifles the creation of walkable neighborhoods. Just like cars, highways have an impact on their surroundings even as they exclude them.

Last year I visited the Esplanade, and although I had a pleasant time, I remember thinking that the the noise from Storrow Drive was annoying and detrimental to the entire Charles waterfront.. This year, I chose to take the same roadway into Boston so I could have a view of the river, and the presence of our car possibly helped convince someone else that the cars on Storrow Drive are annoying and should be moved somewhere else. I got the distinct sense that the convenience and directness I had come to associate with traveling around Boston by car was coming at the expense of making the city a nicer place to live for pedestrians. The congestion, the huge space given over to parking lots, the noise, the fumes, and the neighborhoods bisected by parkways were all there so Laura and I could drive wherever we wanted in half an hour or less. To be fair, Boston is not nearly as bad as many other cities when it comes to car dominance, and the Big Dig and Rose Kennedy Greenway have done much to alleviate the pressure of downtown highways. Even so, the disparities in the time it takes to get places on the T and by driving are signs that Boston still has a long way to go in democratizing its transit options.