“Is it true that you don’t have a driveway?” questioned the young woman, delivering her query in such a way that the followup might be “and are you from Mars?” or so it felt.  The place was upstate New York; she’d been a caregiver for my wife’s sister and clearly they’d covered a lot of topics in their hours together.  And given her experience, it made sense that owning a car and not having your own permanent place to store it right where you lived was a rather fantastic notion. Which it is, come to think of it.

Now you, with your vast life experience and knowledge, know for a fact that urban dwellers of this world  – or at least some of them  –  live in big apartment buildings or on streets of row houses or other such multiple-unit dwellings that are a far cry from the freestanding “single-family” dwelling on its own piece of land that is the American norm (and a whole lot of other places) outside of the ancient eastern US metropolises.  It is likely that the young woman  –  let’s call her Nancy, as good an upstate female name as any  –  had at least been exposed to images of big cities at some point in her life and even stories about people who lived there, maybe on a TV cop show (some version of Law and Order would be a good bet) or in some movie or video.  But making connections with real people leading actual lives in such places can still lead to not considering any of the details of the everyday.  The characters of Law and Order must surely drive home every day and park their car in the driveway, even though the show never depicts this onscreen, right?   

And in this case, maybe we were her first real-life connection with living breathing city-dwellers, who’d also complained to her informant (my sister-in-law) about the occasional frustrations that come with not having our own appropriated bit of land for car storage.  Avoiding the alien-origin question entirely, should I have also amazed her with stories about certain people in my city who didn’t own a driveway but had paid over half a million dollars for a parking spot behind their house?  Or that there were people we knew who neither owned nor drove a car nor depended on rides with anybody who still managed normal lives?  Or that we owned a car but would often not use it for days at a time?  Chances are she was familiar in some way with buses and trains that people in cities seemed to use (I was not about to muddy the waters further by bringing up bicycles), but unless you spend a few days in an actual pre-motor age city, of which America has very few, it’s all kind of abstract, something far from the world you know and understand.  It is also true that all cities, even ours, is totally jammed up with cars  –  in fact by the measure of “hours lost in congestion”, Boston won the booby prize for coming in #1 in America in 2018, at 164 hours per year.  This is America, after all, even as seen on Law and Order, where everybody drives everywhere.

But the whole question of driveways can be thought-provoking in ways Nancy probably never intended (or any sane person might ever consider).   Looking around Iffley Road today with a mind towards the history of people and their cars might tell us a few things about how this first 100 years of “America’s love affair with the automobile” has been going.  Any love affair of that duration has gotta be complicated, don’t you think? The fact is, our house was built in 1915, when it seems most of the neighborhood was created or thereabouts, and that was also right about the time that automobile use in America was ramping up big time, as Henry Ford’s Model T, the first “affordable” car, had only began production seven years before, after which America fell head over heels, as the romance novelist might describe it.  The Orange Line, a major piece of Boston’s transit system that once ran along Washington Street at the bottom of Iffley Road on an elevated track (it was very noisy), had begun service to Jamaica Plain in 1909.  The Orange Line is still there (now farther down the hill and we can still hear it from our house), showing its age in all the worst ways, and there are more cars around then ever, getting in each others’ way with nowhere to put them all.  And some of us on Iffley Road have these driveways, while some of us don’t, and did I mention that congestion prize?  But none of us is giving up our car because owning a car is a truly marvelous thing, a kind of miracle wouldn’t you say? without which life as we know it is unthinkable.   Talk about a mixed bag!  My guess is Nancy in her world doesn’t think “marvelous” so much as “indispensable”, and her world is that of most of America, if not much of the world beyond that, which adds another whole dimension to this picture on a scale that encompasses things like the climate and eventual fate of the entire planet and so much else.

But for now let’s get back to something simple and concrete and comprehensible, like driveways.  Even there the story Iffley Road tells is one which is evident on some streets in the Boston metro area but by no means all.   The dense colonial downtown neighborhoods of Boston tell a different story:  there are a scant few driveways as we understand them, just as one might expect, though even back before cars some of the very wealthy had horses and carriage houses and kind of a “driveway” in the modern sense, since automobiles had nothing to do with it (I believe even the Paul Revere house has a stable out back  –  we know for sure that the guy had a horse). Nowadays the mostly wealthy people that live down there deal with the luck of the draw and park where they can on the street, or purchase a parking spot for outrageous money, or use parking garages.  What modern apartment buildings there are provide space underground.  With enough money (and most of those folks have it),  hiring a taxi or other car service is a time-honored solution;  one keeps one’s expensive car or cars at one’s other property or properties out of town.  You’d be crazy to drive a Ferrari in Boston, but of course it happens.

At the other extreme, more of the city fits Nancy’s worldview than one might expect, with houses and driveways and garages, where it is also common to pave over parts of whatever small yard exists on one’s property, to accommodate the modern trend of families owning multiple vehicles or a larger house that has been split up into smaller apartments, each of which “requires” a space for each occupant’s automotive romantic interest.  The result of all this is some really ugly neighborhoods, and of course worse and worse traffic congestion.

But take a look at the houses on Iffley Road, at least the original ones from the early 20th century that remain:  what you’re looking at is a local architectural practice of the day known as the three-family or three-decker or triple-decker freestanding apartment building, with space and air and light all around, a marvel of design that had its heyday and then petered out by the 1920s. Did I mention that that was when automobility was ramping up big-time in America? And about that time, even in Boston, the single-family dwelling with its space for a car was becoming the next thing.  Call it sprawl Boston-style, and like all things Boston it proceeded in a modest fashion compared to the later no-holds-barred spread of America’s western cities, with Los Angeles leading the trend.

Did I also mention that the Iffley Road neighborhood kind of developed around the newly built Orange Line?  Boston in 1900 already had an extensive streetcar network, originally pulled by horses, back when the occupation of city shit-shoveler was an honorable line of work and much of the city was faintly redolent of a barnyard.  But the shiny modern Orange Line was “heavy rail” and electric and faster, and didn’t smell at all, just one part of the story of how America’s old eastern cities were growing out with what were called streetcar suburbs.  The local story goes that three-deckers were perfect housing for the workers in the breweries down the hill, which were a dominant industry in this part of JP.  The Franklin Brewery building still sits at the base of the street, a huge brick monument to another time (it has been a storage facility for decades).  Most of those workers were immigrants, German and Irish and Italian, many of whom had big families and for whom a private automobile was never to be, but hey that’s what streetcars were for, and now there was also this great Orange Line that would get you downtown in a hurry. 

From the current look of things, it is likely that all those pretty new three-deckers back there around 1915 had no driveways whatsoever running between them, with land on all four sides that could be landscaped with flowers or a garden, or could be a place for family events or a hammock or venues for children’s play.  When we bought our house in 1984, there was a laundry basket with no bottom nailed to one of the maples out back and the entire yard had been pounded into dust by the five boys living on the first floor and who knows who else?  Maybe they had a league.  

There’s no way to know where the first driveway appeared on Iffley Road, or when, or how quickly open space for people became occupied by a parked car or cars.  What is obvious is that the process got started at some point and has never stopped, with new driveways getting permitted and constructed to this day (right now #23 down the hill just applied to get a curb cut, even though the “parking space” in their front yard has been there for a long time).  With a curb cut nobody can legally cut your access off anymore and that is crucial, as you might imagine.  Nonetheless it is not rare to see cars parked in front of driveways around here, as parking is at a wicked premium, as one might describe it in the local vernacular.  

On Iffley Road topography is a major factor in this game.  On the downhill northern side of the street, with mostly flat and rather small front yards, almost every house has space for at least one car squeezed in there somewhere, if not pavement far more substantial than that.  The southern side, on which we sit, runs uphill to a greater or lesser degree, where you climb many steps to get to the first floor  –  from our second floor front porch we look directly across to our counterpart’s third floor right across the street.  This means a driveway requires removal of a great deal of earth and constructing some retaining walls, or going the cheaper route with a steep incline like our neighbors next door at #41, or in many cases honoring tradition and the glories of nature with no driveway at all. Such is the case at our house, where there is green space all around, all of it fervently landscaped.  There’s an obvious price one pays for all that beauty, which will be acknowledged shortly.

But to finish up with the driveway part:  one problem with paving over a narrow space between two buildings to meet the needs of occupants in three apartments means one has a row of vehicles whose owners are unrelated, requiring some kind of system as to who blocks in whom when and how that all gets resolved as people need to use their cars.  I cannot imagine the details of this but obviously it happens here and there on Iffley Road.  One solution is to run the driveway all the way to a paved-over backyard (i.e. parking lot) which I consider to be one of the more hideous and unfortunate symptoms of a culture too nuts about car ownership (what else is new?) but it happens everywhere in this city not just on Iffley Road and who cares what I think?  Of course all the newer construction on Iffley Road follows this model or something like it because it isn’t 1915 anymore.  The most extreme form of this is at the base of the hill, 3200 Washington Street with its 76 units and many new car owners and basement garage with 41 parking spaces.  Doing the math should tell you that many of those car owners will be filling up street space on Iffley Road.  Being driveway-free, we originally feared some kind of parking apocalypse but cheer up! thus far things have merely gotten worse and not terrible.  Not yet.

If you find it curious (or maybe thought it was illegal) that 3200 only offers parking to half (or fewer) of its inhabitants, then welcome to the world of Transit Oriented Development, or TOD (which means “death” in German).  This is where a forward-thinking under-housed and very expensive city like Boston decides to stimulate multiple-unit construction along a “transit corridor”, the much-mentioned Orange Line in this case, by assuming that many might be tempted to forego car ownership and get an apartment at a “cheaper” price in a TOD building, as providing parking to everybody when constructing housing raises costs and resulting rents or condo prices.  Many many multiple-unit buildings have arisen along Washington Street as a result.  What the parking is like around those other places I for one do not wish to know.  If I must venture to some designation down Washington Street I will ride my bike (which is another topic for another time or many times, though clearly related to the larger discussion, here) and it should be mentioned that a flawed but very popular bike/pedestrian path now runs along the entire length of the Orange Line from Forest Hills in the south all the way north almost to downtown Boston.   This is another aspect of TOD if that reference generally means “carfree-oriented” development, as some seem to think it does.  TOD buildings tend to make much of their bicycle parking, and with the coming of electric bikes, which are very heavy and literally a heavy lift if one lives upstairs, this could gain in importance as the years go by.  Or not;  it is way too soon to tell with such things.  

So to get to the irony part:  one of the consequences of 100 years of fanatical devotion to motordom in American culture and politics has always been somewhat anemic interest in urban mass transit, which has never been a thing in American cities outside of Boston or Chicago or NYC or Philly or DC and in recent decades SF.  The huge and useful transit systems in those cities have served their populations in miraculous fashion for a century, in most cases.  The problem is that this has been the same century wherein private automobile use has grown in ways Americans are all too well aware, with a concomitant decline in interest in mass transit, even in those places mentioned where it has been very successful.  The result has been poor political support and underfunding and some growth but much neglected maintenance for very aging systems.  Boston’s MBTA system has seen steady decay for the 40 years we have lived here, with much lamenting and little action and a dose of corruption, to the point where very recently decline has led to something that looks like near-collapse.  They are about to shut down the entire Orange Line rail system for at least a MONTH to try and address problems that have led to shutdowns and train delays, and this is only following a string of well-publicized accidents over the past year, to the point of embarrassment and shame of all responsible for making the MBTA function.  Essential workers and an awful lot of Boston’s student population count on this system to live their lives, and now they’re all left to scramble with a cobbled-together shuttle bus system for God knows how long.  And what about those folks who’ve moved into TOD apartments in our neighborhood, figuring they’d use the Orange Line to meet their transportation needs?  Maybe they never existed except in the real estate brochures.  And from things I’ve read, Boston is merely the poster child for all the major transit systems in those cities mentioned above.  In America the Car remains King, and there are consequences.

Did I mention that of those six “transit-oriented” cities, all of them are in the  top 10 of “most congested” urban areas in terms of “hours lost to congestion” (in 2018) which I assume means motor traffic?  

SO to get back to Nancy’s question (hey Nancy, are you still reading this?) We don’t have a driveway and the space around our house is quite lovely, indeed, way more beautiful than asphalt designed to sit under a car, but the downside is that we rarely get to park our car near our house and this problem is only getting worse, if you’ve been paying attention. Of course parking and driving a car in Boston is an unpleasant proposition to begin with and one best resolved by not using a car at all or using it as sparingly as possible, which we’ve more or less managed to do our many years here.  Nonetheless we’ve got this car and love it for those things it does best (gets us out of town, is a Godsend on certain days in winter and at night or when the grocery load is formidable) and we’ll deal with the hassles regardless, as do all car-owners here in beantown.  The worst part, and something like adding insult to injury, are the eight months from April to November when we must pay attention so as to not get towed on Monday afternoon, when they sweep one half of Iffley Road or the other.  You either keep track and park on the correct side for that week or don’t park on Iffley Road at all on Mondays.  If you drive to a 9-to-5 job every day, you’ve got if made.  

But Nancy, did I also mention that with a few exceptions neither of us has ever driven our car to work?  I didn’t think you’d believe that one, either, and of course we have a driveway, at least in our dreams.  We all have dreams, Nancy.  I’m sure you have yours, and one can only hope that they’re about something grander than a driveway.

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