An entry in my new 21st Century Crisis series and crossposted at Blue House Diaries
Back in October, I gave up my car. For the last six months I have been living in Seattle without an automobile of my own. At first it was a hard adjustment to make, but now I wonder why I ever wasted money on gas, car repairs, insurance, registration, etc. Living without a car has been a revelation. And since it's something we're all going to have to do eventually, I figured that it would be a good way to kick off Earth Week by telling my story.
This diary is going to examine why it is I can do this - as well as why it is difficult for many other Americans to do the same. Before you jump to the comments to say "but it's easy for you - I can't give up my car!" read the entire diary. I address those points directly.
My Experience
I love to drive. Love it. I couldn't wait to turn 16 and get my license and my own car. It was my dad's hand-me-down and I was happy to have it. As soon as I got my license, in August 1995, I immediately began driving all over Southern California. 12 years later my love of driving is as strong as ever. There's nothing like getting behind the wheel, easing the car out onto an open freeway, turning up Tom Petty really loud, and flooring it.
So it was with some trepidation that I gave my 1986 Honda Accord to my fiance last October for her to use in commuting to her new job in Monterey, CA. I plan to follow her down there in June, but school obligations keep me in Seattle until then. When I flew back to Seattle after moving her down, I suddenly realized I was carless. I felt unmoored, at sea. Movement, which was heretofore easy, now looked to be incredibly difficult. How was I to survive without a car?
Because she moved to CA, I had to get a new apartment. I looked around town for a neighborhood that was close to campus, near shops and urban amenities, and would allow me to walk or bus to where I needed to go. I settled on Greenlake, a 30 minute walk and a 15 minute bus ride from campus, and moved here in late October.
Immediately I began to worry again. The supermarket in our neighborhood closed in 2005 and the nearest ones were about a half mile away, on the other side of Interstate 5. It seemed too far for me. I seriously looked into getting online delivery from Safeway. I reserved a Flexcar anytime I had to go outside my neighborhood. The carless experiment wasn't starting off well.
But within 2 weeks I found my attitude had totally and completely shifted. I found that the supermarkets were only a 10 minute walk away, which was very easily doable. The bus service was fantastic, and thanks to a subsidized bus pass, it was an extremely cheap and effective form of mobility. I fell back on the Flexcar less and less often, and eventually stopped using it altogether.
The key was simple: practice. As I walked or bused to where I needed to go, my perceptions of travel time, of speed and immediacy, began to change. A 20 minute busride no longer seemed like an interminably slow journey, instead it was a leisurely trip through my city. The walk back from the supermarket wasn't an onerous hike, instead it was an opportunity to look at houses, watch the gray clouds roll in over the Olympics.
I felt more connected to my neighborhood, to my surroundings. The city feels more open, more alive. I notice things more. I am more aware. Maybe there really is something to the idea that cars dissociate us from our environments. In this 21st Century Crisis, reconnecting to and relearning those environments and ecologies is crucial to our survival.
Friends have told me it'd be even easier if I owned a bike. And I do (it's down in Monterey), but I'm a wimp when it comes to biking up hills. Still, many in Seattle use a bike to get around, and it works fairly well (though the availability of bike lanes and driver awareness could both be improved).
My trips in cars have been extremely rare since November. I've had some friends give me a ride to the airport, but I've also used public transit to get there, and that will become easier for Seattleites once the light rail line from downtown to the airport opens in 2009. A friend and I reserved a Flexcar to make a Costco run a few months back. mcjoan gave me a ride home from a meetup one night. Aside from that it's been the bus or my two feet.
Peak Oil, Climate Change, and Your Car
My life without a car is preparation for our future, when we will simply not be able to drive as much as we do now - if at all. You need to come to grips with the fact that America's reliance on automobile transportation is not infinite - it has a beginning, a middle, and we are nearing its end.
Many of you are familiar with the concept of peak oil - that right around now, oil production has peaked and from here on out, oil production will steadily decline as oil becomes more difficult to extract. You're also likely familiar with the connection between auto emissions and global climate change - as we put more carbon into the atmosphere, the Earth warms and causes all sorts of chaotic effects.
I imagine that many of you, though, assume there will be some new technology that can continue what James Howard Kunstler calls our "happy motoring utopia" indefinitely. Alternative fuels or fuel cell technology will simply solve the problem for us and we can continue on as before.
As Kunstler so throughly documents in his 2005 book The Long Emergency this is simply wrong. Alternative fuels are easily dismissed. Biofuels are a ridiculous answer. To grow those fuels requires massive inputs of oil and gas. So we're going to save oil by...using it to make fuel?! Further compounding this foolishness is the fact that we'd be using our food supply to power our cars. Unsurprisingly this has already caused problems - as bonddad noted over the weekend, biodiesel and ethanol are the culprits behind soaring food prices here in the US. And of course, the energy yields from those fuels is still less than from oil.
The panacea of better living through technology is equally flawed. Most technological development still requires significant inputs of oil and gas, and nobody has yet discovered a way to power cars on a mass scale using renewable methods. Hydrogen fuel cells are currently generated primarily through natural gas - itself a peaking source of energy - and so it will likely never satisfy the present demand. Better technology will not allow us each to drive our cars as often as we do now. We are going to have to make do with MUCH less driving.
And of course, driving less is a concrete way to actually cut your "carbon footprint," not some gimmicky "carbon offset" that makes you feel good but doesn't actually do anything to address the global warming crisis. To address that, our lifestyles must change. We must begin to live differently.
Other Experiences
By now I'm sure there are a lot of you saying "OK eugene, it's easy for you: you're a young graduate student without a family who lives only 2 miles from his workplace in a city with great public transit. But for this or that reason, I just can't do it."
I think there are many structural reasons why it is hard for people to give up their cars. Before I get into those, however, I want to point out that it may not be as impossible as you think, by showing you examples of other Americans who have given up their cars.
Alan Durning, the director of the truly excellent Sightline Institute here in Seattle, a sustainability think tank, gave up his car last year. Unlike me, he is married with two kids. Giving up his was much more challenging for he and his family than it was for me. And yet they did it, as he reports on the one-year anniversary of his going carless. He reports that his family drove 90% less than the average US family, relying only on Flexcars or borrowed cars on some occasions. They cut their gasoline consumption by 80% and saved anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000 (depending on the measurement).
Like my experience on the other side of Phinney Ridge, Durning has found that the key is a good "walkshed" - a compact neighborhood, nearby shops and services, reliable and frequent bus service, and walk- and bike-friendly urban design. Ballard, where Durning lives, is like Greenlake a neighborhood largely laid out at the turn of the last century, and still maintains those mixed use principles that were common before World War II.
Still, Durning acknowledges that it is not easy. At the end of his year-long experiment his family decided to keep going, but take it month-by-month. One major problem they've faced is logistics in a Cascadian winter - how do you get the kids to soccer practice, their play rehearsal, and buy the groceries, in the middle of a wintry downpour? They managed to do it, but at times it became difficult.
To those who argue Americans will never give up their cars even in the face of high prices and stressed supply, I point you to California, where residents are buying less gas for the first time in over a decade, and March saw the highest ridership ever on CA's regional passenger trains.
Rose Hartridge is an example of someone I would have thought would have a very hard time giving up her car. She lives in Rancho Cucamonga, in SoCal's "Inland Empire" and commutes to work in Orange County. But she has begun the process by reducing the use of her car for a commute:
For Rose Hartridge of Rancho Cucamonga, the turning point came recently when she took a job at Allied Business Schools in Laguna Hills and was faced with a grueling commute. Hartridge, who was at the Tustin Metrolink station Wednesday, said she drives to Corona, carpools to work with a colleague and then takes the train back.
"This is the first time I've really used the Metrolink, and it's pretty nice," Hartridge said. Her new routine "beats the wear and tear on my car, and it's cheaper." From the LA Times
Now she is still dependent on a car for at least part of that trip. But it shows that with a bit of infrastructure planning, as well as communal cooperation, people CAN reduce their reliance on their cars. With an express bus line down I-15 from Cucamonga to Corona Metrolink and more frequent trains, she might not need a car at all for her commute.
Why It's Difficult For You: Urban Development and Public Transportation
I strenuously reject the idea that major social, political, or lifestyle changes are the sole responsibility of individuals. Each of us needs help to change. In going carless in Seattle, I've had a great deal of it. Below are some of the reasons why I've been able to do this in Seattle - and why it may be difficult for you to do it. I offer this to suggest bigger changes that we need to make, not to let us off the hook for the need to change.
Walkability. My neighborhood, Greenlake, was developed between 1890 and 1920. The urban design principles that predominated during that time favored mixed use (i.e. buildings that combined retail and residence) and nearby worksites. You can tell which neighborhoods were built during this era - they have homes on smaller lots, or more often 5-6 story apartment buildings, on somewhat narrow streets. There's a lot of commercial activity around; you never have to walk more than a half-mile to find a market or cafe.
My neighborhood, Greenlake, has an excellent walkshed - a neighborhood with most needs in a walkable distance from my home. Without this I would be screwed.
My good friend, who posts here as Linnaeus, lives about a mile and a half north of me. But in that 1.5 miles lies nearly 60 years of difference. His neighborhood was laid out in the 1950s, organized around the car. Unlike Greenlake, his locale has virtually no retail or groceries within reasonable walking distance. Bus service is spotty and routes are further away from his home. He too is carless, but has found he needs to rely more on car borrowing to attend to his needs than I have. That segues into...
Land use. Around the 1920s America made a deliberate decision to abandon mixed use, walkable development and instead emphasizing automobile-based development. Southern California, my home sweet home, pioneered this, and though the Depression and the war put a brake on it, after 1945 this process resumed on a nationwide scale. Sprawling suburbs were built, with huge residential zones that were often several miles from shopping - and many more miles from the workplace. In the 1950s Americans came to believe cheap oil was a birthright and assumed this method of development was infinitely sustainable.
Although we tell ourselves we as a nation freely chose this, there was no such free choice at all. Governments used zoning power and tax breaks to encourage sprawl. In the 1960s and 1970s many urban areas responded to strains there by strictly limiting density. This, combined with the suburbs' class and race-based hostility to medium- and high-density housing, fueled sprawl even further. Although many people wished to live closer to their jobs, affordable houses were often 30, 40, 50 miles away. Today many Californians commute absurdly long distances, from Modesto to San Francisco or from Victorville to Los Angeles, because that's what they must do for affordable housing.
As I suggest above, this was delusional folly. Films like The End of Suburbia and the work of James Howard Kunstler show us that suburbia is unsustainable in the face of peak oil. Because of the land design, it's very difficult to get around without a car. I think back to my childhood in an Orange County suburb. We lived 2 miles from the nearest supermarket and my parents both had commutes of over 10 miles. Worse is that in SoCal, there are few concentrated locations of work - instead worksites are scattered across the landscape. Every morning and every evening millions of Southern Californians are in motion in every direction, moving all across the giant web of roads and freeways. This situation makes it extremely difficult to provide a few public transit corridors, because work is so decentralized.
Without a car it is quite hard to navigate this network. And that suggests that urban design is a major key. We need to return to 1890s and 1900s urban design principles. Sprawl must be outlawed and government should instead favor urban density. Bring people back into city centers.
Public transportation. Seattle's bus system is imperfect, but it gets the job done...so long as you live near the city center. Carla Saulter, who is the Bus Chick blogger for the Seattle P-I, has been able to survive in Seattle without a car for several years, relying on the bus, but as her blog explains, even our system could use some help. Erica C. Barnett, a journalist for the Stranger, has also given up her car for the bus and the bike, and finds it works well enough but could be improved.
Seattle has nevertheless a better bus system than many other cities its size. And it has consistently proved willing to support and improve this system. Ron Sims, the King County Executive, pushed successfully for the passage of Transit Now!, a sales tax increase that is designed to expand Metro bus service up to 20% over the next decade. We are also, finally, getting around to building a light rail system.
Unfortunately, many cities and suburbs lack even the basic system and services Seattle enjoys. Monterey is a perfect example. Monterey-Salinas Transit does not provide the kind of regular, frequent, or comprehensive service that my fiance and I would need to junk our car entirely. The buses don't run to her workplace. Happily, we live around the corner from 3 supermarkets and a drugstore, which means we can significantly reduce the amount of driving we do, but we cannot eliminate it entirely without a much stronger public transit system on the Monterey Peninsula.
The key to effective public transportation is to anticipate, not chase, demand. Public transportation has to be subsidized and built so that it's available before people decide, or are forced, to drive less. Examples of pent-up transit demand abound; the San Fernando Valley's Orange Line bus service has reached within 2 years the ridership it wasn't projected to reach until 2020. If people are to give up their cars, they're going to need to have an alternative available. We need to aggressively expand public transit options, even if they won't pay for themselves, even if they don't immediately produce results.
Conclusion: What Better Time Than Now?!
Alan Durning, he who gave up his family's cars for at least a year, argues that we must not seek individual solutions to this issue. Instead what we need is a collective commitment to alternative transportation:
The more car-less and low-car families emerge, the easier it’ll be to live well as one, because most of the problems we’re experiencing are classic challenges that face early adopters. As more people shed one (or more) vehicles, transit and taxi service will improve. Traffic will diminish, improving life for those of who live with "no box." Walkshed maps, complete with loo coverage, will become readily available. Car-sharing, car-hopping, and high-tech hitch-hiking will catch on and spread—thinning the ranks of parked vehicles and filling the seats of moving ones. Transportation will become something we buy by the trip, rather than by the vehicle—with the result that we will end most "default driving." Above all, the political demand for complete, compact communities—the kinds of places where cars are accessories to life and not its organizing principle—will become irresistible. It’s a vision of the future that keeps us inspired. We’re just impatient to get there soon.
And I fully agree with him. I have been able to live without a car these last six months only because Seattle has made early and halting steps toward providing a more walkable, bikeable, and alternative-based transportation system.
One of the things we absolutely must recognize, as we face this 21st Century Crisis, is that there really aren't any individual solutions. Just as nobody succeeds strictly on their own, so too will we rely on social networks and collective action to survive this coming crisis.
We must also change our attitudes. Most of us grew up in an America that told us we could drive on that road forever. Most Americans believe cheap oil and unclogged freeways are a birthright. They cling to their cars even more strongly than they cling to their guns. To suggest we'll ever have to abandon them is the most profane heresy. (And I'm sure several of you will tell me this in the comments.)
Changing our attitudes is the most difficult part; changing our behavior is much easier once we convince ourselves we can and should do it. And that's precisely what I found about going carless in Seattle: the fear of it was much more difficult than the reality, which for me has luckily been a pretty damn easy reality. I hope we can get together and use the political system to produce land use patterns, public transportation alternatives, and other forms of support to make it easy for you to do the same, before you are forced to by inflation and peak oil.