I'm a rarity in modern society: I’ve never owned a car.
I grew up in New Jersey, but we didn’t get our drivers licenses until age 17, at which point I was done with my junior year of high school. I knew I wanted to go to college in New York City, so owning a car for fifteen months seemed moot. After college I moved to Chicago and then back to New York, never needing a car. Now, I’m even surviving here in Austin without a car. True, I do a good degree of carpooling and my fair share of swearing at the absent public transit. But, I’m living proof that it can be done. It’s just that our society isn’t yet widely set up to accommodate this choice.
Tonight, let’s talk about the choice to go carless, and how it can (or can’t) work for you.
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I chose this topic because it relates to some of our previous discussions here on public transportation; affordable housing, commuting and leisure time; and our general generational concern of being deeply in debt and trying to save money. However, my main reason is because I think for more of us, it’s a choice we can make, if we think hard about how to accomplish it. For the rest of us who can’t feasibly go carless, the problem suggests several significant ways our society needs to change within the timespan of our generation.
The Benefits
First, the benefits of going carless. You all can make most of this list yourself, but here’s a brief run down of some of the many benefits:
- Vastly Decreases Individual Carbon Footprint
- Doesn’t Pollute
- Doesn’t Consume Energy in Manufacture of Car
- No Car Payments
- No Car Insurance Payments
- No Regular Car Maintenance
- No Purchasing Gasoline
- No Road Rage
- The Self-Righteous Feeling of Going Carless
That last one isn’t a joke – I’m glad that I don’t contribute an average pollution output of 2,426 pounds of carbon per year.
Calculate your own carbon footprint at one of these sites – one from TerraPass and another from the EPA. It’s worth thinking about, and then taking action about it.
I know that those of you in Prius and hybrid cars feel that you’re doing your part to reduce the ecological impact of your vehicle, and for those of you that live somewhere that requires a car (hello, Los Angeles!) that’s a great choice. But too many folks can’t afford a new vehicle. And honestly, at the rate we’re polluting our planet, converting everyone to a hybrid isn’t really an option – think of the energy input in creating all of those hybrids! The short- and long-term answer is learning how to live without a car.
The Drawbacks
Sure, there are a few drawbacks to not having a car, and as the temperature has already spiked over 100 down here in Texas I can think of a few right off the bat. Here are the most irritating scenarios about not having a car, and why I don’t think they’re really as big of a deal, given how they play into our wider socio-economic problems:
Grocery Shopping. Big loads of groceries are hard to deal with. But there’s an easy answer – take an empty backpack to the store, and some reusable canvas bags, and just buy as much as you can carry on your person. Ride a bike, and invest in some baskets or saddlebags. (Better on the bike than you!) Besides, if you’re eating enough produce you’ll need to go to the store at least weekly, so why strain under the big load? If there’s reliable public transit you can take the bus home. Bottom line, if there’s a grocery store within a mile, you can easily adapt, and make your shopping more sustainable too.
Big Box Retailers. It tends to be true that big box retailers (Target, Home Depot, Best Buy) tend to be out on highways or in commercial districts not reachable by foot or bicycle. The answer here is surprisingly easy – try not to shop at them. Are there local, smaller businesses? Here in Austin it’s a drag to get to the Target on the bus, and impossible to get to the Home Depot (let alone back with some building materials.) I’d like to note that this is a big contrast from Chicago and New York, both of which feature both retailers in walking-and-subway accessible locations. Instead, here in Austin I go to business I can walk to, like the local family-owned hardware store, or wait and carpool with a friend when I absolutely need to go. Carless in Seattle has a great post on this. Bottom line, the big box retailers take money out of your community and don’t always have the most progressive business practices. Take the money you’re saving from not driving and invest it in shopping local.
Emergencies. This is a valid concern—all sorts of emergencies can be exacerbated by not having a car. Really, the only solutions I can offer are calling cabs, calling friends, or thinking of this as a reason why it’s OK to own a car, and just try to use it as little as possible. Also, running late or missing the bus aren’t emergencies. Emergencies tend to involve the emergency room. So think about whether a little careful planning can negate that "emergency" in the first place. (And honestly, people tend to be pretty sympathetic to the "I don’t have a car" excuse.)
Nightlife. Few cities have public transit that runs late, or to all areas of the city safely and reliably. This can be a pain for going out at night. There’s a solution – take a taxi. The money you’ll save in not paying for all of that car expense is vastly higher than what you might spend on cab fare.
One added benefit in going carless is the drastic reduction in drunk driving, because no one is driving home after a night of debauchery. It’s funny, in college in New York drunk driving just wasn’t an issue, because no one drove. We took public transit or a cab. Even now, the amount I spend on cabs is pretty low. Granted, I carpool a lot (and serve as designated driver a lot of the time) – but after factoring in paying to park and the number of folks who can share a cab, I have a hard time believing that the numbers aren’t on the side of the carless.
It Can Be Done.
There’s plenty of precedent for living the car-free life. In 2006, Seattle-area writer Alan Durning decided to see if his family could survive one year without a car, and blogged about it in The Year of Living Car-lessly. Also, our friend eugene wrote about this here on DailyKos back when he was going Carless in Seattle too. There must be something about Seattle!
In any case, the plan is pretty simple.
1.) Identify all of the businesses within one mile. This is your walking radius. You might be surprised what you can access within just about a twenty-minute walk. Here’s a link to calculate your walk score. Mine’s a 74!
2.) Invest in a bicycle. If you’ve got children, look for some sort of stroller attachment or kid-transporting device. I’ll note that yes, having one child makes this much, much more difficult if they can’t walk to school. More than one? I can’t see how it would work well, outside of a major city. But for those of us who are single... You know the saying – you never forget how to ride a bike!
3.) Investigate Flex-Car and Car-Share options, print public transit schedules, etc. You have plenty of options that don’t involve driving your own car. Need it once a week? Once a month? Look for a car-share that matches your needs.
The one-mile radius is key to determining if carlessness is feasible for you or not. Within that one-mile radius of where I currently live, I can access two major grocery stores, a small grocery co-op, about eight coffee shops (four of them wholly independent), and several restaurants ranging from a diner to vegetarian to high-end fancy food. The three bus routes closest to my apartment take me just about anywhere I’d want to go on a regular basis, and include movie theaters, and the best Indian buffet in town. Yum.
I’m lucky. But it’s no coincedence – when I moved here, I specified that I needed an apartment with great access to public transit and walkable resources. Since I wasn’t paying for a car and its related expenses, I could afford to spend a bit more on rent. Often, that can put you in an area with more access. The further from your city center, the sparser and less frequent the public transit options will be, and usually the less-dense the housing and commercial areas.
The Systemic Problem
Of course, this won’t work for a lot of people, and that’s something worth talking about—and changing. The biggest problem is that our society is not constructed for the carless. If I lived in just about any other city in Texas I’d be desperate without a car, because life is just too far-flung across their urban areas. Austin is still fairly compact, with most of what I’m interested in close together (and close to me).
But I couldn’t live in suburban New Jersey where my parents do without a car – not feasibly. From their house I can walk to basic shopping, a commuter rail station, and stuff like the library, schools, etc. But commercial options are limited in my hometown, and while I know there’s a bus down the main street, I have no idea where it goes, how frequently it runs, or what it costs.
As we get older, we need to think about how we can proactively live car-free. This will become less and less of a choice and more of a necessity due to rising fuel costs, our lagging economy, and the desire to do less harm to our planet. Options like a car-share—where one pays a monthly fee to access a vehicle, then pays to use it on an hourly basis as needed—need to become more prominent, and eventually more available. Public transit also needs to be drastically increased in dense areas, especially to outer-lying suburban areas. The last time I was in Boston, I was tremendously impressed with the connectivity from the suburbs to the city. I certainly can’t say the same for Austin, though the coming commuter rail should help. San Jose’s light-rail system seems like a bit of a mess, because (to my mind) it stops too frequently and costs too much. Newark’s, on the other hand, seems like a big success in linking already-trafficked areas in a quicker manner.
So. How many of us are carless right now? Who has been in the past? What are the pros and cons, to your mind? How can we adapt society to be more conducive to the carless lifestyle?