a new lifestyle

My wife and I are ditching our car.

My wife, Elinor, and I live with our baby daughter, Beatrix, in a mid-size college town in the Midwest. We’ve been a one-car family for a few years now. Last week, the electrical system in our old VW station wagon shorted out (i.e., melted and began smoking). Ironically, this happened on the very same day that I bought a new bike to replace my ancient and recently ruined mountain bike. We looked at the cost of fixing the car, the expected upcoming maintenance work, and the last tank of gas we bought ($53), and decided it wasn’t worth fixing. Then Elinor asked, “Do we really need to replace it?”

I’ll admit: I reacted instinctively and said Of course we do. I grew up here, and I’ve been driving since the state let me at the age of 14. We live in a town with very limited mass transit (a small bus system) in an area of the country that’s extremely car-centric. Though we live in an older part of town that’s more compact, all around us the town is typical of new development: sprawling neighborhoods and commercial districts designed for car travel and little else. We have a 9-month-old daughter who must be carted around. The automobile justifications stacked up in my head.

I slept on it. I thought more about it over the next few days. I started to like the idea. We’d save ourselves a car loan payment and an insurance payment, not to mention (frequent) repairs and gas money, so the cost benefits would be significant. Moreover, with the right equipment and a lifestyle adjustment we could get by. And more than get by – we like riding our bikes together. For emergencies and the rare out-of-town trip we could borrow a car. Those times would be even more rare with planning, home delivery of internet purchases, and some re-prioritization on our part. How badly do we really want to go out to the other side of town? Is there something closer that would do just as well? One obstacle remains in my mind: winter. But we have plenty of time to worry about that. In the meantime, it’s summer, we’re perfectly capable of getting around under our own power, so we’re ditching our car.

And we’re not getting a new one.