There must be a way to survive in this world of suburbia without a car. I'm inspired by my friend Mike who managed to live this way for a number of years. Living without reliance upon a car remains one of my loftiest dreams. I hope to fulfill this dream some day.
To do this I need to address all of our family's concerns. In this blog posting, I will list all the concerns in their respective categories and address them each. I hope to receive feedback so I can refine my solutions to ensure I fulfill my goal and hopefully at the same time inspire my readers as well.
First of all, we need to consider economics. I did not have a slightly yellow lawn this summer because I was trying to conserve water and save electricity the utility used to get me the water. I was not trying to save the world. I was simply trying to save money. We need this attitude in order to maintain the windfall benefit that river runners used to get.
The table below shows how much money I spend annually on my car.
Let's walk through this:
1. Work
wardrobe at work, jog to bus stop 1 mile each way. wash face at work stop sweating by the time I get there. Use rental car when need to visit clients or use bus. This one is not that hard. Problem is laptop: can't really jog with that.
2. Kids to School
This is difficult. How do I convince my wife that she can get kids to school in bad weather when she has to tote the little ones along? How about this little movie below:
Something like this could do the trick! It needs more cover for bad weather though. This could cost some money... I will have to add this to the table above.
3. Groceries
probably the hardest one of all. We could try the local store's truck delivery service. I will have to add this as a cost the table above. I plan on renting a car once per month. We could do really big shopping with this rental car. About rental cars, does anyone know of a company that rents crappy cars that are cheaper? No need to rent a car with <10,000 miles on it, right?
4. Other goods
We could order things off the internet more than we do now.
5. Visiting family and friends
hmmm. let me think about this one for a while...
6. Doctor, Dentist, etc.
see 5 above
7. Recreation (skiiing, sledding, camping, etc)
now i'm starting to wonder if this is even a good idea... but there is a park near our house. That takes care of some of the problem.
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2 comments:
Just discovered your amazing blog via your newly-reactivated Facebook.
Going car-free has been a dream of my wife and I for the last ten years, we still are a ways from it, but ever-striving. We actually did it for 5 months in college (before kids) and tried it again in Fresno but only lasted 2 weeks.
Here's some things we're doing now that get us partially there:
1. Get out of the suburbs. Where we live used to be a new 1950's suburb, but only a 3 mile drive from downtown is definitely city-living by today's standards.
2. Until you go car-free, have a family vehicle. We had a brief foray of leasing a leather-seated luxurios car after graduating college, but we came back to our senses and now own a 1992 Chevy Astro- Van, all paid-off (of course). We keep it well-maintained with new tires, and nice and polished; only 120K miles on it. We basically only use it when we've really, really got to use it (the economics of 19 MPG hwy and $132 to fill the huge tank ensure that).
3. Ride the bus, walk, ride a bike as much as practical. All made more feasible thanks to #1 above, and kept motivated by not having to use the van (#2, above).
--Kelton Baker (posting using my son, Ethan's account)
LegoBoyEthan:
This is great news! I'm glad to read about your (via son's) success getting away from the car!
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