Can we survive in a suburb without a car?

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.