Seventh Carfree Anniversary!

It’s our seven year carfree anniversary. Seven years ago, a waitress from the Blue Corn Café drove off in our 98 Saab. We haven’t owned a car since.

The most remarkable thing about the past seven years is how unremarkable it has been. The difficulties we face and struggle with are the same run of the mill problems most people face and have nothing to do with choosing not to own a car. There are certainly days that are cold and windy, and I just don’t want to go out there in the cold and wind to buy groceries. As far as I know, however, I would feel the same way about going out in a car in that kind of weather. I’m no big fan of winter.

There are times when it feels like we are rowing against the stream. Bicycling, for me, is at least partly about building more livable communities. It seems, however, that as the years go by, we see fewer people socially. I don’t think that’s directly related to our not owning a car, but it can be very disconcerting. Weekends roll around, and we’re not heading over to friends’ houses for barbecues or meeting other families at the park. Granted, partly we just don't make the effort. It's easy to cocoon in the house on the weekend. However, being an at-home-parent can be isolating, and it seems, as the kids grow up and make friends who aren’t the children of our own friends, it becomes more so. Friendship, community, and socializing are all essential to me. To fill in some of the gaps left by the children getting older, I’m trying to become active in the bicycling community again, volunteering on the citizen advisory group working on the Bicycling Master Plan for the Santa Fe County MPO. Tim Rogers, who is doing the actual drafting of the plan, is doing an awesome job.

I’ve started to read The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg. It’s about the “third places” that really hold communities together — the cafés, bars, general stores, and so on. The idea is that they are places people gather to talk with one another. The English pub is a classic example. A culture that is less dominated by the automobile is more conducive to third places. Part of the fantasy end of our being carfree is that we’ll have a hand in enlivening these third places. In reality, however, the third places I do visit are not the convivial places of conversation Oldenburg describes. In the coffee shops people sit, their faces buried in their laptops. We rarely run into our friends. There’s also the issue of expense. Even dropping in somewhere for a cup of coffee can get expensive if you do it often enough to become the type of regular Oldenburg discusses in his book. I like the idea of a rich and well populated casual social network, but I can’t afford to sit around sipping lattés and writing my blog entries in the Aztec Café. So I think our challenge, for the next seven years, is how to create a much richer social culture in our life. I think that’s a national issue that isn’t really tied in to transportation, except that the automobile tends to isolate people even more than they already are. Most of the conversations I fall into usually revolve around bicycling and involve meeting other people who bicycle. It is just this kind of casual social interaction that third places are supposed to encourage.

We’ve also, here at the seventh year, reached a point of owning too many bikes. If we were forced by circumstances to get rid of every bike but one per household member, we would hang on to the Xtracycles. So my advice to those who wish to be carfree is to buy an Xtracycle. Unfortunately, we ride all of our bikes, so I’m still just mentally dealing with the clutter they create. The Bike Fridays are great for bike camping with the children, though we don’t do that very often. The children ride their own bikes more frequently, but everything is close enough to us that they don’t ride very far or very often on their own. I don’t think they’re ready to head out on a tour on their own individual bikes. The tandems sit around waiting for camping trips or those times on the weekends when we want to ride with the kids but don’t want to haul them on the Xtracycles. The other bikes? Well, I’m not going to go into that here. Let’s just say that I have trouble letting go of the bikes that we now have.

I’m sure that we’re all in much better physical shape than we would be if we owned a car, though as I get older, my weight seems to be inching up regardless of my biking for transportation. As a parent, I’m curious if my children will grow up to be healthier having never relied for an extended period on being driven around. I also hope that they are at home at the street level and can find their way around on their own. I would like to think that they are more in tune with the natural world, since they are out there in the wind, sun, rain and snow. My son’s kindergarten teacher, a few years back, remarked that Zeb noticed things and appreciated the beauty in the world more than many children. He would pick up leaves to show her and point out flowers. That’s partly just his personality I’m sure, but I hope that it’s also a result of our not going from television to the car to the mall and back. (Not that everyone who owns a car lives like that. Too many do though).

I apologize for the subdued tone of this post. It’s a celebratory day, but maybe we’re in some sort of carfree midlife, though I wouldn’t call it a crisis. (I’m also about to turn 45 on May 21st, so I’m probably personally somewhere about the middle of my own life.)

Being carfree has become simply a normal state of life. The excitement of learning how to get around without a car has subsided somewhat. We now have to tackle other issues of creating a livable, vibrant community for ourselves.

Personally, I would say I need to focus on the following things in the coming years:

1. Writing for publication.
2. Building a vibrant social life.
3. Cutting down on our possessions.
4. Getting down to a reasonable number of pets through attrition.
5. Building a six month emergency fund.
6. Paying a little more attention to my health.

After seven years, we have the carfree part of life down.