One year car-free – how are we getting on?
So, this week marks a full year since I took the plunge and sold our family car. As much as anything this was a fully immersive experiment as to whether a family of five living in a city could manage, perhaps thrive, without the dominant transport mode of the last 80 years. The other factor was I had already reduced my mileage so low that the fixed expense of keeping the thing on the road was getting silly – and we had constant battery problems as it wasn’t getting recharged frequently enough.
So how do I manage? I have three main alternatives to the journeys I would have taken by car (I walk anything under 2 miles unloaded by choice anyway). The obvious one is public transport, but to be honest this is the one I use the least as it is rarely the answer to what I need.
My workhorse is my Tern GSD (getting stuff done) e-cargo bike. This is as close as it gets to a sustainable urban transport silver bullet, costing virtually nothing to run (£10 per year on electricity according to some estimations) and requiring the fraction of the battery power of an EV car so it is a much more efficient use of resources. It will take me and one child anywhere in our conurbation with relative ease, run an errand or manage a medium-sized shop – that covers the vast bulk of our previous car use. It’s also a load of fun and we can often skip around traffic – I love it.
When I do need a car, I use the Co-wheels car club. This means I can book the car (or van) I need on an app and I only pay for what I use plus a small £5/10 monthly fee. Given the average car sits doing nothing for 96% of the time, I’ve never really had a problem getting hold of one – even on Mothers’ Day yesterday I was able to book one less than 24 hours in advance. The main drawback is that we live equidistant between three club cars and it is about 8 minutes walk to any of them, adding 15 minutes to the overall journey time, which is significant if you just want to collect a distant teenager at night. If we had a club car in our street it would be amazing.
So have we been successful? Overall, yes, I have never found myself cursing the day I sold the car and we are probably saving money overall – I haven’t attempted to measure the carbon benefits but they will be substantial, not least that we share the embodied energy of the club car with about 18 other households.
The one caveat is that we had already arranged our lifestyles around our preference to avoid the need to drive – I work from home, the Prof takes the train or works from home, the kids go to local schools on foot or by bike, and we chose to live within 20 minutes’ walk of the city centre.
If you have already arranged your life around car ownership – living in an amenity-free suburb, working in a distant business park, kids going to school in another part of town etc, then the switch would be far more difficult. This is why there is resistance to the 15 minute neighbourhood/urban village concept (the real one, not the daft dystopian conspiracy theory), many people have literally bought into a car-centric lifestyle and it would cost them to disrupt their lives and buy into this kind of low carbon living.
But we have shown that not only that car-free can be done, but that it’s a lot of fun too. Hopefully over time, it will become much more normal.
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