Carlessness
This week, our paper has a cover story about bicycling in Seattle, and especially about commuting by bike. I mention this because a little over a year ago I decided to go carless and try to do the good prog-liberal thing and see how it worked out.
I didn't turn to bikes. I have many years of bicycling (commuting by bike, even) under my belt and after all those years, plus years of running three miles day (plus years of hockey and weight-lifting), my knees are toast. Nothing will get you off a bike faster that hearing your knees click and pop while you are riding and having them lock up on you from time to time. Besides, bad knees run in my family.
Ditching my car was an easy and difficult decision all at once. It was a 1983 Toyota Celica GTS, a hand-me-down from the family, which was a fabulous car for me for five years. Then, an electrical gremlin took over my car's starter system in December 2004. I spent about $1,500 (on a car that was worth maybe $500, but was in great shape otherwise) and visited three different mechanics trying to get it fixed over the next six months. It didn't work. And so in June 2005 I watched a guy from a wrecking yard haul my car onto a flatbed truck. He told me the state government didn't allow them to part out cars like in the days of yore, but that my beloved GTS was headed straight for the public safety academy. That afternoon, rookie firefighters would chop off its roof in a training exercise. I almost cried.
I've spent most of my life in California, and if you've lived there long, going without a car all of a sudden is like having your balls cut off. I have had a car consistently since I was 17. I love cars and everything about them. In high school, I took auto shop (along with AP classes) so I could learn about and work on engines. I have rebuilt everything from a Mopar Straight-6 (awesome engine) to a Datsun 240Z engine to a TR-6 engine to a big block Ford. I can tune carbs, even the pesky Webers. And there I was standing in the middle of the street, realizing that all of a sudden I would have no relationship with a car. That sucked.
But the economics of my decision made sense: Gasoline was roaring toward $3 a gallon, the useless monorail tax was still in place, and I only drove maybe 150 miles a month. When you factored in insurance (a rip-off even with my clean driving record), gasoline, and such, I was paying almost $1 a mile to have a car that was essentially used to run errands outside the city's main core and to visit friends who lived in Lake City and Bellevue and elsewhere away from my usual Capitol Hill haunts. And if I went out and bought a decent used car, I'd be looking at maybe $100 to $200 a month in car payments.
So I decided to rely on a mix of Metro buses and cabs and walking. I wanted to see how my work and social life would hold up. Besides, the Seattle liberal paradigm is that we should all be like Bus Chick—a really cute former Microsoftie who takes Metro everywhere and saves the Earth and honors the Kyoto Accords and tells President Bush and Chevron to stuff it.
I am here to tell you at the liberal paradigm is, in this respect, an abysmal failure. Or at least it was for me.
My social life went down the tubes. If a friend of mine lived outside of Capitol Hill, downtown, Belltown, the ID, or Pioneer Square, I was screwed. I have a lot of friends who don't live in those places, and suddenly I wasn't being invited to pop over to a friend's house for impromptu barbeques and parties. That sucked. And if I needed to run an errand to, say, Best Buy at Northgate, it would take an hour-plus in each direction to get there—and with Metro's schedules, don't try that in the evening. Besides, you cannot carry more than a couple of shopping bags on Metro.
Not having a car got in the way of work, as well. I am the kind of reporter who prefers to meet people in person, if possible, and I suddenly had to resort to doing a lot of phone interviews unless I did a lot of planning for taking transit—and giving up half an afternoon for a half-hour interview. There were also public meetings I wasn't able to attend, either, all of a sudden—unless they happened to be downtown or somewhere close by.
Cabs weren't much of a solution. Anytime you pop into a cab in this city, it seems to cost about $15 by the time you tip the driver—and that's just around the central core of the city. That didn't make much economic sense.
It's usually at this point when earth-hugging acquaintances perk up and say, "Did you try FlexCar?" They always smile earnestly and the tone in their voice almost suggests that surely that would've been a solution for me. What I tell them is that FlexCar didn't make sense. I'd have to walk a half mile to get to the nearest FlexCar. Then I'd have to pay $9 an hour to drive whatever econobox was available. If you needed to go somewhere for three or four hours, it would almost make more sense to rent a car from Avis for an entire day (something I did a few times).
So, after a year, I declared the experiment a failure and bought an inexpensive car that a friend of a friend needed to get out of their lives. I am back to insurance payments—including a higher-than-usual rate because I didn't have auto insurance for a year and am now somehow "riskier" by the asinine reasoning that our Legislature allows insurance companies to impose upon us. I am attempting to adjust to $3 a gallon gasoline.
After two weeks of being back in the driver's seat, I am happy to report that I am visiting friends I haven't seen in ages, getting shopping done that I'd put off, and popping around the outer reaches of Seattle to do interviews in person. Even better: I can shoot down to White Center and the Rainier Valley to get really good Mexican food anytime the mood strikes. I can swing down to the ID to get great Chinese food without having to make an entire evening out of the trip. My social life is no longer restricted to near-Capitol Hill environs. That's great—and likely also an improvement for Capitol Hill's social whirl as well.
I point all this out because, like it or not, I am tied to cars. The Ron Sims/Greg Nickels/urban planning wonk wet dream of getting Seattleites out of their cars and onto the buses is unworkable, in my opinion. At least in 2006.
I wonder how Bus Chick is holding up.
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