Footloose and Car-Free

I went to college in Southern California, where we all know the car is king.  My grandmother gave me her old car, a 1995 VW Golf, as a gift for my high school graduation. I remember crying with joy when I saw the keys.  I told her that she was giving me more than just a car, she was giving me independence.

I named the car Betty Jean Golf, and loved Betty Jean like a child. We had so many good times together, from late night runs to Del Taco, to road trips with my best friends to Utah or Baja, Mexico.  But after four years of studying sustainability and bemoaning the impacts of individual actions on the environment, I was over it. The insurance payments, fluctuating gas prices, and constant maintenance needs of a ten-year-old car may have helped to push me over the edge, but the long and short of it is that I wanted out.

When it came time to decide where to move after college, being able to get by without a car was one of my top priorities. In our classically nerdy fashion, Mike and I made a spreadsheet to compare all the different cities we were considering by all the different criteria that mattered most to us. Public transportation and walkability were at the top of my list.

Washington, D.C. won the spreadsheet contest, and shortly after moving there I donated my car to a charity. In the almost five years that we lived in DC, I loved not having a car. The Metro and bus systems in DC and surrounding suburbs are frequent, convenient, and fairly affordable. I also got a membership with ZipCar shortly after moving to DC, which came in handy for moving, the occasional IKEA shopping spree, impromptu camping trips, or visits to the vet.  All told, we really only ever used ZipCar a couple times a year, at most.

So DC gave us options outside of car ownership, which was wonderful. Not having a car saved us money and allowed us to live in (subjectively) better neighborhoods, where owning a car would have been such a pain. Thank you, smart growth.

Well, this past fall we relocated from DC to a tiny city (“micro-urban” is the term they use here) in the Midwest. Champaign-Urbana is actually two cities, with a humungous university spread across the two of them. Within the first two months of moving here, I had already found myself wanting a car more times than I did in 5 years in DC.  C-U has a great bus system considering the size of the city, and it’s relatively compact and walkable within the central area. I'm also riding my bike almost every day when the weather permits, something I was too terrified to do in DC.

But overall, it’s harder to get around than it was in DC.  The waiting time for busses is longer. The bus schedule is largely based on the University’s academic calendar, so weekend service is scaled back, as is service during school breaks. Thankfully, they have ZipCar here too, and we’ve already used it a few times, but even that proves less convenient here than it did in DC.

We decided when we moved here that not owning a car would be a social experiment, to see how long we could last here without one. The experiment continues, but I've already found myself checking out used cars on Craigslist, and I even emailed one of them this morning. (It's a hybrid, for what it's worth.)

It seems I have a lot of pros-and-cons lists to make, to decide if I'm really going to give up my foot loose and car-free lifestyle that I've been so proud of for almost six years, or if I'm going back to my west coast roots where a car isn't just a car, it's independence.

Utility Stats: Knowledge is (saving) Power

Last month I went to a presentation by an energy utility consultant, of sorts, and they were describing a very basic, free service they offer to help corporate and governmental clients track their utility usage.  They take copies of the client’s utility bills from the last 12 months and then plot the usage data on a single graph. They said that, often, this simple task can help highlight major inefficiencies and sources of waste that the client might not be aware of.

Sometimes it’s as basic as expecting certain utilities to go up in the summer and down in the winter, and looking for exceptions to these common trends. Other times, it’s just a matter of looking for big unexpected spikes that aren’t linked to changes in productivity, etc. Listening to the presentation, I realized that I could do the same thing for my own utilities at home.

So, I started a spreadsheet to track our utilities. Every month when I get a new bill, I enter that month’s data into the spreadsheet before I pay the bill. I’ve always assumed that I would notice a huge change in monthly usage just by paying the bill each month, but to be honest, my memory isn’t that good, and even the more subtle changes can offer insight.

Here are my graphs for water, electricity and gas, from the three months that we’ve lived in Urbana so far:

It’s a little early to draw any conclusions, but I’m excited to keep track and see if any surprises pop up. I’ll keep you all posted of future developments. 

It’s worth noting that I couldn’t have done this before we moved to Urbana, because we’ve lived in apartment buildings where the utility bills were divided equally between everyone in the building, instead of being linked to our individual usage. But for anyone who does get stats on their individual usage, this simple step doesn’t take more than a minute each month and can be helpful to make sure your usage is what you think it is.

Two-Year Recap

As mentioned in my previous post, it's been two years since I last blogged here. I thought it might be nice to just give a quick recap of what has changed in my life during that time:

1.  I finished a master's degree in Environmental Sciences & Policy.  So you know--I'm, like, an expert now.
2.  I left my job at a big environmental nonprofit, where I worked for four-and-a-half years (including part-time while I earned the master's degree).
3.  I moved half-way across the country, from DC to central Illinois.
4.  I got engaged to the previously-mentioned crafty boyfriend.
5.  I started a new job at a big state university, where my title is Sustainability Specialist. (What did I tell you? Expert.)

Those are the big things. And interestingly enough, they all happened within the last 6 months.  Before that, I was just busy working and going to school, hence no time for blogging. But now that I'm settling into a new job, home, city, relationship status, etc., I've realized that graduate school provided me with an outlet that I originally wanted from this blog, and which I have found myself wanting again, now that I'm out of school. So here we are, starting back up.

The life changes listed above will definitely lend themselves to some blog topics, from the differences in my car-free lifestyle in moving from the nation's capital to a small city in the midwest, to trying to plan an environmentally-benign wedding with 300 guests. So, you can look forward to those. And I'll look forward to having an outlet for all my sustainability-related ponderings.

Hi, it's me again

My last post was October 18, 2009- a little over two years ago. I thought about deleting this blog countless times over the past two years, but a tiny voice inside told me to keep it, and I was never sure why. I'm glad I did, though, because two years, a master's degree, and 705 miles later, I have now found myself wanting to blog again. Go figure.

So, I won't beat myself up for taking a two-year hiatus, I'll just slip back into it like nothing happened. I hope you don't mind.

Amelia-as-blogger: take-two.