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.

Smart Growth

I have a new environmental interest: Smart Growth. It's partially an academic interest, and partially a personal one. Over the summer I read some things for an environmental policy class about making urban areas walkable and sustainable so that the infrastructure itself is green (LEED certified, and the like) and so that the people who live there are encouraged (or in some cases, forced) to live in more green ways. This really struck a cord with me because, as my earlier post mentions, we recently moved to the 'burbs, and let me tell you-- this area could really use some smart growth concepts implemented. I also just love the idea of encouraging green lifestyle choices by making them easier. In my neighborhood, people wouldn't drive quite so much if there were safer crosswalks and sidewalks for pedestrians, and if there were more little grocery stores or convenience stores interspersed amongst homes. (In smart growth terms, that's called mixed-use development).

This semester I'm taking an entire class about transportation and smart growth, so I get to read a lot more about it, which is great. There is a fair share of support for the concept, but there is also quite a bit of anti-smart growth sentiment out there. Some argue that a more accurate term would be "restricted growth" but from what I've read about and learned in class, I really don't think there's anything limiting about smart growth. The point of smart growth is not to restrict or stop growth, it's to accommodate growth in such a way that takes the long-term sustainability of the community and the environment into account. Still, not everyone sees this or agrees with it. And even those who do agree with it don't all necessarily find it attractive. My class, which is full of environmental science and policy graduate students, has a lot of comments from students saying they understand the benefits of smart growth, but at the end of the day, they want their single-family home, their backyard, their car, and their parking spot more than they want to live in a smart growth community. I know they're not alone, and that this is how most Americans think, but it's especially discouraging to hear it from a group of people who are clearly concerned about the environment. The idea that living in a smart growth community is a sacrifice is a huge hurdle that the smart growth movement must overcome. I don't have the answers for this (yet) but as with all things in life, the first step to overcoming the problem is to acknowledge it.