Why I'm Going Car-free for One Year

Until a month ago, my main mode of transportation was a 1999 beige Oldsmobile, which I affectionately called the Oldfolksmobile. It had lived the first part of its life in in my grandmother's Indiana garage, where it was only brought out for trips to the local Jewell-Osco to stock up on cigarettes, Wonder bread, Velveeta and vodka. (My grandmother was and forever will be my #oldladygoals.)

The last part of its life wasn't nearly so cushy.

A little over five years ago I packed my belongings into the Oldsmobile's roomy, beige interior and drove from my hometown in Buffalo, NY to my new home in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I've spent the last five years driving that car through snowbanks I'm too lazy to shovel and backwoods dirt roads in  Northern Michigan that I can't find on my GPS. The Oldsmobile sat outside in the snow during more than its fair share of polar vortexes because apartments with garages are not a thing that exist for us mere mortals in Michigan. It was witness to the slowest fender bender in history because I not only drive old-lady cars, but I also drive old-lady slow. And it acted as my bed on more than one occasion while I was camping. Not that it was particularly comfortable to sleep in (nylon sleeping bag + Naugahyde seats = slipping off the damn seat all night long), but it did seem a bit more bear-proof than my tent.

And then a little over a month ago, I was driving to work when the brake alarm went off. Lights were flashing, stuff was beeping. I don't know a whole lot about cars, but this seemed like a really bad sign.

I pulled into a plaza, parked my car, and opened up the glove compartment to fish out the twenty-year-old car manual. When I found the page explaining what to do when the brake alarm goes off, it simply read,"Stop driving immediately. See section on Towing." This, also, seemed like a really bad sign. 

Luckily, my car was considerate enough to break down directly in front of a mechanic. I explained the problem to the mechanic, dropped off my keys, and took an Uber into work. A couple hours later, he called and told me that all of the brakes needed to be replaced. And blah-blah-something-something about valves. And blahedy-blah-something-something about some other car part I didn't know was actually part of a car.

In total, it was going to cost me much more to repair my car than it was worth. You know it's bad when you ask the mechanic if you should give him tons of money, and he's like "you probably shouldn't bother."

So I didn't.

Instead, I went to Guatemala. And by the next evening, I was in Antigua, drinking margaritas, eating tacos, and watching tuk-tuks drive by, and not caring a bit about my now non-functioning car.

Car? What car? 

I should have probably prefaced that by saying that I was already planning to go to Guatemala for a week-long vacation before my car broke down.

It was just a happy accident that my car happened to break down the day before I was flying out. 

I mean, if your car is going to break down, I strongly recommend that it break down immediately before you fly to a sunny, warm country where tequila-laced beverages and tacos are readily available. It's impossible to worry about silly things like how you're going to get to work and what you're going to do with the two hundred pounds worth of snow tires in your basement while you're drinking spicy margaritas and being serenaded by some guy on a guitar.

A week and a few more margaritas later, I returned to Michigan with a plan: I was going to go car-free for one year and see how I liked it.

And unlike other hare-brained schemes I've hatched while soused on vacation, this is something I might actually stick to.

Why I'm Going Car-free for One Year

1. Saving all the money

As you may know, cars cost money, and, well, I don't really have tons of that at the moment. 

You see, I have a tendency to start my life over every couple years --  and not just a "new hairdo, who dis?" kind of thing. But like, a whole new job and a whole new apartment in a whole new city. Sometimes, just for fun, I change the entire country I'm living in. I didn't do anything quite so drastic this last time, but last year I did ditch my low-paying university teaching job for an even lower-paying university office job. And I moved from Kalamazoo, where my rent was ridiculously low, to the Ann Arbor area, where my rent is ridiculously high and basically amounts to half of my paycheck.  

Over the past year, I've had to really cut back on my spending. I used to regularly go to the theater and take spontaneous weekend trips, now, my weekend entertainment consists of making soup and sorting my Tupperware containers. 

What better way to cut even further back on my spending than to just not have a car? 

Not only will this allow me to save all the money I'd usually spend on gas, insurance and repairs, but also I am no longer able to go on one-stop-shopping sprees at the grocery store where I buy everything from decorative cat art to twenty bottles of conditioner to twenty pounds of cheese because DON'T I DESERVE ALL THE THINGS? Now I have to lug everything I want to buy in my bike basket or in my new old lady grocery cart. 

Introducing Rosie, my new old lady shopping cart! And, yes, she has a name.

Which means my cat's going to have to learn how to use the toilet because do you know how heavy a container of kitty litter can be? Plus, one of those containers is basically the same size as my old lady grocery cart, which means I won't have any room for cheese. And, you guys, I need cheese.

2. Getting in shape without having to join the gym (or, more accurately, without having to go to the gym that I already joined last year but never actually go to).

Another reason I wanted to try out going car-free was so that I could get into better shape without doing anything I will live to regret like giving up carbs or joining one of those fitness classes where the trainer just yells at you the entire time. 

Since giving up my car a month ago, I've walked, on average, six miles a day. Sometimes, when I do fun stuff like get on the wrong bus and have to walk a mile to improv class, I end up racking up even more miles. 

Just a typical Monday for me now... if that Monday includes getting on the wrong bus.

Plus, there's all the lugging of kitty litter and cheese down the street which I'm sure will have me sporting visible arm muscles in no time!  

3.  Getting to feel super self righteous all the time

I wouldn't say that I'm someone who particularly enjoys hardship. Unless that hardship will make me feel like I'm a better human than approximately 90 percent of the world's population -- in that case, SIGN ME UP!

Before I got rid of my car, I felt like an environmental hero every time I marched out of the grocery store with my reusable shopping bags while everyone else had plastic bags. But I could only get that feeling the few times a month that I went grocery shopping.

Now, I get to feel like I'm saving the world every single damn day. 

Just don't ask me to give up cheese. 

4. I don't actually like driving. 

I can barely operate a toaster without setting my kitchen cabinets on fire, so it never seemed like a particularly good idea for me to be behind the wheel of three-thousand-pound vehicle, hurtling its way down the highway at sixty-five miles per hour. 

Plus, the whole responsibility of owning a car seems too much, you know? It's kind of like being a parent, but your child is a really large piece of metal that might explode at any moment. 

For most of my adult life, I was able to avoid owning or driving a car by living overseas or in large American cities where there were a lot of public transportation options. 

But when I returned to the States from China about six years ago, I needed to get to work and buses were not exactly a thing where I lived at the time, so I returned to driving.

Since moving to Michigan, I had toyed with the idea of not having a car -- especially since moving to Ann Arbor where there are tons of buses and bike paths and ridesharing apps and carsharing options. And then the next thing I knew my car broke down, and I was like, okay, let's do this thing.

Goodbye, Oldfolksmobile. 

4. I'll do anything for a year. (Okay, not exactly anything, but, let's just say, I've done some things). 

If there's something I love, it's a year-long project. I love all the books that are like "I lived on raw beans and sewer water for a year" or "I talked in nothing but fake Buddha quotes for a year." 

After reading Eat, Pray, Love, I quit my job and spent a year volunteering my way across Southeast Asia, weeding rice paddies in Malaysia and cat-sitting in Northern Thailand. Admittedly, there was very little praying or loving going on during that year -- mostly just eating. And nobody made a movie about my experience starring Julia Roberts. But, still, it gave me something fun to write about on my blog at the time.  

Going without a car for a year sounded mildly less life-threatening than wading into snake-infested rice paddies. Plus, it sounded like a project I could write about -- something I haven't done much of since folding up shop on my blog over a year ago. 

So here we are. 

New project, new blog. Who dis?