Tell me about going carless

In My Humble Opinion
21

Walrus,
Currently, I’m carless, too. As far as auto insurance goes, you’ll want to get a non-owner’s policy. Basically, it’s liability only plus bodily injuries. I think. I have this coverage now and have had it a few other times in my life, too. It’s way cheaper than paying the rental agency for the same coverage if you’re going to be renting more than a few days a year. I have a fairly high limits yet the policy is pretty affordable. I’d guess that whoever covers your bike may offer this coverage, too.

Oh, yeah, and before I forget, I gotta warn you: you may have to ask different agents about the non-owner’s coverage. Last time I signed up for it, I used the same company I’d had it with for numerous years in the past. No one in the local offices knew about it and were adamant that their company absolutely does not have that coverage. Dadgummit, that’s who the national call center kept patching me through to. Finally, I got a supervisor who knew what it was and signed me up quickly and efficiently.

22

That is correct. A car costs about $60 a day by my dads place in the suburbs where everyone has a car.

Another problem, at least where I live, is that the rental places aren’t open on many long weekends, forcing you to keep the car (and pay) for like three or four days.

23

I’ve heard second hand that in NYC, cars would be all rented out on peak weekends. In theory, not a problem if you reserve in advance.

One trick my friend and I did to avoid pricey NYC rentals was to take the commuter train to the suburbs and pick the car up there, it was always cheaper. Don’t know how that would apply to your area but thought I’d mention it. Some downsides of renting - Waiting in line can get tiresome, and note that a lot of the city-center places close on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, days that you might want to go pick the car up. There’s always the airport, though.

Anyhow, I was carless on and off while I lived in NYC (I lived in Queens so I actually did use the car when I had it). My only advice would be to just come to peace with those $40 cab rides. I mentally allocated an “I don’t have a car” fund, and just took the money out of that. But if you have a bike, and you don’t have a penchant for buying crap on craigslist like I do, then I’m sure you’ll do fine.

ETA: mssmith beat me to it!

24

You said you own a motorbike. How about buying some form of cart (or luggagerack) that can be attached to it?

If you go places by public transport, be prepared taht you’ll need some form of transportation to get from the station to where you need to be. Like others said, that may require a considerable amount of planning, and some creativity if you arrive at Lone Station X in the middle of nowhere and have to catch the last bus to Somewhere Else, a bus that left two hours ago. But that is not a bad thing; like taking hitchhikers, it brings a little adventure in your life. Even the bad episodes, provided they don’t end fatally, :slight_smile: at least make a good story afterwards.

You also need to be prepared to do some extra things that show appreciation to the people that help you out occasionally in the cases you DO need car transport. help them out, the occasional babysitting, bottle of wine/bubch of flowers, , religious returning the car with a full gas tank, etcetera. But that really isn’t a bad thing; such give and take might well be the base for, or strengthen, a friendship.

Another possibility is sharing your car with someone in your neighborhood, ouside of a car-sharing organization. That is doable, although things can get ugly fast if both parties don’t share responsibility equally and accidents happen. I believe there are example contracts available on-line for such car-sharing. (At least there are in the Netherlands).

25

Pfeh! Amateur! :wink:

I ride my bicycle in everything! You just have to be sure you have the right gear. Granted that can be expensive. My girlfriend’s panier cost over $150 but has the volume of 10.5 gallons to carry lots and lots of stuff and is as waterproof as the dry-bags you use for kayaking. You can get splash pants and even little booties that cover your shoes to keep 'em dry.

You’ll look like an idiot (think Big Bird), but you’ll be able to ride in almost anything.

ETA: You have got to see my girlfriend in her winter riding gear. She looks like a puffy ninja! :smiley:

26

I can think of one thing that you may or may not have thought of. While the bike is good, you might find it a bit of a pain to go just a couple of miles. You know the trips that are 3-4 miles. You might find yourself not wanting to gear up properly, maybe skip the gloves or something like that. That’s the last thing you want to do is skip gear, especially for short trips where you think nothing will happen. I can see that being a problem, and have heard people who only have bikes say is a problem.

I think that if the weather permitted it around the DC area I would have at one point gone without a car. I think that’s why I drove a ten year old car, I just never used it. Until it snowed that is.

27

Ortlieb Backroller panniers, right? I have a pair, probably the best investment I ever made in bicycle accessories. Mine are about 6 years now and they’re just as waterproof as the day I bought them.

My daily commute is about 3.5 miles each way, and this isn’t a big problem. I wear “street clothes” (same clothes I’d wear even if I were driving to work). I do put on a helmet, leg straps (for keeping the pant legs away from chain), and sunscreen. That’s about it. I do skip the gloves, but gloves won’t save me from life-threatening injuries anyway.

28

I think Edward was referring to the motorcycle when he said “bike”. On a motorcycle, gloves’ll save you from not having any skin left on your hands.

The only gear I wear on my bicycle is a helmet.

So far, I’ve been very conscientious about wearing my gear for motorcycle trips. Most of my trips are only a few miles around town, so I’m not too worried.

I do have a set of saddle bags for my motorcycle that are sufficient for a trip of a few days, or a decent amount of groceries. I’ll have to see about getting some for my bike.

29

Probably the weirdest thing about ditching my car was that because I listened to the radio in the and only in the car, I stopped hearing new music.

So watch out for that.

30

Where in SB do you live? We lived in Goleta and still got by pretty ok-- we had a car I don’t have a driver’s license, personally, and seldom used the car. Town is easy on bicycle, the express bus to UCSB is a fast way to get out there and the other busses aren’t bad, and the Amtrak run to Burbank is pretty fast if your schedule is malleable. There is the LAX shuttle bus as well which works fine-- not a lot slower than driving because the bus guys take super secret strange routes through Malibu and the coast rather than 101.
Not being a driver, I tend to get just a couple of day’s-worth of groceries at a time, with mind towards what we plan to be eating, instead of huge epic biweekly trips; I walk or bike, limiting myself to a large messenger-bag’s worth of stuff. If you tend to buy 5+ big bags of groceries you might think about a BOB trailer for your bike.

31

I already don’t even listen to the radio in the car, so I stopped hearing new music a while ago.

I live on the east side, near Alice Keck Park.

32

I had an Olds Cutlass Supreme that had so many problems (fuel injectors went out at $1K a piece, oil leakage, computer failure) and by the time that the head gasket blew, I did too. The garage called me up and asked if I wanted to fix it, I told them to have the car towed away. I was so upset that I didn’t clean out my belongings and said goodbye to my rollerblades, some CDs, and a bit of my freedom.

At the time, I lived and worked downtown St Paul. A mere 8 minute walk back and forth with an organic co-op in the middle. I saved money, lots of money really. More than just the standard car operating expenses, but also I would be homebound more. I didn’t go out shopping or hurried out to see a movie as often. Groceries would be bought in a “how much can I carry home” manner.

The negatives were that I tended to rely a bit too much on my friends to chauffeur me around for the day-to-day hanging out. The hassle of renting a car to go on a last minute camping trip or funeral. And just a bit of general escapism that a car can provide.

I did that for about 8 years before buying a car… well, first my parents were moving away and didn’t want to take one of their old cars. They asked if I wanted it and I said sure. I had that for a couple months and then decided that I loved the mobility that the car gave and bought my own. (The '86 Camaro and Minnesota winters were not a good match so I bought something more apropos and handed the car down to my niece).

33

Yup. She’s got red ones. What Ilike most about them is their hardware is the best I’ve ever seen. Plus, if you don’t roll the tops closed you can just stuff more and more into them. It’s like having Mary Poppins’s carpet bag on your bike.

34

Oh, get the pant leg straps if you work in an office. I kept getting chain grease on my dress pants. It was annoying.

I also got a bad snag once because my chain took a good chomp out of my pant cuff.

(Got my shoelace caught in my chain once. Fall down. Go boom.)

I also wear cycling glasses because there’s too much road grit around here (particularly in the spring when there’s all the left over sand from winter salt trucks). They look exactly like sunglasses, but the lenses can be changed, so I wear the black ones during the day and clear ones at night.

35

You will get my car when you can pry it from my cold dead fingers!!! :smiley:

36

I was talking about motorcycles. Didn’t even think about a bicycle at the time. While not wearing gloves on a bicycle is ok, I wouldn’t think of doing it on a motorcycle. I’ve had accidents on both and it’s not really the same.

37

Ha! I noticed the new music thing too. My music supply has almost completely stagnated.

Personally, I hate not having a car. You should definitely try it out, and if you like it, go you! If you hate it, you’ll have extra appreciation for going back to a car lifestyle when you get another. I know that whenever I’m in a car these days (rare, but it happens), I feel so special and privileged…like someone who’s been on a desert island for a year, getting to spend a night at the Hilton and eat a steak dinner. But I digress. :slight_smile:

My reasons for being a hater:

–I have to go shopping ALL the TIME. I can only carry so much stuff home with me, and poor husband is clueless. (I have to spell it all out, otherwise he’ll come home from the grocery with either a single loaf of bread or a bunch of random stuff that doesn’t equal a meal.) Or have everything delivered. Having everything delivered is either expensive or unreliable, as I’m never home during the day and we have no doorman.

–No quick trips. My dad once called me and told me to send a birthday card to may aunt. I had to make a 50-minute trip, walking several blocks down the street and back, just to find a place that would sell me a card. And I don’t have the space to stockpile cards in my apartment. And public trans, even though fairly reliable, means putting my destiny in someone else’s control. Train stuck ahead of me? Hope I’ve got a good book, it’s going to be a long afternoon in this tunnel.

–Speaking of public trans, I’ve had it up to here. Maybe I’m really prissy or something, but I can only take so many smelly people rubbing themselves up against me while I fight for hand space on a disgusting, sweaty metal pole in this life. Someday, I’m going to start screaming and crumple into the fetal position until the guys in uniforms come for me.

–Family far away. I can rent a car or fly to see them, but I feel so dependent. They have to shuttle me back and forth to the airport or car rental place (usually the airport anyway) and it’s expensive either way. And I can’t take a trip on a whim.

All things to think about. But you really should try out going carless for a while. You can always go back. And I have tons of friends who love it and think 'm crazy. :stuck_out_tongue: Fortunately, I’m leaving NYC in a couple of months. And getting a car!

38

I have been carless for about a year. I ride the bus most of the time, the rest of the time I bring home the company truck (if I have to get equipment close to my house for work or to have maintenance work done on it, that sort of thing).

Our bus system is not the greatest, but there are some good things about using public transit (and some crappy things too).

The pros are:

You get to read on the way to work
You never have to get into a freezing car (that only barely starts to warm up as you get within a block of work). Or conversely have to run your car for 20 minutes so as not to freeze all of the way to work
No cost (well for me it’s “free” I’m an adjunct faculty at a local college and all staff, faculty and students ride for free using their school IDs).
Cons:

If you have to do more than one thing (for instance a series of errands) it can take all day since the buses only run once an hour (some routes run every half an hour during peak periods)
Nasty smelly drunks
Welfare parents (with 19 screaming kids) who talk loudly on their cellphones about their most recent court date and their bail etc.
A very very cold wait in the snow at the bus stop
Rude bus drivers

39

Of course the ease/difficulty of car-free life depends entirely on where you live and work. Where I live (small city in Alabama) I’ve given up on being completely car-free because businesses and services are scattered around so widely (nearest decent bike shop is 10 miles away, my vet is 15 miles away, etc), and because it’s not very expensive to own a car (I can’t remember the last time I had to pay for parking). But I usually get by on my bike on weekdays, when I just need to go to work, shop for groceries, etc. To address a few possible concerns:

I have a utility trailer for my bicycle, and it can carry quite a lot of stuff. It can hold as much groceries as I ever buy on a single trip. A baby trailer should work fine too, and easier to find.

In most cities I’ve lived, traffic jams due to car accidents are far more common.

40

We got a baby trailer designed for twins off Craig’s List at a great price (we got it for my girlfriend’s big-ass dog, we’re installing a “porthole” in the top so he can sit with his head sticking out and ears blowing in the wind.) I used it once to cart a mountain of laundry (including two sleeping bags) from my girlfriends when she had to unhook her washer and dryer for a day.

Needing a car for groceries doesn’t cut it with me. The volume of my girlfriend’s two paniers combined is 21 gallons and she isn’t using the top of her rack yet or a basket on the front. There was an extremely good deal on soy milk and she came back with no less than a dozen one-litre tetra packs, plus a weeks worth of groceries for two people. If I filled both her paniers with groceries, it would exceed what we could reasonably consume in a week or two.

My mom walks to the grocery store. She doesn’t worry about the limits of what she can carry either. She uses one of those “granny-carts”, which holds more groceries than she can go through in a couple weeks.

How is that different than being in a car? If there is a fender bender or construction that brings a streetcar or bus to a halt, you’ll probably still be stuck in gridlock and not moving too. You’ll be in control of your own destiny, but only as far as traffic will allow.

Great thing about bicycles, you can get off the bike, and off the road, an walk them past the accident/construction/whatever that keeps car traffic snarled for hours.

For the most part, if I’m biking without exerting myself, I can usually beat most streetcars across town, particuarly if there’s a bike lane.