CAR-FREE BUT NOT CAREFREE
The notion of living without a car seemed simple enough for one family. They would walk, ride the bus and save some money. But when the rubber hit the road (as it were), there were a few surprises.
The notion of living without a car seemed simple enough for one family. They would walk, ride the bus and save some money. But when the rubber hit the road (as it were), there were a few surprises.
The children’s sobs, when they came, were deep and long. Our trusty Honda Civic had just died. Died— that’s a good word to describe the moment when a car goes kaput. Yes, it’s a machine, but it’s more than that. After 200,000 kilometres, you get emotionally attached. Our car didn’t just break down when the timing belt went. It died, and death calls for ritual. I’d had mine: going to the mechanic’s lot to retrieve a few last things—licence plate, first-aid kit, a few CDs in the door. But I was doing more than just gathering our stuff. My wife Colleen and I were saying goodbye to vehicle ownership altogether, at least for a time. We would try living car-free for three months, then re-evaluate.
It seemed as good a time as any. Between new bike lanes and the success of Car2Go, Calgary was moremulti-modal than ever. No, we’re not Vancouver or New York City, but it’s slowly getting easier here to get places without a car. Our family was already “car-lite,” keeping our car parked most of the week. As the at-home parent, I walked the kids to school. Colleen walked or biked to work downtown. We found that the less we drove, the happier we were. So why not ditch the car altogether?
After clearing out the Civic at the mechanic’s, I stood back for a moment of silence, remembering happy moments. Summer road trips to Nebraska. Driving the kids home as newborns. Baseball on the radio.
I walked away and didn’t look back. But goodbyes are never that
simple. That night, the kids wailed in grief.
“I miss our car!” cried our four-year-old, Sam. “We never got to say goodbye!” wailed his six-year-old sister, Laila. Our parental efforts at consolation only amped up the volume. I looked at the clock: 9:12 p.m, more than two hours after bedtime. These kids needed closure. “Let’s go,” I said.
We all piled into the car of my in-laws, who were visiting at the time, and headed for the mechanic’s, in a light industrial area off Edmonton Trail. The streets were dark and quiet. Feeling a little conspicuous, we made our way to the back corner of the lot.
“Here it is,” said Colleen, laying a hand on the deceased. The kids hugged the car, or tried to. They flopped down on the hood, arms outstretched, in an awkward display of affection.
There. We’d all said goodbye. We’d joined the hardy seven per cent of Calgary households that don’t own a car.
Ayear before the car died, I’d floated the idea of going car-free on Facebook. I was surprised by the strong, even emotional, responses people had. It can strain your relationships if you’re always expecting friends and family to come to you, one friend warned. Be careful. Others were enthusiastic, connecting us with carless families in other cities. I corresponded with a car-free mother who biked year-round with her husband and children in Saskatoon. “Choose programs for your kids that are close to where you live,” she wrote. “Your world will get much smaller, but it also becomes much simpler.”
This appealed to the idealist in me. “Live simply”—that had been part of our wedding vows. My sister-in-law once asked me what it meant exactly, and the question stuck with me because I didn’t have a good answer. What does it mean to live simply? Not sure, but I knew from experience that living without a car can slowyou down in a good way. As a college student in Calgary, I had no car and lived 15 kilometres from school. I enjoyed the challenge of getting there.
When you don’t have a car, you allow more time for being in transit. You’re also more open to the surrounding world when you’re not closed off by steel and glass. You recognize people on your route. You have unexpected conversations. The experience is less impersonal and more human.
Now, almost a decade into life with a car, I missed that. Surely it beat the arms race for ever larger, “safer” family vehicles. Better to figure out how to navigate creatively and actively, teaching the kids to do the same. We’re at point A, and need to get to point B. Which tools should we use? What route can we take?
Approached this way, trips become adventures. That’s the word Natalie Sit uses to describe outings with her infant daughter on the CTrain during her recent maternity leave. Her family of three doesn’t own a vehicle. “Not having a car, going to Chinook is fun, in a way,” says Sit, a technical writer who takes the train to work. “It’s a little trip. We get to see something new. She gets to go to the mall. It’s not drudgery for us.” When the family rents a car, it’s a novelty. “A car is a treat for us,” she says. Instead of planning to buy a car, they’re considering a cargo bike.
In the early weeks of our experiment, I felt no hint of drudgery. I pulled the bike trailer to Co-op and cheerily loaded it with groceries. It was satisfying to lug it all home using only one’s strength. We took the bus to the doctor’s office five kilometres away—kind of inconvenient, but doable. On weekends, we often rented a car. Once, for $10 a day, we got a pristine 2015 Dodge Charger, a “muscle car” we could never dream of buying. Unlike our Civic, which had all sorts of electrical problems, the Charger functioned properly. Sam was jazzed. In our old car, the window by his seat was stuck shut, the switch broken. Now he opened and closed the window at will, smiling contentedly.
People often say Calgary is a “car city,” and with good reason. Even with average household size shrinking, car ownership rates per household have grown as the city has sprawled. In 1971, Calgary households had, on average, 1.19 cars per household. A decade later, in 1981, that had increased to 1.5. By 2011, we were closing in on
two cars per household (1.85). Households of four have 2.44 cars on average. “As a whole, Calgary is car-centric,” says Peter Tombrowski, a video producer and filmmaker. “It is designed around the car.”
He knows this firsthand. Like Sit, Tombrowski’s family doesn’t own a car. Pulling that off as a single person living downtown is relatively easy. If you have kids to haul around, it’s tougher—doubly so if you live outside the core.
Yet some do it, and seem better for it. Peter and his wife, Andrea, are in their 18th year of being car-free in Calgary. They’ve raised kids without a car while living by Heritage Drive and Macleod Trail. “It gave us a more pleasant, focused, laid-back perspective,” says Tombrowski, who has made two films about being carless in Calgary.
On Twitter, meanwhile, I watched as Brett Bergie, a resident of Coach Hill, 10 kilometres west of downtown, regularly cycled to the East Village with her six-year-old son on weekends. Her family of three has been car-free for more than a decade.
Following Bergie’s urban adventures on social media was a window into pleasure not hardship. Biking along the river to her job at Bow Valley College, Bergie says, is uplifting. (When’s the last time you heard a driver describe a commute as uplifting?) Even family walks to the grocery store—no short jaunt, at a half hour each way—are better. “When we’re in transit, the journey is actually rich,” Bergie says. “We have better conversations than if we are driving. I find there’s more depth, more patience to listen to each other.”
Interviewed separately, Bergie, Sit and Tombrowski all use similar language to describe what they’ve gained by being car-free. They all speak of having greater awareness of the city, and better time spent with their families. By forgoing Calgary’s default mode of transportation connection, they feel more connected.
With our car gone, I became more aware of this sense of connectedness. When we walk to school, we say hi to people we pass along the way. When we had a car, in the rare instances when I drove to pick up Laila, I’d leave the house in a hurry and speed past whoever was walking. Then, if I arrived a bit early, I’d sit in the car and stare at my phone until the bell rang. One mode opened me up to my neighbourhood, while the other closed me off.
But living without a car isn’t all sunshine and roses. It all depends on where you live, and what mix of transportation choices are available. Despite Calgary’s recent progress toward multi-modality, entire swaths of the city are cut off from the tools that make not owning a car doable and enjoyable. Everything east of Deerfoot Trail is excluded from Car2Go. Many neighbourhoods, especially on the outskirts, have lousy transit service. In many parts of the city, a car is pretty much necessary— and not having one can be more miserable than rewarding, creating a sense of disconnection. “It can be tiring,” says Tombrowski. “There is a wearing down, especially in an environment that is predominantly car-centric.” For all the benefits of life without a car, there are costs, too.
It didn’t take long for us to discover them. Even though we lived close to the core, just a half-hour walk from downtown, we found it tough to move the whole family to destinations elsewhere in the city— especially on weekends when buses are infrequent. The LRT was a little too far away to be convenient.
And just as the physical design of the city is engineered for the car, so are other systems, such as the insurance industry.
The problem there was rentals. Our credit card provides limited coverage on rental vehicles. As well, Alberta rental companies are legally required to provide $200,000 of third-party liability coverage. But this is low; most auto policies are $1 million or more. We wanted robust coverage, the same level you get on your own car. Surely one could buy that, right?
I e-mailed our insurance broker to ask. His reply came quickly, and was unambiguous: “I can’t do insurance for that.”
We shopped around at other insurance companies. Same response. You don’t own a car? Error. Does not compute. We can’t help you. Buy a car, then come talk to us.
I spent many frustrating hours researching, phoning, e-mailing, searching in vain for a solution. Renting got complicated, too. I’d pick up the rental car Friday morning while Colleen was at work, but depending on the company, she’d need to sign a form at the rental office if we wanted to share the driving.
Then, a breakthrough: a friend of ours, local historian David Finch, suggested that we use one of his cars for a while. He proposed a per-kilometre rate, a far better deal than using Car2Go, which charges 41 cents a
minute plus $1 per trip. We live in the same neighbourhood, and he suggested keeping the car parked at our place. We weren’t going to say no.
So there we were, allegedly car-free, with a new-to-us compact hatchback in our parking spot. It felt a little like cheating, like compromising the purity of the car-free experiment. We were supposed to be muscling through the cold like dogsledders, not enjoying unrestricted access to a car that was better than our old one. I took a little ribbing from friends who noted the apparent contradiction.
When I shared this with Finch, he rebuked the critics. “What is purity?” he asked. “Are you not allowed to ride the bus, either?” In his book Pumped: Everyone’s Guide to the Oil Patch, Finch encourages readers to consider their transportation options. “Don’t feel bad about your habits, just choose better ones and look for ways to be more responsible,” he writes, adding that if you’re going to drive, consider putting just $20 of gas in the tank so that it is always nearly empty—“a motivation to walk or use the vehicle carefully.” I can’t say we did that with his car, but borrowing it did change our approach. Being responsible for someone else’s car made us think twice before using it. We didn’t want to needlessly rack up kilometres. Our apprehension was a useful check. Do we need to go for ice cream right now, or can it wait? Can we combine multiple errands into one weekly trip, hitting up the grocery store, the liquor store and the mall in one shot?
There’s a degree of liberation in such restraint. “We’ve found that saying no is a good skill,” says Tombrowski. “Not just no to the outside pressures, whether it be people or events, but even to ourselves.” Not being able to just up and go somewhere on a whim can be a drag, but there’s something to be said for putting off instant gratification. “It’s more rewarding,” says Tombrowski. “I’m more aware when there are boundaries.”
This is not something the Tombrowskis foresaw. They weren’t on the hunt for spiritual enlightenment. They weren’t even trying to minimize their carbon footprint, though they’re glad they have. No, they had debts to pay, and sold their vehicle to accomplish that. “We had one vision in our minds when we began, and then it showed itself to be something else,” he says.
The problems caused by cars in cities are legion: they congest our streets, they pollute, they stress us out. They are bad for our health, both for sedentary drivers stuck in long commutes, and pedestrians who are struck with alarming regularity—more than once a day, on average, in Calgary.
Cars are also expensive. Annual operating costs for a compact car in Alberta are almost $9,000, according to the Canadian Automobile Association. A SUV eats up more than $12,500. Jennifer Keesmaat, Toronto’s chief planner, recently pointed out on her podcast, Invisible City, that the average car sits unused for an estimated 23 hours a day. “This is an intolerable level of inefficiency in any system, particularly in a household budget,” Keesmaat said.
In that light, maybe borrowing a friend’s car wasn’t cheating, but a small correction in a severely imbalanced system.
Still, our vision was flagging. Laila wanted to join Girl Guides, but there wasn’t a branch within walking distance or conveniently accessible by transit. We were reluctant to sign up without knowing, with certainty, that we’d have a car available for the foreseeable future. We couldn’t borrow a car forever, and we weren’t keen on relying entirely on other parents to drive her.
Looking ahead, there were more obstacles. What about Little League in the spring for Sam? And baseball games in Okotoks? What about driving to Vancouver to visit family in summertime, when renting a car is significantly more expensive?
I saw a darkening future, and started sifting through used-car listings.
We bought a car a little shy of three months in. It’s like our old car, only newer. And it’s a manual. The masochist in me found this to be a satisfying penalty for not making it a full three months. I’d never learned to drive standard, and now, in my 30s, I was grinding the gears and stalling in intersections, all sweat and nerves. Penance.
But there I go with the puritanism again, and that’s missing the point. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other, owning a car versus not owning a car,” Andrea Tombrowski told me. “There’s lots of space in between.” After all, even those who don’t own cars are not truly carless. They rent and get rides from others. “We might be considered ‘ultra-lite,’ but we still use cars,” says Peter.
In the end, our family was back where we started. The car is parked for most of the week. We mostly bike and walk. But we’ve circled back to car ownership with a greater appreciation for all modes. “Car-lite is moving oneself in various ways,” says Peter. “It’s discovering other modes of transportation, and then committing to them and making them work. It’s a restored balance.”
Already the car-related bills are piling up: $700 for winter tires, $490 for all-seasons, $220 for a trailer hitch so we can put on a bike rack. The numbers make me cringe. As the city densifies and becomes more walkable and bike-friendly, such expenses will hopefully become unnecessary, with Calgarians forgoing car ownership in greater numbers. But for us, for now, they’re worth it.