You know him as “alley guy”. I know him as, uh, me.

How do we, a family of two adults and two children, 5 and 7, live without a vehicle in Edmonton, Alberta?

Location

I discussed my family’s choice of neighbourhoods in this post about our house in Mill Creek. It is virtually impossible to live in the new suburbs without a car. The ‘burbs were created with the “certainty” that cheap gasoline would last forever. They were designed around the car, which means that they were explicitly built without humans in mind.

We chose to live somewhere north of 51st Ave., south of roughly 118th Ave., east of 149th Street and west of 60th Street or so. There may some gem of a neighbourhood outside of those boundaries that I don’t know about. Please let me know about this unicorn breeding ground if it exists.

So location is a deal breaker, and of course it’s where the denial kicks in hard. Edmontonians look at the cheap houses in Rutherford Heights and start making their list of reasons to live in empty, soulless neighbourhoods. They choose to ignore the basic reality that oil is finite, and that some day they will be priced out of the drive-everywhere-you-go market.

If you manage to keep a clear head about you, a car-free-possible house/apartment has the following features:

• A bus stop within two blocks that has at least two route numbers on the sign. Our bus stop has seven bus routes. We get annoyed if we wait two minutes for a bus during peak hours.
• A grocery store within a few blocks. We have two small stores within four blocks, and a Save-On foods within eight blocks.
• A farmer’s market within walking distance. Yes, we are modern-day hippies.
• Restaurants, a community garden, a library, medical offices, and a bank, all within walking distance.
• A job or two, that someone in your household works at, within 35 minutes bike ride and 40 minutes on the bus.

Renting

Not owning a car isn’t the same as never driving a car. A half-dozen times a year, we rent a car for one or two weekend days. It’s incredibly cheap to rent cars on the weekend, presumably because the rental companies make most of their money on corporate clients, and therefore have a surplus of cars sitting around on non-business days.

We rent for $10-$30 per day. $10/day gets you 50 km of mileage, $20-$30 is usually unlimited km.  read more... »

It’s been four years since we sold our last remaining vehicle.

We did it primarily for environmental reasons. I know, I know, making choices based on morality is boring and irrelevant these days. Convenience and “luxury living” are kings. Regardless of the trend, we felt deep concern about the unfolding environmental crises, and we were willing to make changes to our lifestyle to reduce our share of the damage. And let’s get real, the single most destructive thing that humans do is buy, drive, and maintain private vehicles.

So we got real. We sold the old van and waited for the impending doom that must certainly accompany our decision. We have been amazed at the results.

Limits

Four years on, we are thrilled with our decision to break the shackles of car prison. My car-free friend Wendy Allsop, a big inspiration for our decision, said it well in this Edmonton Journal article:

“There is this image of these overburdened granola-eaters making all these difficult choices that make their lives so much work. That’s not a correct view. It’s much more freeing and lighter than people could ever imagine….There are so many things we do because it’s available to us and, as humans, we’re not good at putting restrictions on our own activities. Not having a car is one way of having an extra boundary put on your lives that makes you live better.”

She’s talking about limits, of course. Throughout the industrial revolution we have strived to break through more and more of the limits that energy constraints imposed on us. Now we are experiencing the downsides of having so few limits. The physical and monetary downsides are obvious, but the lifestyle ones are tougher to pin down.

The “limit” of not having a car makes our lives better in these ways:

• 90% fewer minutes sitting at traffic lights and in traffic. Less dead time.
• A slower life. This one is huge. It’s super-easy to say no to that event or activity halfway across the city that might be 4% better than the one three blocks from our house.
• No more “what’s that sound” sinking feeling. You know, the one where your car is trying to tell you that it’s time to open your wallet again.
• No more car accidents. We’ve all been in one right? Did it make your day better? More convenient? Did you get where you were going really fast?
• More bike time. We love to ride our bikes. You used to when you were 11. What happened?
• More time of all sorts. If you convert your time to money, and consider that it costs roughly $7000/year to run a car, we save a huge amount of time by not having one.

Our life is better without a car than with one.

Next post, I’ll write about some of the tricks we’ve learned on how to live car-free.