The year of going car-less

Could you give up your car for a year?

Last year Alan Durning, husband, father of three, and founder of the Seattle-based sustainability think-tank Sightline Institute, did just that. When his eighteen year old son totalled his nineteen year old Volvo, Durning and his wife decided to turn it into an opportunity for a year-long experiment.

If, like me, you're not quite prepared to go there yourself, you're in luck. You can still read about it in Durning's fascinating blog about the experience. And it's not just a running inventory of the logistics of life without four wheels, it's also a thoughtful look at the meaning of that life without those four wheels.

Take, for example, when a columnist at a Seattle weekly paper took potshots at Durning, calling him a moocher for bumming rides from others on occasion. Rather than getting defensive about it, Durning started looking at the "gift economy" of swapping rides with other parents, something they were unable to participate in as a car-less family. As he describes it:

The swapping of rides is a convenience and a practicality, of course. But it’s also a form of community building. In fact, anthropologists regard the reciprocal doing of favors as not just a form of community building but as the essence of community building. That’s because humans, like other primates, seem to be programmed to honor the norm of reciprocity, which Stanford social psychologist Deb Gruenfeld defines as “a powerful and pervasive social rule that compels us to treat others as they have treated us. For example, when others have done us a favor, we feel that we ‘owe’ them one in return.”

When the bonds of mutual reciprocity are thick and stretch in many directions, you have a strong community–one that’s high in social capital. And you’ve got the feeling, as a parent, that many hands are there to support you.  People chip in to help you when bad luck strikes, and you do the same for others.
But subtract the car from this equation, and you’re suddenly out of currency for the most basic exchanges.

He goes on to talk about how he and his wife worked out other ways to participate in the community-building gift economy of parenting.

So what about you? Could you go car-less for a year?

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Comments

[Adrian McEwen]

I did 50 weeks without a car a few years ago after the engine blew in my M3. Not completely deliberately, it was just a non-trivial thing to fix and my initial "it'll just mean I cycle more for a month or so" ended up longer than I thought.

It wasn't too much of a hardship, but I think living in Cambridge (UK) helped as travelling by bike is often the quickest way to get around even if you do have a car.

Buying heavy or bulky items was the main time it was a real problem. And visiting people away from Cambridge could be a pain - it was my impending trip back to my parents' village for Christmas that finally prompted getting the car fixed.

I did consider getting rid of it for good, but decided I enjoy driving too much and that they are convenient for when you need to transport a lot of stuff. It's just one of the last options I choose if my journey is less than 8 miles.

[nabh]

In communities that are big and remote such as those up north of Canada I do not think that giving car/ truck is possible. But we can still enhance everyone's awareness of the amount of emission he/ she is generating by visualizing it in terms of a geographical area: Joshua M. Pearce, Sara J. Johnson, and Gabriel B. Grant, "3D-Mapping Optimization of Embodied Energy of Transportation", Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 51 pp. 435-453, 2007. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VDX-4MFKD8J-1&_user=1025668&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050549&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1025668&md5=6ecd35aab63837a900a6231cda3a9c51