Toddled Dredge

Shannon wrote at BlogHer today about the challenges of living with one car, or going carless altogether. Every now and then, I wish we could give up the cars. We lived carless for eight months (before kids), we have sporadically spent about half of our marriage with only one car (both before and with kids), and currently we have two functioning cars and are expecting to add my parents’ dreadful old van to that number when the new baby is born.

I hate cars. I hate repairing them, I hate paying for insurance and gas and registration and e-checks. I hate funding the wealth of one of the world’s most oppressive states, Saudi Arabia.  I hate the breakdowns and the unreliability of cars.  I would love to live without one, but I just don’t see how we could.

For eight months Az the Husband and I lived without a functioning car. We took the bus or walked wherever we needed to go. At the time, we lived in a small apartment in a neighborhood that included our church, our doctor, our school and a grocery store all withing two miles. Az took the bus the five miles to his workplace, and I took the bus for any specialized shopping.

When you depend on public transit, life is a little different. It wasn’t easy to go back home for something forgotten, so I had to plan for everything I needed before I left. I always carried a big bag with plenty of empty space. I shopped for groceries almost every day; carrying groceries 1.5 miles gets heavy, so I could only carry enough for one day. I stopped buying most liquids because they were too hard to carry. I could no longer comparison shop for groceries; the only option was the store within walking distance.

Because every bus trip requires lots of waiting at stops, and the bus is rarely going directly to your destination, every errand took at least twice as long as it would if I had a car. I planned as many errands as possible in one outing. I learned to be prepared for all kinds of weather. Just because it was sunny when I left, doesn’t mean it would be sunny later. I carried an umbrella and sunscreen.

We finally went back to car-driving before winter. I don’t know if I could have managed it during the snowy season, but I realize some people do. There were a lot of things I loved about taking the bus. It slowed down the pace of life, encouraged me to be more patient and easy-going. There was a kind of freedom to it.

People in big cities do this all the time, but they generally have a decent public transit system. In our little city, the bus system is awful. There aren’t enough routes. The payment system is outdated. In a large midwestern city like Chicago, a bus pass is credited with a given amount of money, and each fare is subtracted from the pass when you swipe it. In our little city, bus passes are bought with a flat fee, and are only good for a specific zone and on specific days. They are a worthless nightmare, deliberately (it seems) planned to lose the customer money.

Perhaps because of the inconvenience of the bus system in our small city, it is used almost exclusively by people who cannot afford to own a car. This means that the routes (and therefore the stops) are through some of the poorest and scariest sections of the city. If I travel downtown from my current neighborhood, I can get there directly without transferring. But when I want to come home, the same route takes a circuitous trip through one of the creepiest abandoned housing projects in the city. The trip home takes twice as long as the trip there. If Az were to take the bus to work, he would need to transfer in the dark in a very scary part of town, waiting for the last bus of the night. If he missed it, he would be stranded.

Before our first child was born, we moved. Though we chose a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, we are still more than four miles away from our doctor, our church, our favorite bakery, and Az’s workplace. I could walk the distance to most of those places, but our children could not.

Nor is the bus a safe alternative for four small children. My oldest daughter is only four. Bus passengers need to be able to hold on in case the bus stops suddenly. It happens. My two year old just couldn’t do it. I could not hold all the children I would need to hold on the bus. I could not be sure that there would even be seats available for us on the bus. On crowded routes, my kids could easily get lost in the shuffle, and you need to know exactly where the kids are when you get on and off a bus. A toddler was killed this year under the wheels of one of our city buses.

So it seems we are stuck with a car. If we switched to only one car, we would save money on insurance and registration and possibly repairs, but we would actually increase the amount of money we spent on gas. When we have only one car, that means that one of us has to drop the other off and then return to pick them up, doubling the actual number of miles to work driven. While Green SAHM points out that correctly that having only one car cuts down on needless driving or unnecessary shopping, I suspect the rising gas prices will do this for us anyway.

And then there is walking. The more children we have, the less possible this seems, at least while they are little. Last year I could push my two oldest in a stroller uphill to the nearest playground, which is two miles away. Now I have three and am pregnant with my fourth. My four-year-old cannot reliably walk four miles. My three-year-old definitely can’t. Even if my four-year-old could manage the distance, letting her walking along a major road where the traffic moves at 45 mph is too scary for me. She is an energetic little imp, and I might not be able to grab her quickly enough if she darted the wrong way and I had my hands full with a stroller.

So we are stuck with being a multi-car family.  When the new baby is born, we will no longer be able to fit all the kids in the back of the family sedan, and my parents are planning to give us their old van.  It is an ugly beast of a vehicle, and I plan to only drive it to church, except for the rare (very rare, hopefully) family outing.  Driving that behemoth will cost us a bundle.

But I remember the carless days we had, and I feel a little wistful.  Maybe someday when the kids are older, those days will come again.