For the first time in my driving age life I don’t own or have easy access to a car. Yesterday, I sold my 2003 Hyundai Elantra with 80,000 miles on it. Elantras are apparently in demand, perhaps because word has gotten out they are inexpensive but reliable. Mine served me well. If you have one and have contemplated selling it, this may be the time. Even while living in Japan- the epitome of convenient and efficient train transportation – for two years after college, I was far enough out in the country in a town with no train station that a car was necessary. Let me be clear up front: I did not sell my car for environmental reasons. This is not some attempt to show how green I am, for I never claimed such. While I do what I think is reasonable to conserve energy and help the environment, I am not a radical or even ardent environmentalist and getting rid of my car is not a “get back to nature” move. Plus, someone else will now be using that same vehicle, so it’s not like its taking a car off the road even though it may keep a new car from getting on the road. It is nice, however, to know that I won’t be buying gasoline that is expensive and refined from oil that is increasingly foreign and fraught with political, security, and environmental instability. And yes, I think we should move quickly toward sustainable growth, a part of which is driving less, upgrading to more efficient vehicles, and using mass transit when and where feasible.

I’ll use this experiment in “carlessness” to refine my behavior, cut costs, and hopefully contribute to a healthier planet even though environmental concern was not the main reason for ditching the car. Just as we take out insurance policies on our houses, we should insure that our one collective house- the earth- will not catch fire, be flooded, or otherwise be destroyed; all for the simple reason that right now, we’ve got nowhere else to go. We don’t fully understand how our home is being affected by nearly 7 billion people living on it. One of the main points of this website is to promote technology, business, and behavioral change as the main drivers of the sustainability movement. This is the only realistic combination of forces that will bring the second green revolution to fruition. But enough pontificating. Back to selling my car.

The motives for selling the car we’re largely financial. I wanted to save more money and the only way I could do that was to increase my income or decrease my expenses. Increasing income isn’t so immediate or so easy a proposition. So I went for decreasing expenses. And boy was owning a car ever an (often necessary) expense. I tallied up all the receipts since I bought my car 6 years ago. This included two new sets of tires, numerous oil changes, as well as scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. All told, I spent over $5,000 on my car over 6 years for maintenance. This total doesn’t even include gas, parking permits, car washes, and several speeding tickets and parking violations along the way. Nor does that include $100 per month minimum for insurance.

I’m lucky to live in Washington D.C. where the bus and train are convenient and fairly reliable. There are only a few cities in America where you can get by without a car. New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, D.C., Portland, and Minneapolis come to mind. But even in most of these cities, if you go anywhere outside the city limits transportation becomes awfully difficult without a car. Forget trying to live in the suburbs without one.

The experiment is now upon me. While I didn’t use the car much if at all during the week, I often took it around the city or to places outside the city on the weekends. It will be interesting to see how I respond to this change. I know I’ll miss the ease and freedom that comes with owning a car. I took my first cross country road trip the summer after graduating high school. I’ve made 6 trips across or nearly across the country and back and love driving.  A car is most definitely freedom but selling a car, canceling the insurance, and getting rid of one “responsibility” and possession to worry over is also interestingly liberating. Plus, now I can mooch off of all the friends that always used to pester me for rides. Anyway, here goes nothing. In a few months I’ll write a post letting you know how life without a car is turning out.

- Justin Manger

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