In 1993, I was a suburban teenager. I’d barely heard of the Internet.
A cell/mobile phone was something business people used, and they often were tethered to cars with extra antennae.
There was a single phone line in our house and it was perpetually used by my stepmom in the evening.
There was only one way to escape, and that was with the family car.
Back then, gas was relatively inexpensive, global warming was still an abstract concept, and access to a car was a one-way ticket to freedom.
In a car you’d have a stereo, likely with a cassette deck, and you could cruise around with friends, without a care in the world.
It was a good time. I remember it fondly.
However, I’m not writing to paint a nostalgic picture of my youth, but rather to contrast my view of the automobile then with my view of the automobile now.
Since that time, I moved to upstate New York to play in a band, where a car was absolutely necessary, because you couldn’t walk anywhere. The local gas station was an hour walk away.
Having no car meant being stranded, so again, a car was freedom.
Upon my return to the DC area in 2000, I decided that rather than invest in a car, I would cut my expenses and move into the city, which after a year and a half of living with my parents and saving money, I did.
But first I had to work. This meant borrowing my parents’ car and driving across the dreaded Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge every morning, and then up the George Washington Parkway to Arlington.
While the Wilson Bridge was a guaranteed disaster every single workday morning, the George Washington Parkway was generally a pretty easy ride.
However, even smooth sailing can result in disaster.
One time as I was cruising along on the GW Parkway, right about to the point where it generally starts to slow, I saw a female jogger on the median.
She was about my age, with curly brown hair, and a figure that made me wish she’d stop jogging for fear of losing it.
As I was driving by, she paused at the median to catch her breath, and began to pull her lycra tank top up, over her head to wipe her face, as my jaw dropped in response...
No sooner had the words “sports bra” registered in my mind before I saw the traffic twenty feet ahead of me at a dead stop. I was still traveling at about 35 miles an hour.
Thankfully I drew upon unknown instinct ingrained by twenty years of action movie driving scenes to swerve into the next lane and stop without an accident.
I sometimes wonder if that girl noticed the destruction her beauty had nearly wrought.
At any rate, that’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me in several years of driving to work in the D.C. area, if you discount the flashing lights and gruesome wrecks at the end of a long line of rubberneckers.
On average, it’s a process that could take up to an hour to go, literally, five miles. The Wilson Bridge has since been doubled up, which I’m told helps, but traffic is still terrible most everywhere in the D.C. region.
There’s the stop, and the go, and the stop, and the go. The angry people. The constant cut-offs, let-ins, near misses, honks, and of course, the shouts that (hopefully) no one can hear.
It’s a stressful experience and it happens twice a workday, every workday.
It feels confining, claustrophobic, and the only thing worse than the stop-start-induced motion sickness is the tense rush of adrenaline when the traffic lets up and people finally get to accelerate.
After a year and a half of saving thanks to my parents’ generosity, I was able to move into a studio apartment at Thomas Circle in the heart of DC.
At that point a funny thing started to happen.
I took the Washington Metrorail three stops to work. I could listen to my new 128 MB mp3 player (expandable to 256 MB with SD card!) and read the newspaper while I did it.
A month after I moved in was September 11th, 2001. On the day, people were afraid of being on the subway, because there was a perception that anything could happen.
Accordingly, I walked from my high-rise office in Arlington, VA and its view of the burning Pentagon, across the Francis Scott Key Bridge, through Georgetown all the way down M Street and Massachusetts Avenue until I hit 14th Street - home sweet home.
The Potomac River as seen from the Key Bridge in February '04
The whole thing took an hour.
It was the same amount of time it took to get across the Wilson Bridge, minus the stress and with the added bonus of exercise and a sense of...freedom.
It was a real eye-opener.
I decided to try this walking thing a bit more. It took me a solid half-hour to walk to my local train, catch it, and then walk from the station near work to my office.
So only an extra half-hour one-way would mean that I could walk to work and avoid what has been lovingly dubbed the Orange Crush (the overcrowded Orange Line Metrorail) in the time since I left DC.
The hour walk was great for my health. Between that and a short-lived habit of rock-climbing I took up, I was in the best shape of my life.
Best shape of my life: Me and Jefferson Memorial in 2003 during the cherry blossoms
Best of all, I was free. I didn’t have to stay between the lines. I didn’t have to signal my intent to swerve.
I didn’t have to worry about who was in front of me or behind me, and it was impossible for me to be late as long as I left at the right time.
I didn’t have to be smushed up against my fellow rail passengers, mulling whether it would be too awkward to try unfolding my newspaper to turn the page.
I had the freedom of the sidewalk. For the next five years I would mostly walk to and from work, and it was a largely happy experience.
I walked out of town on the left side, and I often watched as drivers sloooowly commuted into town next to me (their right being my left), scowling, staring blankly, occasionally honking their horns as needed, but rarely smiling. I felt kind of sorry for them, as I knew their pain.
During that time I met my partner, who had a car, and took to driving her around on errands and such, but I still mostly walked to work.
Driving Emily's car to South Carolina, knee up.
When we moved to Australia, we decided to live close to Adelaide, which has a fairly respectable public transit system, at least by American standards.
We’d forego the car, which would have meant payments, petrol, insurance, etc. - all things struggling migrants can do well to cut from their budgets if feasible.
I walked from Mile End to work at Victoria Square for three years, about a 35 minute walk.
It was nice in the Winter, but in the Summer, walking across the parklands is brutal. I’m bald; there’s the sun to contend with, and I wasn’t accustomed to daily applications of sunblock or wearing sunglasses and hats.
And then there’s the flies. If you are the only person walking through the empty parklands, they will come out of the woodwork to attack you and only you.
They especially aim for the exposed orifices...ears, nose, eyes, and mouth, and they have no fear of swatting arms or getting squished once they reach their goal.
I would combat them by wearing the obligatory sunglasses, listening to music with headphones, and constantly exhaling violently through my nose.
But still, I had the grass and the sidewa...er, footpath. Now I had an 80GB iPod with a whole library of music to walk with!
Mostly I listened to my latest recordings and made mental notes on what needed fixing, which turned out to be a pretty productive use of my walking commute.
These days I ride the bus. I live a bit further from the CBD, so it’s necessary, but only just.
Some days I find that a fifteen minute bus ride is too short to really enjoy, but the hour walk alternative would be harder now that I don’t walk and listen to music at the same time.
I loved walking and listening to music, but I can’t do it anymore. This owes to the fact that I had a speeding car run over my toe last year, and I had no idea it was coming; indeed, I stepped into its path, if only barely.
Rock climbing had taught me that when things go horribly wrong, it is usually due to a variety of factors. In this case, there was a speeder, no traffic signal, and a careless pedestrian who had his noise-canceling headphones on at full blast.
Thankfully the only damage inflicted was a knick on my new work shoes, but I learned an important lesson in the value of life, and how fleeting it really is.
This is what a speeding car did to my new work shoe almost a year ago.
I’ve known people who simply don’t understand how I can not want a car.
However, each day I understand less and less how anyone, at least in an urban area, could really want a car, and I have often pondered the lengths to which we will go to have one.
There’s the expense. The wear and tear. The insurance. The repairs. The danger. The traffic. The petrol. The other drivers. The harm to the environment. The stress. The oil wars. The oil spills. The upkeep. The rules. The tickets. The threat of legal liability. The list goes on and on.
I’ve reached the personal conclusion that driving a car is ultimately dehumanising, dangerous, destructive, and dominated by an authoritarian structure that tells you what to do and how to do it, when and where you can and can’t go, at all times.
Worse yet, it is fueled by an industry that perpetuates the very worst of human culture and the most inhumane and violent of economies.
On my feet, no one tells me where I can and can’t walk unless I’m going to be crossing the path of a car.
I don’t have to consider whether I am paying for BP to destroy the Gulf of Mexico, or encouraging the pilots of F-15’s to bomb Iraqis.
I don’t have to wonder if I am hurrying the rate of global warming by contributing to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
I’ve known people who just couldn’t fathom that I would subject myself to public transport and walking, to grocery shopping every other day, and then only buying what I could carry, to relying on taxis when I needed to make a big purchase or move something.
But my time on the bus is golden, and is the polar opposite of time in the car.
On the bus, even when it’s crowded, I can read. I can interact with my friends, family, and fellow internet people thanks to the mobile Internet.
I could listen to music in a car, but I couldn’t write a song while driving (though I could sing along in a car, which would admittedly be awkward on the bus).
I find that many of my songs are written on the bus these days.
I occasionally recognise a friendly face and have a chat.
Sure, the bus isn’t perfect. There are rude people and unpleasant people, reckless bus drivers, and elbow-to-elbow sardine-style crushes.
However, I can’t remember a single time I genuinely feared for my life on a bus, even when I witnessed a vicious fight or had clearly unhinged people yelling and screaming in my vicinity.
I’ve never seen anyone die in a bus, and you only really hear about it happening in places menaced by terrorism or icy mountain roads.
It is harder to walk from place to place, to carry groceries, to wait for and then hang on for dear life in buses, but it is also cheaper, healthier, safer, greener, and infinitely more peaceful than driving a car.
I may drive a car again someday, but until then, I am happy to live a carless life.
