Car-Free and Care Free

Shortly after my 25th birthday, I sold my car. As a former college professor once put it, I “joined the revolution.”

The revolution? Surely, considering the technological revolution currently underway and the cultural revolutions of the last century, abandoning a Honda Accord should not count as revolutionary. I had been driving for nearly a decade. And while I love the feeling of the open road as much as anyone else, I realized that bringing my beloved Accord with me to Center City Philadelphia just wasn’t very practical. So I decided to sell. It was a personal choice, with the added bonus that I would be saving gas and repair money. It seemed like a sensible and uncontroversial decision - that is, of course, until I began to share this news with friends, family, and the rest of the world.
Automobile ad campaigns pitch car ownership as “moving forward,” and a majority of Americans have integrated that philosophy into every aspect of life. In her 1998 book, Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay observes that we “spend our lives behind the wheel.” Growing up in the small central Pennsylvania town of Mechanicsburg, our only “walkable” destinations were an ice cream parlor, a pizza shop, and a few local businesses. It was easy to understand why suburban life made a car necessary. But when I moved to Philadelphia, I chose a neighborhood close to public transportation. There are grocery stores and a fantastic shopping district just a few blocks away. Owning a car just didn’t make as much sense. 

Still, I haven’t been able to abandon cars entirely. My family is still in the suburbs, and I need a way to get out of the city for longer trips. Besides that, the very best shopping in the city is not within easy reach of public transportation. For that, there’s Philly CarShare (slogan: “Our wheels, your freedom”). You can choose from hundreds of cars on lots around the city for hourly rates of between $5.90 and $7.90 per hour. You can reserve a hybrid car, a pickup truck, or a Mini Cooper. It tends to take half the time of public transportation, and you don’t even have to pay for gasoline. The convenience is hard to beat. (There are similar car-share services in San Francisco and Austin, and Zipcar, an hourly rent-a-car outfit, is now in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York.)

While living without a car in the city has been relatively easy, it’s a curious experience choosing to be car-less. I am, all of a sudden, a reluctant member of a marginalized group of “anti-auto activists,” whose principles I’m not sure I agree with. Though I certainly see the environmental benefits of not owning a car, I didn’t see my decision to sell as a bold social statement, or a step toward “revolution.” But now that I’m auto-less, I’m realizing I get lumped into a left-leaning group where a lot of other labels should (but don’t always) apply.

I’m also realizing just how much city officials must like car owners as residents. Maintaining a car in a city these days seems to create an entire little economy in itself. Drivers create endless sources of revenue for cities - ticket and parking meter revenue, taxes, parking lot and garage fees, gasoline and maintenance. In Philly, rush-hour traffic reports focus solely on gridlock. And while the buses and trains are frequently filled to the brim with commuters, the number of cars on the road seems to be as high as ever. 

Mom at the Wheel

In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay, an architecture and planning critic for The Nation, describes the phenomenon of “mom at the wheel.” The car, according to Kay, once represented freedom for women. The social revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s brought changes in attitudes about women’s rights and roles. But car-buying among women didn’t really climb until this shift coincided with the consumerism of the 1980s. “In less than ten years after 1983, women’s travel quadrupled,” Kay writes. With all this freedom came the added responsibility of running all the errands and transporting children to school, soccer practice, and music lessons.

My mother certainly fell into this category. When I was young, she became a car-owning, working mother of the era, driving back and forth between her office, the grocery store, and school several times a day. Growing up, she would always remind me that a woman needs to take care of herself - that love and marriage are positive, wonderful experiences, but that it is important not to be dependent on anyone else. To her, selling my car meant I had not taken her advice to heart.

“So, you’re moving downtown - and selling your car?” my mother asked, incredulously.

I tried to convince her that I was not sacrificing my independence, but it was no use. (And we’re still not speaking about the subject.) The point I wanted to get across was that, for a woman in a city like Philadelphia, owning a car can be as much a burden as it is for a man. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, Americans currently spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic. How is that for freedom?

I decided to speak with Jane Holtz Kay herself, to see if her work on Asphalt Nation changed the way she saw herself as a woman. Turns out she had just bought a brand new car as she was beginning to research and write Asphalt Nation in the late ‘90s, but she convinced the dealer she bought it from to give her every penny back. Years later, she still finds living the car-free life a fairly easy choice. In her town of Brookline, Massachusetts, most people own cars, but with some planning, she can walk or ride public transportation to take care of most everything she needs. Her daughters, now living in New York and Paris, also don’t own cars. While she sometimes relies on friends to drive her from place to place, she agrees that the car-free lifestyle is one of liberation, rather than restriction.

This was something I could relate to. Selling my car gives me more freedom, rather than less - mainly because I spend less time pondering what to do the next time the car breaks down. To the women of the 1980s, this may be a freedom difficult to comprehend. But a working urban woman no longer needs to rely on a car to feel independent. Perhaps it’s a bit of a revolution after all.