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Life Without a Car, or How I’ve Learned to Embrace Simplicity
Giving up a car is weird but not impossible.
There’s no way around it: car ownership is the rite of passage into adulthood, it’s a symbol of independence, and hell, there’s no better symbol of untapped potential and freedom than a tank full of gas.
And yet… How many of us take car ownership for granted, as if it were not only inalienable but also an inevitable part of life? Have you made peace with the idea of paying for car maintenance, and gas, and insurance, and all the other random expenses that come with it?
In my opinion, there are two main types of people: urbanites and suburbanites. It’s more or less impossible (or at least very difficult) to make it in the suburbs without a vehicle. At the same time, depending on the kind of city you live in, it may be possible (or even preferable!) to live without a car at all. Over the course of my journey, I’ve lived in lots of places: rural Nevada (Winnemucca and Fernley), Reno, Las Vegas, Fort Worth (the rural part, next to cow pastures), Tampa, Seattle, Toronto, and now Quebec City.
I’ve seen some fairly pedestrian-friendly cities that had pretty overloaded bus systems (ahh, downtown Seattle at 5pm… I still have nightmares), I’ve seen cities that where being a pedestrian was generally a…
