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Live Car Free

If you live in a city with a train system, it's easy to go car free.

Learning to be better drivers, drive better cars, and drive less are all steps in the right direction, and that direction is toward decreased car ownership. As Professor and activist Kenny Bruno said during his interview with The Green Life, “ No car, no power plant, no chemical factory and no detergent actually protect the environment. Some damage it less than others.”

If you are fortunate to live somewhere where not having a car is an option for you, there are many reasons to consider it. Here are a few of them:

Save Money: Any way you look at it, not having a car is much cheaper than having one. According to the department of labor statistics, car ownership costs are second only to housing costs in a household budget. The average American household spends more on their car than they do on food and healthcare combined for an entire family.

To see how much your really spend on your car, check out the Real cost of Car Ownership calculator here. The amount of money you truly spend on your car will shock you. Compared to the huge costs of personal car ownership, the cost of public transit is microscopic, even if you add in an occasional car rental or car share fees for those times when a car is necessary.

Biking is great exercise, and can easily be combined with public transport.

Improve your health: Americans spend an average of 101 minutes daily in their cars. Replacing even one third of this time with exercise would dramatically lower our obesity epidemic. Even a short walk to and from transit makes a difference in individual health. However, just as damaging as the lack of exercise cars promote is the stress they cause.

Americans now spend the equivalent of a full work week every year sitting in traffic. Studies repeatedly show that people making long commutes are at a higher risk for a host of health problems, including high blood pressure, sleep depravation, and depression. This is in addition to the risk of a car accident, which is much higher than the risk of an accident on a bus, train, or plane. An excellent article, published in US News and World Report, on how America’s love affair with the automobile is breaking up due largely to health and welfare concerns of driving, is available here.

Save the Planet: Of course, traffic is not only stressful, it is wasteful. Wasted fuel and increased pollution from traffic congestion is one of many environmental problems caused by cars. The car is probably the single most environmentally destructive invention. Nearly everything about the car is damaging to the environment. Waste disposal of tires, batteries, and other hazardous materials, air pollution, water pollution, the environmental costs of oil exploration, refinement, and consumption, and of course, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions.

It doesn't have to be this way, and it hasn't always been.

A Short History of American Public Transit

The GM Streetcar Conspiracy The US was once dominated by railways, and had what many considered to be the best public transit system in the world, largely run by trolleys, but by 1972 public transit ridership was at an all-time low. Many argue that one of, if not the main reason for this change was the intervention of General Motors, in what is now referred to as the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy. Between 1926 and 1935, General Motors began to buy up New York Railways, and gradually replaced the trolleys with GM buses. This is thought to be GM's method for making public transit less popular, and thereby promoting the car. Although GM’s role in dismantling public transit in the US is debated, GM and its partners were convicted of anti-trust violations and criminal conspiracy in a Chicago district court in 1949 and fined $5,000 for each violation. Oddly, this was portrayed fairly accurately in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? For more information on the general motors streetcar conspiracy, check out these sources: www.carbusters.org www.lovearth.net

“It is generally overlooked that the US once had the finest system of public transportation in the world. Streetcars changed the way people lived. They opened up suburban life. The population of the Bronx went from under 90,000 to 200,000 in the years immediately after the introduction of the streetcar. By 1902 New York streetcars were carrying almost 1 billion passengers annually.”

- Bill Bryson on Travel in America

Public transport is by no means something new or foreign to the American way of life. American public transit has been around longer than America has, with the first publicly operated ferry in Boston in 1630. The US Public transportation system was once considered the best in the world, and ridership peaked at an all time high in 1946. By 1972, however, public transit ridership was at an all time low. What happened? Cars happened. Thanks to Ford, and soon GM, the individual car went from a luxury item to an everyday necessity, and combined with the demise of the popular and cheap streetcar (see sidebar: The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy), single family, soon to be single occupant cars, forever changed the nation.

The history of public transportation in this country is fascinating story of cooperative and competing government, corporate and individual interests, as well as socioeconomic and political issues. For further information on this subject check out these websites:

The American Public Transportation Association
The Reader’s Companion to American History – Public Transportation

And these excellent books:
City of Quartz
The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape
The Life and Death of Great American Cities

more general resources

Get More from your Miles, Drive Less, Live Car-Free

For more information on climate change: World Resources Institute,
Union of Concerned Scientists

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