When you're looking to decrease your ecological footprint and reduce your monthly expenditures, reducing car usage can be incredibly helpful: it reduces greenhouse emissions, reduces your costs, and encourages greener transportation methods like walking, biking, and taking public transit.
One way to reduce your car usage is to reduce the number of cars you own. Our household of two started with two cars: we both drove to work and school, and our schedules overlapped enough that it didn't make sense to try to use just one car. But over the years, we've realized that a lot of the distances that we usually drove were walkable or bikable, and that we appreciated the excuse to get outside and move around.
Over time we've realized that we rarely used two cars at once, and even then, we could probably work around the issue. Now, this is partially possible because we live in an urban location with easy access to public transit and very local options for groceries and restaurants. We both have a walking commute, and only take cars to work in really inclement weather or when we need to run an errand during the day. But decreasing our car use has also been possible because we realized that we were happier using the time we might use to go to the gym running errands by walking or biking. Both my husband and I would rather get the fresh air and changing view, even if it makes the errands take slightly longer.
This past year or so, our city introduced a car-sharing program called Car2Go, which is available in major metro areas across the U.S. and Europe (there are also other options like ZipCar, and HourCar, but we like Car2Go because of its saturation in our market). There may be a small startup fee, but we managed to find coupon codes to waive it, so we only pay for the time we're actually driving the cars. For the few trips we take when we need separate cars, we can use Car2Go for an easy, cheap car anywhere in our city. The Smart Cars that they use for the program are not our favorite to drive and I was not hugely impressed with their help-desk, but for the rare instance when we need a second car they're certainly sufficient and we've never had more than a 5 minute walk to find one. A nice bonus: we can use our Car2Go membership in any of the other cities that have the program, which is an easy way to find transportation while traveling.
Since car-sharing is now a reasonable and viable alternative to a second car, we just sold our extra vehicle. Not only are we saving the cost of running and maintaining the car, we're saving parking costs, and insurance costs. And we've created an incentive to try to find non-auto transportation when we're doing things individually, so that we don't tie up the car. So far, we're satisfied that as long as we live in a place with car-sharing available we won't be put in a real crunch by only having one car for two people.
Is being a one-car family realistic for everyone? Probably not. If we had kids, or jobs that required longer commutes, we'd probably find a second car provided enough convenience that it was worth the additional cost and increased impact on the environment. But until then, we've been surprised at how easy and pleasant going down to one car has been. Are we likely to get rid of the car we have? No- it still provides a lot of convenience for us, and getting rid of it would cause more hassle than the cost and eco-savings are worth to us. But we take care to get the best mileage we can out of the vehicle we have, and efficiency was definitely one of the factors we considered when we were car shopping.
How do you decrease your car use? Have you found good alternatives to traditional automotive transportation?
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