My parents always had two cars. We were a family of seven, plus assorted dogs and cats, and the cars were usually station wagons, parked in the circular driveway in front of our three-story house in the Philadelphia suburbs.

My father taught at a high school in the city, and my two oldest sisters and I attended the adjacent elementary school. We rode into Philadelphia with him in the mornings, with several older kids from the families of friends. His Mercury station wagon had a back-facing rumble seat from which my sisters and I could make faces at the drivers behind us.

The trip was 13 miles, one way. At one point I had the route memorized. The last street was Germantown Avenue, which had trolleys hooked up to overhead wires and cobblestones instead of asphalt.

We lived in what seemed like the country, between two cornfields and a cow pasture. My sisters and I could walk across one of them to an ice cream shop without touching pavement. Decades later, our old house is long gone; not a stalk of corn or a cow remains. It’s all housing developments, office buildings, and parking lots.

Maybe my parents saw the future, and Maine was their response. My father bought into a former summer camp on Deer Isle, at the end of a series of progressively smaller roads. Every year when school ended, we loaded up the station wagons for the twelve-hour drive, leaving at night, with the seats down and sleeping bags spread out across the back. My sisters and I loved those road trips. The sun came up somewhere around the Portsmouth traffic circle. We took the turnpike to Falmouth, then up the coast: over the drawbridge at Bath, lunch at a favorite rest area near Wiscasset, maybe an ice cream at Crosby’s in Bucksport, which is still there. We moved to Maine year-round the year I turned ten.

Maine was where I learned to drive, on a private dirt road in a rusting 1960 Jeep with standard-H shifting and iffy brakes. The first car I owned was an International Travel-All I bought from my mother for four hundred bucks. I still think she ripped me off. We called it “the Monster.” It had four-wheel drive and a stick shift as long as my arm, and by the time it came to me it had been pretty well beaten to death by an exuberant, careless family.

Things went quickly and predictably wrong. I replaced one wheel bearing, and then another, to the tune of several hundred bucks apiece. Then the gas tank fell off while I was driving. Meanwhile, the Monster’s body was being eaten away by car cancer. My parents had once mired it on a sand bar and watched helplessly as the ocean swirled around it – which explained why I never knew which body part was going to fall off next. It had to be the most expensive $400 vehicle in history.

That car almost killed me a couple of times. Once the gas tank fell off while I was driving. Another time the hood flew up in my face when a truck whooshed by in the other direction. By the time I finally sold it for junk, the Monster was more rust than metal.

My last car was a Ford Escort wagon I bought from my son for $600 when he went to college. It had been my mother’s car before that. My son had decided not to have a car at school, partially because he did not want to pay the inflated insurance rates that accrue when you get two speeding tickets before your seventeenth birthday.

The head gasket blew five months after I took the car off his hands. When I told him this sad news over the phone, he said, “What did you do to it?”

And that was it – my last car, like my first, a cast-off from my family.

In between, I’ve had new cars and old cars, cars I’ve loved and cars I’ve loathed, automatics and standards, vans and pickup trucks, vehicles made in Europe and Japan and America, pieces of crap and pieces of culture. I’ve driven cars owned by friends and cars owned by co-workers. I’ve had driving jobs: a school bus, a taxi. At different times I’ve been a long-distance commuter and my kids’ transportation to school. I’ve been a full, willing participant in the American Car Culture.

No more.

I’ve been thinking about my father lately, because he died nine years ago this week in an automobile accident. He was one of 42,642 deaths on American roads in 2006, an annual slaughter we apparently consider an acceptable cost for our motorized way of life.¹

You might think there’s something Freudian in my subsequent decision to give up car ownership, but the truth is I was already souring on cars. It wasn’t until May of that year that I moved from a small town on the coast to Bangor, where a car-free life is possible, and even then it took me until the end of the year to cut the cord.

My Dad and I disagreed about a lot of things. He leaned conservative and I lean liberal, so we had plenty of fodder for lively political discussions. But he did teach me a valuable lesson about courtesy. He had a nice phrase for it, too. He used to say that courtesy is the grease that keeps the machinery of society running. When I was younger, and surer of everything, I pooh-poohed this as the faux wisdom of an old man. He didn’t live to see the rise of social media. But nowhere is his lesson on courtesy more needed.

Express an opinion on Facebook, or a blog, or any on-line forum, and within about three comments someone is likely to call you a fool, a traitor, or worse. Recently I was trying to make the point that taxpayer-funded public transportation can save a family the cost of owning and maintaining a second vehicle (around $9,000 per year on average, according to the American Automobile Association), and was not so cordially invited to shut up, with the added admonition that I was obviously “just another loud-mouth dolt.”

Few of us would say that to someone’s face, but computer screens and cars seem to shield people from the immediate consequences of being rude. I’ve had horrible things yelled at me from passing cars when I’m on my bicycle. I’ve been flipped off more times than I can count. I have heard drivers express the opinion that bicycling on public roadways should be outlawed, that bicyclists are nuisances, that we are dangerous. Bicycles aren’t killing more than thirty thousand Americans a year.² Cars are dangerous.

I do realize that bicyclists and pedestrians and bus passengers can be rude, too. But they are not cocooned behind a windshield or a user name. Recently I was on a bus with a young woman carrying on a loud, lengthy cell phone conversation. You could hear her all over the bus. I finally approached her and asked politely if she could wrap it up. She responded with a stream of invective. I told her she was being rude to her fellow passengers, and she replied, “I don’t care.” After I had meekly returned to my seat, the guy across from her leaned over and said, “Will you shut the fuck up?” She told her friend on the phone that people were harassing her and she had to go. Message delivered, in a language she understood. Would the guy have spoken up if I hadn’t said anything? I don’t know.
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It doesn’t kill you to be polite. Courtesy can be the difference between reason and resentment, between an agreement to disagree and the harboring of hard feelings. It isn’t always easy, but practicing courtesy is always worth the effort. On line, it can foster respect. On the road, it can literally save lives.

 

1 – Figures are from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

2 – The 2013 figure was 32,719, including 4,735 pedestrians and 743 cyclists. Fatalities dropped sharply following the 2008 recession and gas price spike.

 

 

I am new to this business of blogging. Consequently, I expect that this blog will evolve as I learn more tricks of the trade. Uploading graphics, linking to other blogs and web sites, managing comments – these are all things I’ll have to get better at as I go along. For now, I’m trying to write a new post every Saturday, and also trying to get the word out about this blog’s existence. Thank you for visiting and reading, and if you find something of value here, tell your friends about it.

It has now been eight years since I’ve owned a car. My driver’s license is current, however, and I do drive from time to time. In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I live with a woman who owns a car. On cold winter mornings, she has often offered to drive me down to the bus stop at Pickering Square, where I get on the 7:15 bus to Orono and go to work. I usually take her up on her offer. So sue me. I’m not a purist. Purists are boring.

Besides, what am I supposed to do, break up with her just to prove a point? She’s on her way to work anyway, so it’s not an extra car trip just for me. We walk downtown, even in winter, to hear music or go out to dinner. When we started dating, my lack of a car was a plus, because she lives on a narrow street with a driveway barely big enough for one vehicle. Where to put the second car on the nights I stayed over was never an issue.

Before I moved in last November, I lived alone and car-free for three years. It never cramped my style. I had an apartment on a bus route, close to town, and I shopped at stores I could easily reach on foot or bicycle. I bought groceries “European style,” in smaller, more frequent trips. In the summer I frequented farmer’s markets and small beer stores. I sometimes used the bus to go to Hannaford.

The point of all this is to deflect the kinds of straw-man arguments often leveled at people advocating for change. Environmentalists hear this all the time: “You want we should all live in caves by candlelight?” Obviously we are not going to unmake technology, nor should we, and just as obviously, we are not going to un-invent the automobile. But we CAN be smarter in our use of technology and its effects on the planet. And we CAN question some of our entrenched attitudes toward cars.
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I am NOT advocating that everyone reading this blog renounce car ownership tomorrow. Many people legitimately need to own cars. Families with small children, traveling carpenters with equipment, gigging musicians with gear, on-call medical personnel – all have solid reasons to invest in a vehicle. But I see far too many people clinging to their cars out of habit, because we have come to regard car ownership as a necessity instead of an option.

The infrastructure we’ve created around the car reinforces this. City councils eagerly embrace new parking facilities but balk at expanding public transportation. Businesses locate in outlying shopping malls instead of walkable city centers. Bicyclists are marginalized. And the relentless drumbeat of car advertising on TV brainwashes the public into thinking that cars are much cheaper than they really are.

The sense of entitlement around car ownership is so pervasive that we often fail to notice it. Take parking, for example. Why does your employer offer you free parking at work, but not free lunch? (The University of Maine is one local employer that gets this right – they charge for parking and give away bus rides. More on this in a future post.) At shopping malls, the price of parking is included in the prices at the stores – but there is never a discount for bus riders, bicyclists and pedestrians, who consequently end up subsidizing the drivers. A proposal to charge a nominal fee for parking in downtown Bangor is met by howls of outrage and predictions of doom for downtown businesses.

Change happens incrementally, one individual attitude at a time. As more people free themselves from the shackles of car ownership, the infrastructure can and will change to accommodate them. Not everyone can give up car ownership. But some of us can. And even in the face of car-centric public policy, it’s easier than you think.