Conscious Choice: Car-Free

January 2004

Car-Free

Saving Money and Your Skin

by Douglas E. Morris

It has been over 15 years since I’ve owned a car. In America, everyone, even radical eco-warriors — people who fight for farmland protection, or clean air, or saving red beaked, barking parakeets — own cars. Even the folks who are trying to save the planet from man’s excesses are just as guilty as the next guy of spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. To them, because I do not own a car, I am a hero.

To others, however, I am a certifiable freak. When I visit relatives in the Midwest, people shy away from me as if I have the plague, or a third eye, or smell really bad. Not owning a car is almost considered treasonous in the heartland.

Neither freak nor hero, the real reason I finally decided to abandon the internal combustion engine was a little more prosaic: I didn’t want to end up as a statistic. Even before I researched automobile accident figures, where I discovered that more than 45,000 Americans are killed every year and millions are left disabled for life, I was confronted first-hand with the perils of driving.

My love affair with automobiles started out just like everyone else’s. But then I had three pretty bad accidents in a very short period of time, which convinced me that automobile ownership was something I should forego. My very first car was a used Honda Accord. It was junkyard material a year after I bought it. A guy pulled right in front of me doing a "U" turn. I slammed into the side of his huge sedan. My beautiful little gold Honda became an accordion. Luckily, I walked away with only a bump on my head.

My next two cars were obliterated in a similar fashion, with lunatics pulling out in front of me, and me ending up crumpled against them. After the third time, I decided that this was my last strike. Next batter. I headed to the dugout and put away car ownership for good.

I quickly found I did not need my car at all. Nor did I miss it. I walked, biked, or took public transportation everywhere I wanted to go.

Not having a car was also one less headache, one less thing to worry about. I no longer had to get the tires rotated or put air in them, check the oil or get it changed, buy gas, put in washer fluid, vacuum the floors, or wash and polish the damn thing. I also didn’t have to worry about parking, registering the car, or getting frustrated sitting in traffic.

Being car-free quickly became rather liberating. I had much more free time and my stress level decreased. Most importantly, I also began to notice that I had loads more money. Once I opted out of car ownership, I could not believe all the money I was able to save. Without car payments, insurance, gas, registration, maintenance, parking, and all the other incidental costs associated with owning a car, I calculated that I was saving, minimum, $7,000 per year. That made me wonder how much cars would have cost me over my lifetime. Calculating 40 years of ownership, I multiplied that by $7,000 per annum, and came up with an astounding $280,000!

No wonder people complain about never having enough money. Cars eat up any spare cash we have! Now that I was car-free I could save for a down payment on a home. So I did. In two years I had the money I needed to buy a beautiful condo. I could take great vacations. So I did. I could invest, which I did. It was amazing the amount of economic freedom I had just because I did not own a car.

Despite the uniqueness of being automobile independent, I really haven’t changed that much. I am still your average, run of the mill, blue-blooded American male. In many ways I’m still the same guy I was before I kicked my car habit. However, people still pin some grandiose purpose onto my car-free existence. They imagine me as a hard-core environmental activist, or a public transportation promoter, or a budding Dalai Lama exuding peace and harmony.

Even though not owning a car can be about those things — and over time I began to embody them all — however for me being car-free is about cold, hard cash. While whistling all the way to the bank, I am also safe from the maniacs lumbering around in their SUVs.

Saving money or saving your skin, either reason should be good enough to break free of car dependency. But if you want to do it to save the whales, preserve family farms, or be more at peace with the cosmos, that’s just fine too.

Douglas E. Morris is a Washington, D.C.-based writer.

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