How to Decide If You Can Live Car-Free
When I was a teenager, owning a car was all about feeling grown up and having a sense of freedom—being able to hit the road whenever you wanted. As an adult, owning a car can feel like an inevitability: How will you get to work, buy groceries, or drop the kids off at school if you don’t have wheels sitting in your driveway at all times? Heck, this whole country was essentially designed and engineered for cars.
But car ownership also kind of sucks. It’s expensive, for one thing: The average cost of owning a new car is more than $1,000 a month these days; on average, we spend close to 20% of our household budgets on buying, maintaining, and driving our cars. And commuting in a car can be miserable much of the time, and has a negative impact on both your physical and mental health.
That might drive you to think about ditching your vehicle and going car-free. There are a lot of benefits to getting rid of that expensive stress machine in your garage—but first, you have to figure out if it’s a good option for you.
Can you live without a car?
Before you do anything, you need to know if ditching your car is even a practical possibility. If you need to commute to work or other locations on a regular basis, there have to be alternatives in place before you can go car-free:
Public transportation. Google Maps is a good starting point: Plug in whatever regular commutes you have and choose the public transport option to see what your options are. Make sure to set the “arrive by” time so it can take schedules into account. This will give you a decent idea of your options and how long they will take.
Delivery. If you currently drive to get groceries or other necessary items, check if there are delivery options available, either directly from the business or via a third-party app or service.
Car-sharing and rental. Even if you have acceptable public transportation and delivery options that make going car free plausible, you may occasionally still need a car. Whether it’s to haul a load from your local hardware store or to go somewhere that’s not easily accessible via public transport, check to see if there are car-sharing or rental options that make sense. Having a carshare a block away is great in case you suddenly need to get somewhere quickly.
What does it cost to live without a car?
If you have reasonable public transportation or other options to replace your drive, your next step is to see if it makes financial sense:
Public transportation is generally going to be overwhelmingly cheaper than driving. A monthly pass for commuter rail, for example, has a median cost of $137.50, and a bus monthly pass has a median cost of about $55. Estimate how much you’ll be spending on different public transportation options every month.
Car shares. Having a car share option is a good idea for those times when you absolutely need to drive somewhere. If it’s an option in your area, add up those costs, too. For example, Zipcar costs $9 per month or $90 per year, plus the cost of driving (which starts at $11 an hour and $91.50 per day, not including insurance). Peer-to-peer car-share businesses like Getaround have more variability in pricing because the car owners set their own price, and traditional car rental agencies can vary a lot depending on your location and when you’re renting, so you’ll need to dig in a little to get a sense of what you’ll pay if that’s your only option.
Delivery. Delivery services from groceries or other businesses usually come with some kind of fee, so make sure you factor those into your calculations.
Finally, consider the time cost. Public transportation is almost always a much slower option; one study found that public transportation took as much as 2.6 times longer than driving. This is true even in areas with very robust public transportation options—commuting from Hoboken, N.J. into Manhattan can take about 20 minutes by car, but about 40 minutes via public transportation, for example, according to Google Maps. Commuting by car might suck, but 20 minutes of your life is not nothing. On the other hand, once you arrive at your destination, you have to park your car, which can be its own hassle, depending on where you are. Cars take up time in other ways, too (maintenance, breakdowns, etc.), so you’ll need to consider your individual situation to figure out what your time cost might be if you go car-free.
How walkable is your city?
Something else to consider if you’re dreaming of a car-free life is whether you can walk or bike to places in your area. Looking up your town’s Walk Score is a good start, and again Google Maps can give you an idea of how far you might need to walk to work (or if it’s even possible; Google won’t show you a walking or biking route unless it’s safe). If you can bike, you could consider a cargo bike trailer to haul groceries or other items back to the house.
About 40% of all car trips in the U.S. are three miles or less, which is a pretty walkable or bikable distance for most people, but you have to take a few things into consideration:
Your own physical fitness and condition. If you’re not physically capable of walking or biking a few miles, going car-free might not be possible unless you have robust public transportation options.
Infrastructure. Even if it’s possible to walk or bike places around you, if there are no sidewalks or bike lanes, or if your only possible route requires walking along busy highways, the dangers might outweigh the benefits of going car-free.