The One-Car Household

It's Earth Day. So what are you going to do about it?

Shiner and I are a two-car household. This is very convenient, but largely stupid. Our day jobs are less than two blocks from one another. I spend just under $1400 every year to insure and gas up my car. I don't know for sure (note to self: find out) but I assume Shiner pays about the same. And our two cars together generate more than our fair share of CO2, globally speaking. The American Transit Association tells me that by switching from two cars to one, we could cut our carbon emissions by 25-20%.

What would it look like if we became a one-car household? Commuting to the train together in the morning, bussing or biking when offsite meetings or schedules prevent us from commuting together, meeting at the train platform in the evening and riding home together. Yuppie-duppie-dorable. But it's a little more compliated than that.

Since Shiner took his second job, he's needed to drive straight from the train station to the store after work, meaning it's not practical for me to go home with him on the nights he works. On those nights I've been staying late at the office to get more work done, but that would need to change--after 6.40, my bus comes only once an hour (a total pain) and I don't bike home after dark because I go through some sketch areas with high rates of cyclist-directed violence (yikes!). So no more working at the office late-late for me. I would have to go home and log in remotely. That also means no more free dinner, since my employer will reimburse for meals we eat downtown when we stay later than 7.30. It would also severely limit my ability to run errands after work.

This will also mean I'd feel somewhat housebound one day each weekend when Shiner's got the car at work. I wouldn't actually be housebound. I could easily get out and walk or bike, or figure out how to take a bus wherever. But frankly, that's a big mindset shift.

I'm going to give it a go. Shiner has been forewarned. We've talked in theory about how we think we could become a one-car household, but haven't taken any steps toward trying it out.

Michael Pollan wants me to grow a garden, but what he's really suggesting in this week's Times Magazine is that each of us do something "to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen." And some of that involves doing things that seem inconvenient and possibly futile, but right-minded and incrementally useful.

It's Earth Day, and I'm going to try to quit my car.