How to Live Well Without Owning a Car

How to Live Well Without Owning a Car: Save Money, Breathe Easier, and Get More Mileage Out of Life by Chris Balish
My review
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Since I started riding my bike to work more often recently, I have started pondering an everyday bike commute, ditching our second car completely. This book has some valuable tips for people like me, and even more for people who want to go completely car-free, instead of car-lite like me. Some of the choices he presents are hard: move closer to work, closer to services like the grocery store, choose doctors, dentists, churches that are closer to your house, and so on. The author focuses on the financial benefits of going car-free: no car payments, insurance, maintenance, and so on, and does present a compelling case to someone looking to buy a car, or who is still paying for one. My Civic hybrid is paid off, so I don’t have the car payments on that to worry about, but it is still costly enough to make it worth looking at.
For me, he convinced me to look closer at public transportation as an alternative/backup to biking, and it actually does look feasible. We only live a mile or so from a Metro station, and my work provides a shuttle bus from another Metro station. I could also take a bus, though I would have to plan in advance to catch it on schedule. Still, both are valid options if I couldn’t ride my bike. My work even provides pre-tax paycheck deductions for transit, which I didn’t know about before.
I’m going to keep riding for a few more weeks to see if it’s really something I want to do all the time, but after reading this book, I can definitely picture our family cutting down to one car in the not-so-distant future.
Next up is Divorce Your Car by Katharine T. Alvord.