Suburban Friends and the Carfree Family

We got a really great question on the When you really need a car post. BusChick writes (somewhat edited here):

"The biggest driver (pun intended) of car use for us is visiting friends. My family lives in the city, and so do most of my old friends. I, do, however, have one or two close friends who live outside of bus range; my husband has several...

I like to reciprocate visits to friends and not always have them come to us, but renting a car just to go sit in a girlfriend’s living room is not something I’m going to go every week—or, for that matter, every month. Most of my husband’s friends have kids, and they are forever having baby showers and birthday parties and Super Bowl parties and et cetera. Sometimes we can take the bus to these events, but these are two-transfer rides with long wait times and infrequent service... Many times, we cannot take the bus to these events and so either have to rent a car or skip the trip...

So, after all that, my question is: Do any other car-free parents have this problem, and if so how do you handle it?"

I wrote a little bit about this a while back, but mostly in the context of new friends. But the existing friends and family are a tougher problem. Some strategies we have are to host events instead of transporting ourselves to other peoples' houses, especially if it's for an activity along the lines of "hanging out in a living room". It's easier for us to feed and host people than it is for us to get to them, and hey, then they don't have to cook, so it's a win for them. For friends with kids who live in the burbs, we sometimes arrange for transit accessible meet ups at kid friendly activities that they'd probably come into town for occasionally anyway (like a trip to the Boston Children's Museum).

But that doesn't really answer the question of the baby shower or the super bowl party, that really is happening at someone else's place, and that someone didn't really consider bus routes when they bought their lovely 4 bedroom in the burbs. One strategy is to increase the threshold for what you consider a true social obligation. If the baby shower is for someone you really care about, and particularly if it is for family, then maybe it is something you need to be there for since a baby is kind of a big deal. The super bowl party might be less of a true social obligation (but keep in mind, I'm not a football fan, so feel free to disagree for your own life). If you decide you really need to be there, one option is to divide and conquer. If only one grown-up goes, you might be able to beg a ride from a driving friend, and lord knows the toddler doesn't want to go anyway. If you can't rustle up a ride ahead of time, go ahead and take the 3 bus trip, knowing you'll probably be able to hitch a ride home since everyone there will be horrified that you didn't drive and will be falling all over themselves to offer you a ride home (just say at moderate volume "oh, I need to head out soon to catch the bus, I've had a great time!" and you'll have 10 offers of a ride...but all of those offers evaporate if a carseat is involved).

The social pressure to maintain tit-for-tat invitations is very strong, but is nearly impossible to maintain for a carfree person (especially a parent of small kids) in a social world that assumes you have a car. These social rules are largely unspoken. It might happen that you gradually come to fewer and fewer parties, and eventually you just aren't invited anymore. Honestly, for some friends, that may not be such an awful thing. I'm sure your old friends are wonderful, but is each and every relationship really one of those friendships meant to last a lifetime? Most friendships do eventually fade, especially once kids are in the picture, and you know, that can be OK (and isn't that kind of what facebook is for?) But some of those friendships are probably ones you really want to maintain and are willing to work for. For these friendships, a little communication is in order.

I'm reminded of a situation with some of our best friends (fortunately, they are the kind that live in walking distance!). We both have 3 y.o. kids, but theirs is a more finicky sleeper. When he was little, he couldn't sleep at our house. He still has a much more rigorous nap schedule. However, our kid was fine sleeping at their house and could be a little more flexible on timing at a younger age. As a result, we frequently ended up going to their place and having our kid nap or even sleep overnight there. We started feeling really bad for never having them over and for eating too much of their delicious food. So, at some point, we actually talked about it. We established that for them, it was easier to just host us than to mess up their kids sleep, so it was OK for all of us if we didn't host as often. Now, that conversation was probably a year and a half ago now, so we should probably have it again, especially since baby nap schedules trump 3-year-old nap schedules and baby R has been added to the mix. Maybe now we can return the favor and feed them (C & D -- let's discuss!). But the point remains, we felt bad for not meeting our social obligations, but there was a good reason for it, and it turned out that there was an arrangement that worked.

Perhaps it's similar for those really close friends who had the audacity to move to the burbs without checking with you, first. Go ahead and tell them, out loud, how truly difficult it is for you to get to them (even though you feel pressure to prove anything can be done by bus) but that you value the friendship and would hate to lose it due to logistical difficulties. Say that you'd really rather host them when you get together or meet at a restaurant or activity in bus range, but let them know that for the really big stuff (the baby shower, the wedding), you'll suck it up and rent a car. If you can actually communicate about the unspoken obligations, you can probably come up with a level of contact that maintains the friendship.

(And congratulations to BusChick and BusNerd on the impending arrival of BusBaby #2!)

Walking like a Tortoise

Most of the time, walking drives me crazy. I am obsessed with efficiency, and walking is slow. I think the one-minute walk to the kitchen at work goes by too slowly. The idea of a treadmill simply boggles my mind. Yes, I know that walking can be peaceful and I'm sure I should be living in the moment, but in the race between the tortoise and the hare, I tend to root for the hare.

When I don't bike into work, I don't have a bike available for the trek from my office in Porter Square down to Lesley's
"south campus" where I teach an afternoon class. It's a solid 13-15
minute walk from door-to-door, but I can get from my office to the
classroom in just seven minutes if I bike. Just
imagine what I could do with those extra five minutes! In fact, it
would be enough time to wolf down some lunch, which I never seem to have time to do on teaching days.


Lately I'm walking much more than I'm biking. I live less than a
mile from work. When I wake up to a cold and icy morning, it's hard to work up enthusiasm for my bike with it's terrible windchill. In the last month or so, Dorea has been having problems with her legs; to give her a break I've been doing both daycare dropoff and pickup. This means that three days a week I take H to day care around 7:30am and pick her up around 5:15pm. It's much easier to walk than to bundle H up warmly enough to ride a bike, so I plod along without my bike like a tortoise.

But as a result of all this walking, I've made a friend. There's a man who commutes on foot in an exactly an opposite pattern from me. When I am headed to Porter Square around 7:45am, he's walking away. When I'm headed away from Porter at 5pm, he's walking back. Over the last month and a half we started to notice each other, then started nodding, then saying a brief hello with a wave. We now have big smiles for each other every morning and afternoon. Running into him is one of the highlights of my day. It's exactly what I love about being carfree, but I never would have met him if I was on my bike. If I don't watch out, I might get hooked by this tortoise lifestyle.

Surviving carfree babyhood

We recently got an interesting comment from Charlotte of Chic Cyclist, on the thread about how we gave up our car. Charlotte writes:

"some vestigial teenager in me clings to the 'option' of having a car somewhere, just in case. I'm going to have to read about how you handled the early months of H's life - my biggest concern is the time between a possible future baby's birth and the point where she can wear a bike helmet."

First of all, gold star to Charlotte for actually considering getting rid of the car. She's in the Boston area, so chances are she and her partner won't even miss it.

That said, she's right to anticipate that if kid(s) are on the horizon, getting through babyhood without the car can be tricky. But if you can do it, the rewards are many (not least of which is not being trapped in a minivan all day every day for the rest of your life).

On the practical front, the impact of parenting on biking and carfree living spans much more than the first year of babyhood that Charlotte anticipates. If you are pregnant, you may or may not feel comfortable biking while pregnant. Yes, yes, I know the Dutch do it, but Dutch roads have space for bicycles and Dutch drivers are probably a bit more deferential to bikers than those in Boston. So far, I have yet to meet a real life pregnant lady who has biked. I don't feel comfortable doing it, for a variety of reasons, so for now, I am T, bus and foot dependent.

Then comes biking with the kid. In the states, conventional wisdom says wait a year, and that felt reasonable to us. In reality, it took us about two years to come up with a bike setup we felt good about, but we could have started much much earlier if we'd gotten our act together. During that first year, you need to make sure that anywhere you need to get with your kid is accessible by foot or public transit, preferably by foot (it's not fun to be the one with the screaming baby on the bus, though see buschick for a mom who is serious about bus riding with a baby). Chances are, in a fairly large city, you'll be able to do this. Choose a doctor close by (there are plenty of them). Restrict to a local search for childcare. If you'll be working outside the home, you can still blast to work on your bike like the old days after you drop off the baby, though if you're anything like me, a new-found sense of mortality may lead you to become a bit more cautious. I certainly relaxed my insistence on all-weather biking once H was born.

And once you finally get the baby on the bike? I'm afraid all is not as blissful as you might hope. It is nice, yes, but you might not get the kind of toddler who wants to sit on a bike for miles at a time. You'll probably feel more cautious about winter biking. Rainy-day biking with a kid takes a lot of gear and preparation, and you may find yourself avoiding it more than you did in your pre-kid days. Once you start biking with your child, you'll also get a lot of flak, from random people on the road, but also from real life friends and family who are anywhere from "concerned" to absolutely livid that you would place your child at risk on a bike. I've written some about my take on the safety (or not) of biking with a kid, but all the thinking and soul searching in the world won't spare you the intrusive advice that you'd all be better off if you just bought the SUV and the giant carseat, and strapped your kid in 24/7.

So if it really is this hard, why do it? Why do the work of navigating pregnancy, babyhood and toddlerhood (perhaps several times) without a car? What, exactly, is the payoff? The payoff is a life in which your entire family is firmly integrated in your local neighborhood and your child isn't made to sit still, strapped in, as you drive endless mindless miles from one thing to the next. The neighbors you meet as you are out walking or regularly frequenting the local park (because it is so close, and you can't really drive to the nicer one a little farther away), become the friends that you call when your whole family is throwing up, but you are out of pedialyte and soda crackers. And if you are already a person who loves the freedom and independence of biking and minimal dependence on a car, isn't that something you want to share with your kid(s)? Life changes when kids come into the picture, but you don't have to leave what matters to you behind. Better to keep the things you love and are proud of, and include your children, even if it's a little inconvenient at first.

Cost of Living in Cambridge vs. the Cost of a Car

One interesting tradeoff that we've used to make our lives car-free is to trade housing costs for automobile costs. The only reason that we can afford to live in a condo in Cambridge, MA, is that we don't have to make any car payments or pay the high costs of maintenance and gasoline. Now, that is not to say that we don't have any transportations costs at all. We pay to ride the subway and the bus, we pay occasionally for the use of a zipcar, and we spend a significant amount of money on our bicycles. But those costs pale in comparison to the cost of car ownership.

Lowering our transportation costs allows us to tolerate an increase in housing costs, hence we can afford to live in an expensive city. We've kept our housing costs as low as possible by living in a 2-bedroom , 660 square foot condominium. We don't have a yard, but we do have many parks nearby (and we live on a private way which sort of functions as a paved yard for kids in the neighborhood). Personally, I like to think of our closest park as a yard that's maintained by the nice people at the Department of Public Works. We're willing to live in a small place in order to be able to live without our car, and we see it as a choice we are making, rather than as a constraint that we are forced to live with.