http://www.ireport.com/ir-topic-stories.jspa?topicId=322520

What if you were car-free?

Countless legislators and environmental groups have called for the United States to reduce its dependence on foreign oil. Do you think it’s possible?

Here’s our challenge: Leave your car at home for one day and show us how you get around. Whether you bike to work, take public transportation to the grocery store, or walk everywhere, we want to see whether ditching your vehicle is a realistic option where you live.

Document your car-free day through video and photos and let us know what it was like. And it you use alternative fuels, let us know. Your story could be featured on CNN.

I have a car-free day every day.

But I do know it’s a lot easier here than it is in most of the US.

Around here you would be pretty much screwed.  Almost everything you might need to survive (except a job) is 1 to 3 miles away.  Minimum.  When it comes to jobs, they can be scattered anywhere along a roughly 11 mile by 5 mile rectangle.  Our public transportation is a joke, with the buses going through each neighborhood 5-7 times a DAY on average. (With almost NO bus traffic between 11am and 3pm.)  i guess it comes from us living in agri-country.  everything is pretty spread out up here…..

This sounds great…I’ll make my children participate, too.  They’ll be so excited to walk 4 miles to Jocelynn’s school (most of the way without a sidewalk along a VERY busy road) in temps that will probably by close to 90 by 8:30 or so!  The humidity will be AWESOME.

On the way home I can stop at the grocery store to pick up some items I need.  After that, my hands will be too full to hold onto little children.  I hope when we get to the part where we’ve got to cross the road (TWICE!) that they’ll have no problem running into traffic!

Later, when I need to run to Target, (cuz surely I can’t take my groceries with me…they’ll need to be refrigerated first)...we’ll walk the 4 miles to the bus stop (again, without sidewalks for most of the journey).  Once we’re on the bus stop, it will take us 5 miles beyond our destination…but I’m sure by this time it won’t be in the 90s anymore…just the upper 80s.  After we cross the overpass, Target will be in our sights!  Then all we have to do is cross 12 lanes of traffic (again, TWICE).

I bet it feels good to reall show our support!  Awesomely awesome.

I think I can detect a possible trace of sarcasm there, Maeg.

Smerk - 01 September 2009 04:10 AM

I think I can detect a possible trace of sarcasm there, Maeg.

  Really?   I thought she was just being really, really supportive.

Yeah, I’ll be glad to get up three or four hours early (at least) to take a bus into the city for an 8am class with eight (18"x18”) project boards and my giant T-square and other regular books.  Then, when I’m trying to leave and I’ve got all of that again and I have to take the rush hour buses down to work with all my stuff, it’ll all be fine.  Not like I would ever forget anything or anything.  After work, my boss would probably drive me home because he’d think the experiment was a dumb idea.  Otherwise, the bus wouldn’t get me home until 9 or 10pm, if that.  I’ve never seen a bus pass the stops out by my apartment except for late at night and early in the morning.

Smerk - 01 September 2009 04:10 AM

I think I can detect a possible trace of sarcasm there, Maeg.

What’s that?  I can’t hear you over how AWESOME this idea is.

That would so not work here either.  We live 25 miles at least from two large cities, and pulling the trailer of lawn mowers behind us to get to the yards that need mowing is just not in my capabilities.  I think there are a lot of places where this would be very possible though, but so much of America is agriculture land, that it’s just impossible.  I don’t think Neo would appreciate my being that close to so many fast moving cars either.  I’m incredibly clumsy, no matter how hard I try not to be.

I’d probably loose weight really fast though if I WALKED the 25+ miles to Starbucks instead of driving there.  Damn that store and it’s delicious iced coffee drinks.

So, in answer to “Do you think it’s possible?”, it’s a ‘no’, then?

Aside from my commute to work, which simply wouldn’t be possible without my car, my ordinary days are pretty much car free.  Around town I generally either walk or use my bicycle.  Nothing for the usual day-to-day needs is more than about four miles away.  The Post Office is about a mile away, the grocery store a couple of miles, the library about a mile. . .I’m usually walking to those (though if I were to go to the grocery store and buy something like a 50 pound bag of potatoes, eight gallons of milk, and half a cow I’d probably want some other arrangement than just walking home carrying them in bags. . .).  It’s only on my irregular excursions to other towns that the car comes into use.  I only need to fill the fuel tank about once a month.

That’s one of the advantages to living in this area.  Because of the geography, everything’s sort of concentrated into the valleys, rather than spread all over the place.  Which is rather convenient for people, seeing as how taxis and passenger trains don’t exist around here and that the only regularly scheduled bus in the region runs for two weeks each year and has two stops.

I could but I ain’t gonna.