JUNE : BEEP BEEPS (Driving)

Way back in June, I set out to give up driving my car. 

Before you go assuming this meant I needed to be chauffeured around like some kind of sultan, let me clarify. 

My goal was to abstain from Single Occupancy Vehicle (SOV) transportation, meaning I couldn’t drive myself anywhere if I was the only one in the car. 

As someone who has made a living in the bike industry for over twenty years, it should come as no surprise that I already consider the bicycle a viable form of transportation. What you may NOT know, is that I actually love driving. I love it. It’s so easy, effortless and efficient. You never break a sweat. You don’t have to change clothes. You can carry just about anything without needing a single Voile strap. It’s amazing. I like short drives. I like long drives. I like running errands, one after the next. I love loading up the family and transporting us all safely from one place to another. In some circles I associate with, this would be blasphemy, but it’s the truth. As long as I can just ignore the fact that our entire planet is incredibly, indelibly and irreparably harmed by our species’ unrelenting use and abuse of fossil fuels, I think driving is pretty cool.

(Pause for existential dread)

(and we’re back). 

So why did I choose to give up driving? 

To ride more. 

To remind myself what life would be like on a bike. 

To reacquaint myself with the value/cost of a trip.

To challenge myself to carry whatever I needed to carry.

To refresh my appreciation for a functioning car. 

To put my life where my mouth is. 

By day, I work for PeopleForBikes, the leading bike advocacy organization in the country. We work to create new and better bike infrastructure and pro-bike legislation across the country because bikes are good for people, good for communities and good for the planet.

If anyone should be riding their bike for transportation, it’s me, right?

On the surface, my current lifestyle lends itself quite well to giving up my car. I work from home, I have an ever-shrinking social life, the weather in Wisconsin is wonderful in summer and just about anything I need can be delivered to my doorstep within a few days.

Since I have a family, I didn’t give up driving entirely. I permitted myself to drive other people, and if there was no other option, I could drive by myself if the goal was to pick up one of our kids. I didn’t want the abstinence to be a burden on anyone but myself. At first, I thought I’d abstain from driving if we were all piling into the car, but I didn’t like the way that felt, and Anna doesn’t particularly love driving, so after a few days, I just got in the driver seat if we were going somewhere as a family. 

A decade ago, when we lived in a small town in Illinois and I was running the bike shop, it was feasible to use the bike as my primary mode of transportation. Work was a mile away, the grocery store was a mile in the other direction. We could cart our tiny kids around in a trailer to play at the park or visit friends. In the mid-00’s, I challenged our entire staff at the bike shop to lock up their keys for a month and commit to living life by bike. It was a challenge, for sure, and while my staff shared the love of bikes, some of them were a little wrankled by the commitment. We locked our keys in a countertop display case near the register (It was a great conversation starter). We were inspired by stats like “over half of car trips in America are less than 3mi, and 28% are less than 1mi”*. We wanted to live out our belief that you could live a car-free life in a small town. I remember enjoying the challenge, but I also remember it being a burden on my family. I also remember the entire staff being very happy to get their keys back at the end of the month. 

When we moved to our current home, 10mi west of the city center of Madison, we inadvertently traded bike-ability for natural beauty. We are out on the edge of town. It feels more rural than suburban, even though town is only 3mi away. There are two ways to get to town from our house. One is a state highway. The other is a beautiful road… straight up a big hill. It’s enough of a hill that roadies come out and use it for repeats. It’s a great way to warm up for a ride, but it’s typically more effort than one wants to exert to go grab a gallon of milk. It’s not particularly wide and the sight lines aren’t great around the curves. It’s certainly affected the way we ride as a family. We don’t do many family bike rides from home. My kids don’t/can’t/won’t/shouldn’t ride bikes to school, work, or friends’ houses. It’s simply not realistic for us to go car-free and rely on bikes completely. 

Even so, I was a committed bike commuter for many years. When I worked in an office downtown, I rode regularly, often stacking up 20-30 commuter miles in a day throughout the year. For a while, unless I was riding singletrack, most of my rides had a purpose or destination. After the pandemic and a job change, I started working from home full-time and my commuter miles evaporated. I still ride into town from time to time, for coffee or just for a change. I miss those bigger commuting days sometimes. 

I thought this abstinence would give me a good reason to get on my bike to run all my errands. While I did replace some car-trips with bike trips, I often talked myself out of the trip entirely. I just didn’t go. I put things off or did without. So, in that sense, I failed. But that’s ok. I still rode errands on my bike. I still rode to some gatherings. The abstinence successfully refreshed my perspective(s) on bike transportation. There are great benefits to riding your bike more. There are also many times when bike trips don’t make the most sense. 

Time didn’t allow me the luxury of riding my bike a couple times, so to make sure my abstinence didn’t burden other people, I drove. I didn’t ride my bike to meet up with friends one night, because the restaurant was 80 miles away. I drove. Chicken feed comes in 50lb bags. I ran that errand in my car. Oh well. Of all the abstinences so far this year, I probably broke this one the most. 

That’s fine. I wasn’t mad at myself. One sub-goal for this month was to give myself a break. I needed an easy abstinence, and one of the things that made it easy was an extra helping of grace. This whole 12 Abstinences thing has been really interesting this year, but now that I’m halfway through, I am feeling a little fatigued. It’s not that any one abstinence was super difficult, but the culmination of keeping it up all year is starting to wear me down a little. This abstinence was low stakes. I could eat normal, act normal, entertain myself as normal. I just couldn’t drive myself places. 

In terms of giving myself a break, this abstinence was a success. 

This abstinence highlighted the fact that a car-free life requires more commitment than most people can make, and that empathy that can be applied in my bike advocacy. The car-less life isn’t feasible for most of America, but the less-car life can be a great thing. Swapping out short car trips with short bike trips can have a positive impact on your fitness, headspace and outlook. I’m glad I challenged myself this way and would encourage you to try it, too. 

Thanks for reading. 

*this exact stat is from the Dept of Energy in 2021, but the stat hasn’t changed much since the early 2000’s.