Christina Goes Carless

A couple posts ago I recounted a frustrating and discouraging bus experience, and while I think it’s important to be completely honest in this blog about my transition to carelessness, I’m concerned I may have given the impression I don’t support or endorse Phoenix’s Valley Metro system. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love Phoenix and frequently tell anyone who asks about being carless how great Phoenix’s public transportation system is.  I defend the city’s transit system ad nauseum online on multiple social media platforms including Quora, Facebook and Nextdoor. I point naysayers towards My Sidewalk forums  asking for user feedback and whenever possible give concrete examples of how that feedback is integrated with the city’s transit plans. So it seems like a post listing everything I respect and like about the city’s public transit system is in order.  Scroll down for the listcicle; keep reading for the context. Why people think it suck...

I've already rhapsodized about the childlike bliss of rediscovering bike riding in a previous post , so I'll try to rein that in this time. But now that the Hubby and I have had our bikes for a couple weeks, suffice it to say I love biking more with every ride, even though I did take a few (well, three to be exact) minor tumbles as I learned to adjust to my Electra Townie Commute 8D 's step-through frame. The Hubby got the Electra Loft 7i , which suits him uncannily well. If you'd like to know more about riding that bike, let me know and I'll have him write a guest post. The Bike As always, allow me to remind readers that I am not a "serious" cyclist, just a girl trying to go carless. I am, however, a conscientious consumer and chronic researcher, so long before we turned in our 2014 Nissan LEAF I had spent countless hours researching bikes that would be best for my urban commuter/errand-running/ we're-serious-picnickers needs. But first,...

Being carless isn’t all healthy walks and eco-savings . The truth is sometimes it can just plain suck. Two recent bad experiences I’ve had have underscored this, though I’m still trying to remain positive. But I want this blog to be an exercise in a loose form of radical honesty , so it’s only right to post about the negative experiences as well. So, without further ado I present the cluster of what should’ve been a no-transfer, 15-minute ride turning into a two-hour ordeal. The jarring reality check of an unplanned stop A couple of weeks ago I was riding down Thomas Road from 40 th Street (i.e., the gym) to home, which means my destination was Thomas and 52 nd Street. It’s a short ride, with relatively few stops and the walk home from the stop in front of the slightly sketchy Shell station on 52 nd Street and Thomas is mere tenths of a mile. My short, nomally direct route. Today, however, the bus driver abruptly turned right off of Thomas Road and pulled...

When I was 18 years old, my parents got me driving lessons from a slightly sketchy but very cool driving instructor who taught me “defensive driving”. It turns out my initial instincts about my driving ability were spot on: the instructor said I would be OK, but that driving sure didn’t come naturally to me.  Boy, was he right. I always hit the curb when parking and have a tendency to bump stationary objects. Within a week of purchasing my first grown-up car after graduating college, a 2008 Dodge Stratus, I had scraped all four sides of it while attempting to successfully turn into my apartment's one-car garage. Still, especially as a print reporter in rural Nevada, and later at newspaper 50 miles away from my home in Arizona, there was no getting around driving. The day it occurred to me that now I work from home and most of our regular haunts are 5 miles (or less!) away, I felt like I’d had the kind of epiphany that changes the course of mankind. Maybe, just ma...

The GRID bike bay at Sloan Park in Mesa, Arizona. I’d forgotten that when riding a bike, there is always a light breeze blowing on your face. Riding a bike transforms ordinary street infrastructure like parking lots into playgrounds and double-dog-dare-you obstacle courses. Curbs become invitations for mildly courageous feats, like yanking the handlebars up just as the front tire leaves pavement in an attempt to land on the street under the curb with only the bike’s back wheel. To ride a bike, even if only at moderate speed, is to grab velocity's hand and tweak gravity’s nose as you both ignore its incontestable authority. Bike riding is a joyous act of rebellion against physics itself. As I rode, even though I remained firmly on the ground, I still had the giddy, happy sense that although this wasn’t actually flying, it surely must have something to do with it. How had I forgotten that? It took only a few minutes for everything I’d forgotten I loved about bi...

What this blog IS This blog chronicles the (mis)adventures of an unathletic, overweight, clumsy woman in her mid-30s going carless in Phoenix, Arizona. That may not seem like a blog-worthy big deal, but I haven’t ridden a bike in any real sense in at least 20 years and haven't had to use public transport since I was a teenager. I'm also not great at reading maps and by "not great" I mean "totally incompetent". I am  pretty handy, being a fountain pen tinkerer and take-apart-the-toaster kind of gal, so I'm actually looking forward to learning about bike maintenance, but I suspect there will still be plenty of surprises in store. I'd like this blog to be useful to other people considering going carless who may not already be an avid cyclist. Whatever I learn, and how I learn it, you'll learn too by reading this blog. To prepare for this rather major transition, I’ve been doing a lot of research. That in and of itself has been an ey...