Special Series
The Year of Living Car-lessly Experiment
In a Series
No Box
Cars are boxes. They’re boxes on wheels with couches inside. They’re extensions of our living rooms, mobile privacy pods, where the driver gets to choose the music, company, temperature, and schedule.
So, for a newly car-less family like mine, one main change in shedding our box—the “car-coon”—is spending less time in private space and more time in public.
The effects include both gains and losses.
No Box means no insulation from unpleasantness: Amy saw a bus rider start screaming at the driver one day, and Gary actually had to call the police (on his car-less cellphone) when a rider got especially belligerent. My own pet peeve is the tobacco smoke I must breathe while traveling certain sidewalks—sidewalks where smokers take refuge from Washington’s workplace cigarette ban.
The True Cost of Car Crashes
Even a fender bender can have a big impact on your week, and your wallet. But more serious crashes are taking their toll on the Northwest--car crashes are the leading cause of death of northwesterners under the age of 45, killing about 5 people a day in the region and injuring many more. These individuals tragedies add up to staggering proportions--2,000
deaths a year in the Northwest and an economic drain of more than $8 billion
per year.
We've created a counter that shows the high personal and economic toll of our car-centered lives adding up in real time for the Northwest:
Even if your life has never been affected by an accident (and you'd be one of the few), it's a strong argument for building cities that give people other options than driving (the more you drive, the higher your risk), and provide access to transit (mile of mile, the bus is 10 times safer than driving). Here are some of the ways we can get there.
