Guest blog by Rob Greenland aka The Soc Biz
Ahead of this week’s In Town Without My Car Day we’ve been exploring travel in all it’s glorious forms…
On a crisp new year’s day morning in 2010 I made a resolution:
For once, it’s a resolution that I stuck with. We had a fairly vague notion that we wanted to be more green, and it felt like one of the main things we had control over was how we got around as a family.
We looked at the car’s logbook – and over the past five years we’d pretty consistently driven 10,000 miles a year. So we decided to keep track of our mileage – to see if we could get that figure down a bit.
We started to try to use the car less – by basically stopping to think about each journey we were about to take. Was it viable to walk, cycle or take public transport? If it was viable, we chose an alternative.
We were helped by the fact that we ended up living in the city centre for six months whilst we tried to buy a house. Suddenly the car wasn’t on our doorstep – but decent public transport was. I think that helped wean us off the just-jump-in-the-car habit.
Fast forward to 2011. Where we’d been regularly doing 10000 miles a year, we did 7000 that year. A fairly big change – and we were beginning to edge towards the level of car usage where you can begin to question whether it’s worth owning a car at all.
So we continued to keep track of when we used the car. By now we weren’t using it at all during the week (neither of us needs a car for work) and some weekends we used it for no more than an hour or two. Of course, we still needed a car for holidays, visiting family etc – but we were very much aware that it’d sit on the drive, unused, for days at a time.
In October 2011 we finally took the plunge. We’d moved house by then. Partly by accident and partly by design, we’d ended up somewhere which made it easier to be car-free – 5 minutes from decent bus routes, 10 minutes from my son’s school. So we sold the car.
How have we got on since? Most of the time we get the bus, sometimes we cycle, sometimes we walk. And when we need a car we hire one – weekends and holidays from Enterprise, and odd hour here and there from City Car Club.
We’ve been keeping track of what it’s cost us so far – and getting around has cost us, as family, an average of £450 a month. £250 on car hire and fuel, the rest on public transport.
To be honest I’ve been surprised at how much we’ve spent. Over £2,000 on car hire seems a lot. But how does that compare to the cost of owning a car? The finance I might need to buy one in the first place. The MOT and servicing. New tyres. Fluffy dice. Replacing the radio when it gets pinched because I don’t want to lose my treasured no claims bonus. I don’t have any of those costs – or the hassle that comes with car ownership – any more.
But it’s not just about the money. I can’t stand car culture and I’m glad to have taken a step back from it. I don’t like how we’ve ended up planning our cities around the car – how a motorway cuts my city in half, or how people drive out to identikit shopping centres whilst a characterful city-centre struggles to survive. I’m not part of all that any more, and I like it that way.
Our lifestyle has genuinely changed as a result. We do all the things you might expect. We walk more up and down our street. The neighbours I know are mainly those who also walk. We shop more at local shops. And – this is one thing I find most interesting – we go into Leeds city centre a lot more – as that’s the easiest place for us to get to. I think that’s a good thing.
I’m not suggesting going car-free is for everyone. We waited til my son was at school – we’d have struggled before then. But I certainly think it’s worth asking yourself the question – do I really need to own a car to get around?
Rob Greenland runs Social Business Brokers – the people behind #leedsempties – and he blogs at http://www.thesocialbusiness.co.uk/
The Culture Vulture are running a lunchtime event Friday 21st September – free of charge with Metro Book here if you are interested