I have been having a debate with a friend who is quite militant in their belief that I should not own a car.

I can see his point - the consumption of oil, the pollution of the environment, the detrimental effect on personal fitness are all valid arguments against owning a car. I just can't imagine getting a weeks worth of groceries home on a bus, or paying for taxis regularly. I'd have to give up almost all of my social life and hobbies. My family, work and study would be impacted through time loss at the very least.

I agree with his ideal of a carless society, but I can't see why I, as an individual in my circumstances, would put myself at such a practical disadvantage when the big picture benifits are so small.

Given the recent increase in fuel prices and the ongoing debate about peak oil and climate change, it might be something that is worth discussing.

I want to ask sluggites;

Do you own a car/Would you if you could?

What are the advantages and disadvantages for you?

What kinds of differences would changing your car ownership status make to your lifestyle? (ie, what would you do differently if you gave up your car/got a car)

(Oh great and powerful Mods; if this looks like POOP, feel free to scoop it)

Some places it is now impossible to live without a car. When you live 20 minutes out in BFE, you don't want to have to hike in case of an emergency. That said, it wouldn't be too much if say, only one or two people per family had a car. Definitely any in the family who work.

If you live in the city, within hiking distance of things, then odds are you may not have to have a car. You could potentially use a taxi to get around in the city, and rent one if you have to go outside the city elsewhere.

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I do currently own a car. It's on a lease - a dark blue Rav 4. It gets good gas mileage, has four wheel drive to get through snow, looks like an SUV but turns like a car. Do I need a car? Honestly, for the moment, I likely do not. Being on college campus, freshman are not allowed cars - thus last year I did without, and was fine. Is it much more convenient? Yes.

I do carpool friends around - some of them either don't have cars, or want to avoid burning gas.

What I would really like to get is an alternate fuel source type of car - hybrid-electric, such as that.

I do not currently own a car (mainly because I am 15), but I'm thinking carefully about buying a moped as soon as I pass my next birthday. I would be interested because I would be able to get myself around very easily, and fuel consumption is very low.
"Where to park a moped" is the main problem I am facing.

However, I imagine it's not easy to move things around on a moped. I will need a car.
My sister has bought a small Suzuki Swift off my parents and is driving that.

It seems that many people around Perth are converting their cars to LPG because of the soaring fuel prices ($1.43A a litre last time I checked), so that might be my best bet. On the other hand, I'm very interested about fuel-electric hybrids and hydrogen-powered cars.

Did you know that the car that led the procession at the 2000 Sydney Olympics was a hydrogen fuel cell car? Unfortunately, it cost a small fortune for them to make.

For me, the biggest disadvantage to owning a car is that you need a place to park it.

This is not as trivial as it sounds, particularly if you're at college or somewhere else, and a parking space doesn't come with where you live.

If you're living in a city that was built before the car, a car isn't as necessary. You can walk to a grocer and pick up small amounts of food and drink as you need it. I live around the corner from a grocery store and do that. And you should be able to bike to work or use public transportation, if you didn't go all silly and get a place 20 miles from work.

If you live out in the boonies, a car becomes more necessary.

If you live in the suburbs, you're silly.

If you live in a city with a good public transportation system and a lot of traffic, it might be the clear rational thing to do not to own a car. Why wait in traffic, pay all that parking money, and spend all that money on gas when you can get places a little slower (In rush hour, maybe *faster*), when you don't have to?

If you need to drive to get to your job, you need a car.

I drive a car because I have to go to school in another city, which is a 20 minute drive, nad bus fair foesn't exist for me to the school and bus travel would be increibly expensive.

But at least I have my mother to get rides with, since she works in that city.

I don't have a car and don't particulary need one due to living in a city with good enough public transport, and supermarkets within walking distance.

There are a few occasions where a car would be convenient, usually when going somewhere outside Vienna.

Should i win the lottery or otherwise get buckets full of money i might by a car and use if for thoose occasons, unless my suspition is correct that it is more ecconomic to rent luxury cars then, rather then owning a cheap one.

I loathe the public transportation system in some of the places I've lived recently (Reno, NV, for example) - one time I spent an hour waiting for a bus, gave up and spent another hour walking home, then discovered that they had changed the schedule. Not to mention that they would be up to 30 minutes late or early, or that they were usually scheduled to arrive about 2.5 hours after I would get out of class late at night.

I also loathe driving in medium/heavy traffic - I used to have a job in Los Angeles that required me to be stuck in traffic for two hours going home each day, regardless of when I left anywhere between 4-7PM. I really needed some sort of autopilot that would just keep me a certain distance from the cars around me and in my lane - the traffic jam was so dense and slow that it probably would have worked fine.

I like cars, but I don't like it when they're required to get around, because usually the traffic volume is more than I like to deal with. I've lived in a few places where we didn't need to use a car (Bothell, Washington, for one), and that was nice.

The fact is that having 1 car per employee isn't manageable in any city. The roads fill up, and the traffic stops moving. Traffic is a lot like a fluid; increase the number of particles in a constant volume and pressure will increase until the fluid solidifies and can no longer flow.

Where I am currently I wouldn't consent to own a car. If somebody gave me one, I'd sell it and stop worrying about tuition money for a few months. Parking is a nightmare, and I flat out can't afford any of the costs associated with a car. I own a bike, and I make that thing work hard. I've discovered that I can bike from the south side of Chicago all the way out to Rush which is on the west side in about the same amount of time it would take me to use the public transit system. And then I haven't got to pay two bucks each way, twice a day all week.

When living with my parents I'd sell the bike to get a car. It's twenty-five minutes by car just to get to the nearest grocery store, and even if I did want to bike it there's no way I could without getting hit by a car.

Frankly, the environment, shortage of fossile fuel, and concerns about global warning only matter to me in so far as the alter the costs for me of owning the vehicle.

On the west side of the Mississippi, public transportation is not nearly what it is on the east side. There's a huge difference in the way the country is built and operates depending on which side of that river you're on.

Albuquerque has approximately three quarters of a million residents. It covers an area somewhere around 20 square miles. You rarely see buidlings taller than four stories around here, and there may only be one or two with more than ten (mostly hotels). The public transportation system in infamously poor, and many people live in the major suburb (Rio Rancho, which refuses to acknowledge it's a suburb, but it is) yet work in the city - a commute of approximately twenty miles or more.

Albuquerque is not that atypical for a city on this side of the Mississippi. Most people over here simply can't comprehend how people in larger cities on the east coast can actually rely on public transportation and never drive a car a day in their lives.

You know, L.A.'s public transportation system used to be the envy of the world. Then it got dismantled and L.A. is what it is today.

I live in Vail, CO. Many people up here do not own cars but then they are forced to rent places to live. It is to expensive to buy a house "in the city" so if you want to buy a place you are so far out of the way to afford a place you need a car to get anywhere.

So by defualt, I make enough to buy a house, therefore I need a car to get from my house to where I want to go.

And finally, all you people with out cars? How do you buy groceries? 1 case of soda/beer would be more than I could ever carry on a bike. When I do grocery shopping I fill my backseat and trunk of my car.

Yes, they/we had the Red Car line, which made travel all over Los Angeles very convenient and fast (my dad remembers riding it). It's claimed that GM was not responsible for the destruction of the Red Car system, as I had believed; unfortunately, it would be nice to have it back now, or a faster, more convenient rail system than we have now. To get to my job I would have needed to make at least one, maybe two train swaps, then walk five miles from the station to my workplace through an extremely hazardous high-crime district, or catch a bus that was going my way. Waiting for the bus going back the other way, after it got dark, was not something I wanted to deal with.

Maybe if there were nice wide or dedicated bicycle lanes; I could use the bicycle for the connector, and the public transit for the really long distances, but as it is, bicycling with the cars in almost any major city* is particularly hazardous to your health, and those narrow little "bike lanes" crammed in alongside rows of parked cars, any of which could open their doors in your path, is just encouraging fatalaties and accidents.

*-With the exception of at least Seattle that I know of, which has separate bicycle paths and the drivers are so used to seeing bicycles that they're expecting them. Safety in numbers, in a way.


When we didn't have a car in Seattle, my family would generally take the bus where we needed to be, load up on groceries (usually two-to-four bags per person, three people total), and then haul them back on the bus and the mile or so (maybe less) from the bus stop to our house. On the odd occasions when we shopped with a bicycle (more often in Forks, WA, out on the Olympic Peninsula), we'd ride to the store, then walk the bike back, using it to help support the bag or two of groceries or whatnot, but we had a station wagon then, so we'd generally use it for larger shopping trips.

Come to think of it, I have seen people with small trailers for their bikes, that could take as much cargo as a small sedan trunk.

The walking could be a bit time-consuming compared to the car, but we needed the exercise anyway, and it was a good combining of tasks. Not that we didn't walk practically everywhere back before the turn of the century anyway - it saved fuel and wear and tear on the car, and kept us sane (I don't know about other people, but I, for one, feel better when I'm getting regular exercise - yet another reason I need to move out of Pasadena and back to a cooler climate, such as Seattle).