Ariel

Week One:

Perfect weather for not having a car! And a bit of fateful event planning. My first weekend as an avowed Walk Ride Sharer was also the weekend of the PennFuture 10th Anniversary gala - an organization dedicated to helping PA break its dependence on fossil fuels and move toward a more sustainable future. I was attending with my boss (my company has worked with PennFuture for several years now, and the two of us agreed to attend more than a month ago). It was also a black tie affair, and the idea of riding a bus in a cocktail dress or hoofing the mile or so walk in four-inch heels was not high on my to-do list, so I took a taxi. Maybe the least environmentally conscious move short of renting a Hummer or chartering a private jet, like Al Gore, that evening's speaker, did (he says he purchases carbon offsets for all the miles he logs).

Sunday, my husband (Alex) and I loaded the baby and an afternoon's worth of the baby's stuff into PhillyCarShare Volvo, which we reserved for the day to meet my family and some friends in Peddler's Village, about an hour north of the city. The Volvo was a really smooth ride, Alex didn't have any problems installing the carseat, and the trunk held the stroller, the ton of stuff we picked up at Target and the two weeks' supply of groceries we picked up on the way home. We live in a highrise in Center City, the kind where parking is, um, nonexistant on the street and really, really expensive in nearby lots, so it was kind of great to be able to drop off the car at one of said expensive lots and be done with it - no $280 monthly payment, no valet to tip, no skyhigh insurance premiums. In a move we've perfected over the last year, we unloaded baby, groceries, and a whole trunk load from a 30 minute loading zone spot in half that much time. Our car, a four year old Subaru we've managed to log 120,000 miles in, is taking a much deserved vacation in the suburbs for the month - out of sight, out of mind. No offense to the trusty Subaru, but it was nice to trade up for a day!

Week Two:

This was a pretty travel-heavy week for me. I’ve been walking to work for the last 2 years, so commuting is really a non-issue for me. When I’m not commuting, though, I travel with a one-year-old, so biking is not so much an option, and sharing a car involves installing a car seat every time.

On Tuesday, Alex (my husband, still complaining about not having a car), and I took the day off to take the baby to the Philly Zoo. I have started hanging out on SEPTA’s site, planning hypothetical routes on the trip planner, so I had learned that the #38 would take us from Love park to the zoo. I’m not sure if the bus was late or I read the schedule wrong, but the zoo isn’t real strict about timeliness, so waiting for the bus wasn’t a huge deal. The baby flirted with our elderly fellow passengers contentedly for the 20 minute ride, and the driver was kind enough to give us precise walking directions (it’s a mile or so from the stop to the zoo, but a straight shot). After a full day of walking, Alex wanted to take the scenic route home, so we walked back to Center City through Fairmount Park. According to our new pedometer, we logged 6.5 miles. I’ve gotta go get those Pumas, cause my feet were killing me.

On Friday, I had a morning conference at the Union League, and then I took the Keystone to Harrisburg for an afternoon conference. Amtrak is a really easy way to travel, pretty comfortable, and I was able to walk to the conference from the train station and take SEPTA home from 30th Street Station.

On Saturday, we walked the mile and a half to baby’s Gymboree class and Sunday, we walked in the Breast Cancer Race in Fairmount. My in-laws visited from North Jersey on Saturday afternoon and we “cheated” a bit by borrowing their car to run to the Babies R Us in the suburbs while they babysat. I rationalized it thusly: it saved them from having to pay for parking, and it saved us from having to negotiate public transit with giant boxes of diapers and such. It still made me appreciate how good we have it living in the city – it’s so much easier getting around here without being entirely reliant on a car.

Week 3:

No car whatsoever this week, and it feels good!

After testing out virtually all of Philly’s transit options last week (intensive walking, bus, train) we morphed into tourists and rounded out the experiment with the Phlash trolley and the Riverlink ferry this weekend. The Phlash is always a fun way to get around, and we took it to Old City to meet friends for dinner on Friday, and then again to Penn’s Landing on Saturday to pick up the ferry to Camden Aquarium. The ferry was great – the baby loved it and it was a nice, if touristy, way to get to the Aquarium without having to actually go to Camden. No offense if you are a Camdenite, but, I’ll be taking the ferry and otherwise avoiding your, um, great city, if I can help it. The ride back coincided with an exodus of sorts – every teenage suburbanite from all reaches of the Main Line had overdosed on mascara and glitter, put on their lowest cut tanktops and were boarding the ferry to the Kanye West concert. Fortunately, we were heading in the opposite direction and narrowly avoided the deluge.

We also got our first vegetable delivery in our CSA share from Lancaster Farms this week, our latest step in trying to live more locally, and picked it up on foot, no big deal. I picked up my new Pumas! They held up well at the Aquarium and walking back home from Penn’s Landing, but I’m not quite as enamored as my fellow Walk Ride Sharers. I’ll have to break ‘em in a little more and let you know!

Week Four:

A quick overview of a week in the life of the carless. Caught a ride with a colleague to an event downtown on Thursday night, and spent the entire ride waxing poetic on the virtues of carsharing. And then, um, took a taxi home. Oops. We booked a BMW on Saturday for a family BBQ, and I could really get used to that! Such a smooth ride! On Sunday, walked to the grocery store, baby in tow, and loaded up a week's worth of food into our granny cart. The whole process went surprisingly well and was much less stressful and time-consuming than our usual Sunday morning drives to the suburbs. The Monday plan is to take the bus to the Zoo. On Wednesday I will be taking the Keystone to Harrisburg again, and next weekend we will attempt to travel, my husband, the baby, my mother, and I, to Williamsburg for the week (work conference for me, colonial sightseeing for them). I booked the Sienna minivan well in advance, so we could travel in comfort and abundant trunk space. Wish me luck!

All in all, we have been doing a huge amount of walking. Not having the car here has been strangely liberating, and I feel like we are finally, FINALLY embracing the city lifestyle. And the punchline - this week ends our participation in walk ride share, but not our experiment in living the carfree life. We have decided to sell our car, not look back, and keep on keeping on!

Week Five:

Another ride out to Harrisburg on the Keystone, where a friend picked me up from the Amtrak station and brought me to a conference on renewable energy. It is difficult not to feel a bit righteous listening to a room of industry folks bemoan how other people aren’t doing enough to stem human impact on the environment and knowing you are the only one in the room who didn’t drive there alone, with the air conditioning blasting. Took the hotel shuttle back to the train station – bonus – it was going there anyway to drop someone else off.

I think I’ve burned more than my share of fossil fuels this week, tho. Booked PCS’ minivan for five days to take my husband, my mother, and the baby down to Williamsburg. The minivan is nice. A little too nice. My fossil fuel addicted husband, who just last week was sold on the idea of selling our Subaru and living a more pedestrian life, now wants to move to the suburbs and buy a minivan. He describes the ride as like “driving on clouds”. The seats in the minivan seem intentionally designed to accommodate the morbidly obese, and on the ride down, checking out the hundreds of other minivans on the road, we realized how well the manufacturers know their target demographic. I can see this happening to us if we never have to walk anywhere again. Upon arriving in Williamsburg, we accidentally disembark at the wrong hotel and ask the bellman if our intended destination is walkable. “Oh, no,” he explains, our hotel is “at least a quarter mile down the road.” And anyway, why would we want to walk if we can just drive? We walk the distance (considerably shorter than a quarter mile) and wonder how much longer the air here will be breathable. Also, we blew $100 in gas on the drive down. Maybe we’ll look into buying a minivan when they make an electric 8-seater.

Anyway, the month-long experiment in carlessness has officially come to a close, but the Subaru will stay in indefinite “park” for now.