Let Go of the Wheel: You’ll Be Happier Once You Ditch Your Car

Issue #29 · A divisive topic that often generates a spicy discussion, particularly when this unsolicited advice is given to Americans.

Hi there, I’m Emily! 🙋🏼‍♀️ For those who are new, here’s a quick catch-up:

Five years ago, I packed my life into a suitcase and hit the road, moving to a new city every few months. Now I write stories about the quirks and realities of living abroad, intertwined with my attempt to create a happy, meaningful life.

Let Go of the Wheel: You’ll Be Happier Once You Ditch Your Car

Let me guess: Upon reading the title of this post, a dozen reasons why you could never go car-free already began racing through your mind. It’s a divisive topic that often generates a spicy discussion, particularly when this unsolicited advice is given to Americans:

• “I’m not walking 3 miles to the grocery store when it’s 106°F in Austin!”

• “Car-free would be impossible with kids. And you don’t have kids so you don’t understand.”

• “How do you expect me to lug home eight bags of soil from Home Depot without my truck?!”

• “I’m not waiting 45 minutes for a bus that might not even show.”

I’ve heard it all, trust me. And the thing is, these are all valid points! Besides NYC and maybe a few other U.S. city downtown cores, the zoning, infrastructure and public transit systems in the United States are simply not conducive to car-free living. Now, I don’t actually expect anyone to up and move from their car-dependent suburban homes immediately upon reading this one little blog post. But I do hope that sharing my experience — how unintentionally going car-free has revolutionized my daily routine — will offer insight into an alternative approach to living, and illustrate why we should consider prioritizing car-free infrastructure and community-oriented neighborhoods.

Let me be clear: I’ve lived the car-dependent lifestyle before.

I drove a personal vehicle for over a decade, doing a 30-minute commute each way to an office park out in the suburbs. My morning routine included the Dunkin’ drive-thru, and lunch breaks alternated between strip mall Chipotle runs and pit stops at Target. Once I conquered rush-hour traffic on the Baltimore Beltway, my evenings involved jockeying with dozens of other drivers in my 2:1 car-to-street space neighborhood.

My old Baltimore rowhome was prime real estate in Federal Hill, walkable to everything you could need — dozens of restaurants, a pharmacy, a gym, a hardware store, a large community market — even the iconic Inner Harbor and Camden Yards were just a 10-minute hop, skip and jump away. Even still, it was an entirely car-brained community: bike lanes were sparse, pedestrians were low priority, and the furthest anyone walked was eight blocks to their car when they couldn’t find a closer space late at night.

It wasn’t until I sold most of my things — car included — and moved to San Francisco that I tested out what life was like without four wheels. Initially this was a temporary decision, assuming I’d eventually start shopping for a new ride with California plates once I got settled. But after three months of relying on BART, Muni and my own two feet, I realized I didn’t actually need — or even want — to replace my car. My traffic-induced stress had disappeared, I was regularly getting 10k (very hilly) steps in, and the lack of car payment, insurance premium and gas tank were perfectly timed, as anyone who has relocated to the pricey Bay Area will understand.

Yes, I occasionally hitched rides with friends, used UberPool during its golden era and relied on Hertz rentals for weekend trips to Lake Tahoe. But my day-to-day weekday routine was revolutionized: the 38R bus straight downtown saved me hours on my commute, I became a regular to the friendly faces at my corner market and wandering everywhere on foot allowed me to form a deeper connection with the city right off the bat.

My move to the west coast was the first step towards my eventual international travels, which has only strengthened my anti-car dependency mindset. Over the past three years, I’ve primarily lived in well-transit-connected cities or small walkable beach towns, and my quality of life has skyrocketed — though it’s the secondary benefits of not owning a personal vehicle that always surprise me most:

• Within an eight-minute walk of my apartment in Valencia, Spain last summer, I had eight different options of where to buy fruit and vegetables: four small grocery stores, three corner produce stands, and of course, Mercat de Russafa, the central community market. I ate fresher and healthier because of this.

• Nearly every single day, I used the city bike-share program to pedal 20 minutes to the beach (90% of which was in protected bike lanes). I enjoyed a daily dose of sun, got a bit of bonus exercise and moved around the city with ease because of this.

• In the small Mexican beach town that is my winter home, my morning coffee rotates between two cafés just a few blocks from my house. The baristas greet me like a regular, and not a day goes by without a run-in with a neighbor or an impromptu chat with a friend. I feel a strong sense of belonging because of this.

What you give up in private fenced-in yards and garage space you make up tenfold in convenience, community and vibrancy. You’ll have opportunities for spontaneous social interaction, better utilization of third spaces and a sense of connectedness to your home that an isolated, car-dependent McMansion in the suburbs simply can’t provide. And I haven’t even touched on the environmental benefits of a car-free lifestyle, because truthfully, it's not one of my motivating factors.

Now, I realize that being mortgage-less, office-less, child-less, and pet-less makes it really easy for me to up and relocate to the other side of the world, to a place where existing car-free infrastructure (and its subsequent quality of life enhancement) already exists. And we can fawn over the pedestrianized Superblocks of Barcelona, the seamlessly efficient Tokyo metro system, or the extensive bike infrastructure of the Netherlands all day, but that won’t accomplish much — because looking at this from a uniquely American perspective, the obvious problem is that somewhere between 50-70% of the population already lives in car-dependent suburban sprawl. Even if we had hypothetical community buy-in to change things, it’s really difficult to build backwards.

So what do we do about it?

For the United States to make a dent in its car dependency, it will take radical, long-term change. We’re so deep in the hole, in fact, that I believe it's more realistic to instead focus on evolving our existing suburban neighborhoods into tighter-knit communities — notice that I specifically didn’t say denser communities. While building vertically, urban infill and densification would still be my personal first choice, I realize that car-culture in the U.S. is simply not going to budge. But by taking a people-first approach (rather than a car-first approach) to our individual neighborhoods on a smaller scale, I believe that we can still create an improved sense of convenience, community and liveliness. Here’s a few ideas:

• Create more centralized third spaces where people actually want to hang out — include playgrounds, dog parks, community gardens, skate parks, picnic areas, outdoor fitness stations and other free amenities that allow people to meet their neighbors and feel a part of their community.

• Redevelop strip malls into pedestrianized “Main Streets” with outdoor seating, fresh food stalls, public event venues and human-centric green spaces — loitering should be encouraged, not forbidden.

• Allow for mixed-use zoning which blends residential, commercial and recreational spaces together, in-turn reducing the need to drive to daily errands and activities for those who do choose to go car-free.

• Shift away from winding, unwalkable cul-de-sac neighborhoods towards those with interconnected grid layouts, wide sidewalks and lots of tree cover.

• Build well-connected, protected bike lanes so that people regularly use them, thereby defeating the flawed “why should we invest in bike lanes if nobody rides bikes?” chicken-or-egg logic.

Car-free zones are not an inconvenience, and the concept of the 15-minute city is not a “war on drivers” — it’s just that I’d prefer to not have to hop on the freeway and wrestle against a cramped Wal-Mart parking lot every time I run out of milk. And it doesn’t have to be all or nothing — even just a 25% reduction in car dependency can help unlock the secondary benefits of car-free living. Let’s encourage healthier lifestyles. Let’s create more community cohesion. Let’s provide safer streets for our children to play in. Let’s improve our quality of life by choosing to design human-centric spaces instead of prioritizing parking lots.

And to those who still disagree, including the stubborn, vocal group of NIMBYs and the auto lobby that regularly shoot down any attempt to invest in public transportation, bike infrastructure, urbanization or pedestrianization, I leave you with one thought: Keep your car. Continue driving everywhere as you currently do — seriously, don’t change a thing about your day to day routine. But hypothetically, if there were fewer cars, less traffic and less congestion on our roads because other people opted to walk, bike or hop on the bus — wouldn’t that also be better for you?

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Recommended related posts:

• Stacking the Happiness Odds in Your Favor — Thoughts on the domino effect that results from the decision of where we choose to live.

• Societal Pressure Escape Velocity — For those who like the idea of ditching your car and want to take their unconventional lifestyle one step further.

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