Car Free Year in Review

Okay. I know it's been months since the last update, but let's just forget all that, say I was too busy busing it to blog, and celebrate the fact that my car-free year has come and gone, and I am still sans car. A little recap of the highs and lows of saying goodbye to Cecelia and taking to the streets by foot:

Highs

• Emissions. What emissions?
• 15 novels, 30 magazines and 12 gazillion daily newspapers.
• 4 fiction stories written, revised, written again.
• Daily exposure to humans who don't all look, act, talk, smell the same as me.
• Zipcaring to the Shenandoah cabin and beach camping.
• My first trip on a Chinatown bus to NYC.
• Bicycle love.

Lows

• Scary mean bus driver. She yelled. I trembled, got mad, composed letter in my head recommending she take up a new line of work.
• Missing every single happy hour that ends before 8 p.m.
• Missing my car. I still sometimes miss my car. So sad, so true.
• Carsick woman vomiting on my shoe on the bus.
• Getting carsick on the bus and wanting to vomit on the shoe of the woman next to me.
  

Bicycle, Bicycle, Beer!

Two items on the bicycle commuting front:

The Europeans are at it again with their smarty-pants ideas about getting around car-free. On Sunday, Paris launched a huge new bike-sharing scheme, putting 10,600 bikes into circulation around the city. Now Parisians and tourists can Le Tour around the famous city car-free.

Way to go, Paris.

Second on the list: Beer and Bikes.

My favorite hometown brewery, New Belgium Brewery (makers of the famous Fat Tire), have a wicked fun new website (http://www.folllowyourfolly.com/).

Who said that dioramas were passe? Not me.

Well, New Belgium is looking for a few good riders to take up the very same mission that yours truly embarked on last year. Give up your car for a year. Get a new bike.

In exchange, New Belgium might give you a shiny New Belgium original bike. If they don't, drink their beer anyway. It's tasty. (If you can get it, that is. I can't. They don't distribute here. Sigh. Stupid quality control and microbrewery local principles. I will just have to satisfy myself with Dogfish Head until a trip home.)

So anyway, if you live in any of the following cities, then go here to put your hat in the ring:

Denver
Truckee
Seattle
Portland, OR
Boise
Missoula
Durango
Ft. Collins
Flagstaff
Tempe
Austin

Additional Resources:

• Funny good book on beer and social change: Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World

Strategies for the Car Free Summer Vacation

Sure, sometimes I long for the wide open roads of the West and an old-fashioned, stop and eat foot-tall banana cream pie in every diner between here and Tallahassee, road trip.

But as summer dawns, and my feet get to itching (oh how they itch!), I've managed to get out of town a couple of times already without owning a car. It can be done, and truth-be-told, these little getaways were far easier than I might have expected. Local getaways tend to be less expensive and come with a lighter footprint than the carbon-heavy globetrotting.

I can't help but lust after Lonely Planet guidebooks for far-flung locals, but from here on out, I may take a note from my parents and find an alternative way to go. (Girl on Foot's parents spent nearly six months traveling by bicycle in the western United States and Canada last year. They literally rode away from their house, headed north, and didn't look back. It's how they tend to take most of their vacations ... making the planet healthier and riding laps around me)

Okay, back to strategies for small summer escapes:

Ride Your Bike Anywhere

In the great tradition of Girl on Foot's parents, roll on out of town.

Unzip Beach Camping

We zipped our way to camp at Assateague and hauled along bikes for getting around once we were there. Car-sharing at its best. (I swear, Zipcar doesn't pay me. It just makes sense.)

Ticket to Ride

In order to meet up with my honey and her mom at a bed and breakfast in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, I checked into train schedules. Sure enough. I can get there via Amtrak or the local commuter train. The places trains and buses go blow my mind. And for car-free folks, they are your ticket out of town.

Carpool to Shenandoah National Park

I teamed up with some generous friends to carpool to the mountains for a little volunteer work and hiking. We weeded some invasive species, took a four-mile hike, and got poison ivy. Good times.

The Green Turtle Adventure Bus with Hippie Roots

I have never ridden the tortoise buses, but I mention it because it's so funny and original and I want to do it.

http://www.greentortoise.com/

Other Resources:

• Train: http://www.amtrak.com/
  
• Bus: http://www.greyhound.com/
  
• Chinatown Buses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_bus_lines
  
• Bike Trails: http://www.traillink.com/

Smells Like...

An upside (98% of the time) of commuting by foot is that I'm far more sensitive to the details. No more so when I'm sitting next to a man who has been living on the streets or when I'm walking the last half a mile to the office under a canopy of trees.

Now, when I walk, bike, bus and carpool, it's like exploring a whole new (olfactory) map of the world.

A few of the smells that frequently populate my house-to-office trek include:

• Car and bus exhaust
• Urine (my least favorite, and the most humbling)
• Coffee
• Sun-warmed pine needles (my most favorite)
• Pizza
• Body odor (ranging everywhere from sweat-soaked spicy to downright funky)
• Just-cut grass

France Has Best (Bike) Idea Ever

In my attempt to learn more about other forms of transportation and resource sharing, I ran across this 2006 Wired article detailing a new approach to the old idea (at least in Amsterdam) of public bikes for use in urban areas:

The rent-a-bike scheme, called Vélo'v Grand Lyon, is open to anyone armed with a credit card. It costs 1 euro ($1.20) an hour, but there is no charge for the first 30 minutes. Since 90 percent of trips take less than half an hour, most subscribers pay nothing.

The model resembles that of the fast-expanding car-sharing business on this side of the pond. Which makes sense since, for better or worse (worse, I say) Europeans love bicycles and we Americans love cars.

The bikes have lots of technological bells and whistles (thus, the Wired plug) to keep them from being stolen and to keep Lyonites peddling. Pretty smart marriage of human-powered get-around and edgy technology.

Are you listening Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver ... and all you other big smoggy ol' cities?

Do this. Someone do this. Please.

Girl on Foot...Goes to Canada

My feet, they are tired, eh. But I've discovered a new form of transportation:

Sledding!

Share a Car, Share a Cabin

So Girl on Foot grabbed her honey and got the hell out of town.

We cut out of work early on Friday, packed some grub and fled 96 miles west into the Shenandoah mountains.

Without. A. Car. (er, sort of).

After going car-free some months ago, I became a member of both Zipcar and Flexcar, two of the major national car sharing companies with brilliantly green business plans based on the idea of helping folks like me (and you) get around. Like a rental company, but 1 billion times more convenient and less corporate-feeling. It's a slightly more complicated version of Amsterdam's famous bike share scheme.

So, we checked out our car and braved sleet, snow, bumpy roads and the occasional wrong turn (I can totally reverse over the tiny bridge in the snow in the dark ... no problem) to get to our cabin. We reserved the cabin, nestled in a hollow on the edge of Shenandoah National Park, from the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, of which we have recently become members. We joined up because they are an awesome group, and because you can share a bunch of so-cute-it-hurts cabins that cure you of the city faster than you can say Paul Bunyan.

So, the theme of the weekend (other than finding the outhouse, listening to mice plot their revenge on humanity in the walls, and sawing downed wood until my hands cramped) was sharing. Just like Kindergarten.

We even shared in the cabin log book, where the woman who'd stayed before us has recorded some really incredible soul-searching thoughts about her life, her dog, and the recent death of her mother. Big stuff. There was also a little too much sharing done in the log by a visiting Ice Capades troupe (I'm not making this up), and a man who went into far more detail than I would have liked about the effect of the cold on his, er, anatomy.

All in all, it was a great adventure. Good, clean fun. And while it did involve some travel by car, rest assured, it was a shared car.

The (Not So) Happiest Place on Earth

In Colorado, where I grew up, most ski resort towns find themselves with the exact same problem that recently prompted Disneyland to conjure magical teams of lawyers charged with putting the kibosh on condo development close to the fantasyland. The sand in Micky's shorts seems to stem from planned condos (some zoned for affordable housing) intended to shorten the commutes for workers. AP reported:

Housing advocates say the units are desperately needed to accommodate workers who are essential to the city's huge tourism industry but can't afford to live there. Many workers spend at least four hours a day commuting from outlying areas where rent is cheaper.

It was the four hours a day that caught my attention, since that's about what I spend commuting. I'm pretty content to catch up on NPR and my reading in that chunk of time, but I, however, am not working for minimum wage or trying to raise a family.

New urbanism and mixed-use communities, it seems, have nothing on Mickey's "magic." The folks over at DisneyCo must not have seen National Geographic's cool New Urbanism interactive ... which is surprising, because it's animated and cartoony. (See, learning IS fun.)

"Disney's position is, this is our brand, we have a brand image to protect," said Cynthia King, director of the Center for Entertainment and Tourism at California State University, Fullerton. "People have an expectation, and you can't really hold that against them."

Well. Um. Sure I can. Especially when their brand of magic is bad for workers, families, and the health of the environment.

More Learnin'

• National Geo's "The New Suburb?"
• Colorado's resorts start to get a clue: NPR's "Low Income Resort Housing"
• New West Network: "Affordable Housing Woes Plague Colorado Resort Region"

Slug Lines

Don't know what "slugging" is? I didn't either until a few weeks ago when a (far more hip) fellow car-free commuter put me in the know.

Slugging is modern day hitchhiking for the common commuter. Awesome! You wait in a designated spot, and someone in a car comes by and picks you up. Why would they pick you, a total stranger, up? So they can get into the HOV lane. No muss. No fuss. Just a ride on the fly.

This is so cool. I can't wait to try it, or better yet, try to start a slug line for my office.

Check it out: DC/Virginia Lines: http://www.slug-lines.com/

Oh, a few points of etiquette:

• Don't speak unless spoken to
• Don't use your cell phones
• A slug line doesn't leave a woman standing alone (yeah, old-fashioned chivalry)
• No "body snatching" - you have to read the full rules and etiquette list to figure out what this means.

So go forth, commuters, and slug!

Don't Let 'Em Get You Down

I hoof it no less than a mile or two a day to get to and from work (by foot that is...that doesnt include the 60 or so miles covered by metro and bus). When I bike from the metro, I ride 5-10 miles a day.

Now...on days like today, when I am tired of the city; and the sidewalks; and slush, cars, pollution, noise, cranky commuters, angry bus drivers, work clothes, cubicles, meetings (sweet jesus, why so many meetings?), I like to imagine that I'm not slogging through the city just to get to work. No. I'm actually training for a mountain trek. Yeah. Conditioning for a summer backpacking trip out West. Where I belong.

So, in an effort to cheer myself up, here is a daily dose of the Tetons in all their glory:

Now, time to head home...I mean, train for an outting in the wildnerness.

Socks for Sale

I discovered a new* bus that cuts cross town and goes a ton of places I often want to go. Which is great.

Also on this bus; a dude selling socks. Two packages for five bucks. A pretty good deal.

I have small feet, so I didn't bite (sock tip: socks sold in bulk, even on buses, are never small), but it did get me wondering ... why isn't there more of this? And why, oh why, can't there be someone selling coffee on the bus in the morning? I mean, I know that drinking and eating are a no-no on Metro, but I would be a smarter, nicer, more considerate, and overall better rider with a fresh, hot cup of coffee in my hand. I probably wouldn't even think unkind thoughts about the woman on the bus with ugly-as-hell-what-were-you-thinking-those-killed-several-animals Ug boots with the fur tassel balls.

In case you are listening, sock dude. Two for five bucks, huh? I'd pay it for coffee.

*By "new" bus, I mean new to me. The 90 bus has been serving the people of D.C. far longer than I've even been living here. I didn't mean for a minute to imply that the bus didn't exist before I hopped on for the first time. How very egocentric that would have been. Totally unlike a blog all about how I get to and from places.

When We All Agree to Shut Up for Five Minutes

Every couple of years, I have a near-religious experience during my commute. This oh-so-rare moment in morning madness is precipitated by everyone on the bus or metro car (and I'm talking 30-50 people here) agreeing that it is far too early in the morning to:

• talk to each other
• talk on our cell phones
• tote around any infants or children that make noise
• turn up our iPods to "broadcast mode" (even though I'm sure everyone wants to hear more of The Mountain Goats and This American Life...they just don't know it yet.)
• laugh, cry, fart, curse or otherwise do anything other than sit quietly and get where we are going

These bizarrely silent moments are always unexpected, never last very long (5 minutes tops), and when you think about it, completely amazing. Fifty people! Being absolutely quiet in a public space without being told to.

It floors me. And it renews my faith in humanity. Maybe the sentiment is over the top, but I'm not kidding. This kind of thing can't be orchestrated. And it happened to me this morning.

Good stuff.

How to Wake Your Dead Car

Whether you've got Irish blood coursing through your veins or not, I recommend a traditional (or non-traditional) wake to help ease one's passing into car-lessness.

What you need:

An Irish bar
An open tab
Indulgent friends
Money for the jukebox
A photo of your recently-deceased car (optional)

What you do:

Gather in said Irish bar. Order drinks of choice (beer and whiskey recommended). Play music that you used to listen to in your car.

Toast your car again and again. Reminisce on all the good times had in your car. Tell the story about the great sex had in your car. About the punk cop who busted you having sex in your car. Tell the one about getting stuck in the mountains. Or the mud. Or the one about getting locked out of your house and having to sleep in your car. Whatever your stories are, tell them. Toast them.

Make your friends tell stories. Talk about how much you will miss your car. It's okay. No political correctness here. Just let it out. You loved your car. You will miss your car. You will be reducing your carbon footprint, sure. But for now, its okay to just get piss drunk and feel shitty about your dead car.

Go home. Wake up, hungover, but happier to be car-free.

I Resolve to Give Up My Car. No, Really

It's been months since I decided to give up my car. I cancelled my insurance. I decided to donate the car to my local public radio station. (It's not worth selling. Besides, I don’t want to know who's driving my car around. It would be too sad. Really, it's better this way.)

Months later, my car is still parked two blocks from my house, collecting dust, bird crap and the wrath of my neighbors, who no doubt think that I've abandoned the sad ol' girl, since someone reported it to the city. Crap.

But now it’s the New Year. 2007. My car-free year. It's time to dig up my title (I'm sure it’s in my files. Or a box. Or my desk drawer. Oh dear.), clean out six years worth of on-the-road essentials, and lighten my proverbial load.

Among the inconceivable amount of paraphernalia I pulled out from Cecelia's various nooks and crannies at 10:30 last night were:

• Bungee cords (yes!)
  
• One red shoe (I've been looking for that...)
  
• One beekeeping textbook (so I can have sweet sweet honey and candles when the world goes all to hell and we will survive only by the number of post-Apocalyptic skills we've been able to acquire. Next on the list: knitting.)
  
• A long lost head lamp
  
• Two sheets of Barbie stickers (which I'm keeping, or course.)
  
• Photo of Dinosaur National Park (which prompted 25 minutes of road trip nostalgia)
  
• Two bazillion pens
  
• World geography trivia game
  
• Maps of: Virginia, Maine, Wyoming, Portland, Or., and the continent of Africa (Ummm?)
  

Anyway. It's done. As soon as I find that title, Cecelia will officially be out of my life.

And why has this taken me so long? Well, judging by the wave of melancholy and regret that gripped me when I took off my hideous red Hawaiian print seat covers, it’s probably because I am still deeply attached to this rusty blue hunk of metal and fabric. Four months after preparing myself to give it away, several successful months of commuting on foot, and I'm still in mourning. Weird.

New Year's Resolution #43: Stop procrastinating.

New Year's Resolution #44: Stop getting attached to carbon-emitting inanimate objects. Or, for that matter, inanimate objects with wheels (said the girl who is still mourning the loss of a bicycle stolen two years ago. What a terrible Buddhist I would make, all this clinging.)