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Making a Car-free Life and a Car-Free
Family Work
By David Callahan
I first became car-free in 2000
for a lot of reasons.
Years of hunting for parking and worrying about payments,
transmissions and brake pads had begun to take a toll. I was also
tired of staring at the cars ahead of me and watching motorists
risk other people's lives to save themselves a couple of seconds.
Mostly I got tired of the way I felt when I was driving. It put
me on edge.
I let my Honda rot in the sun and put my bicycle to work. That was
when my wife and I lived in a tiny apartment on the near South Side.
We certainly had no use for a car. The two of us rode bicycles home
from clubs at 4 o’clock in the morning and we rarely purchased
anything that was too heavy to pick up on a bike.
We could have lived like that forever. But we didn't.
In five years, we would have
twin girls. Everyone said, "You're going to need a car."
We decided to test whether we could sustain a car-free lifestyle
with babies.
Ten months after their birth, I am happy to report, we still do
not own a car. And it isn't as hard as I thought. It just takes
more planning.
Except for a handful of instances, most of the trips we make with
the babies are on foot, CTA or Metra. The big difference in our
lives is we now belong to a non-profit car-share program called
I-Go, which places cars all over the city that you can book
for a small hourly fee.
So, I've done some driving, but we've spared ourselves the burden
of maintaining an automobile. The trips by car are few and far between
and when we travel solo, it's first and foremost by bicycle.
This system is easier to maintain in a city like Chicago, blessed
as it is with good commercial density, a comprehensive mass transit
system and things like car-share programs and bike lanes.
Reducing our carbon footprint is important to us not only because
part of my job is to convince others of this value, but because,
as Al Gore
says, it's a moral responsibility.
It’s that thought that sustains us when we have second thoughts
about hauling our daughters’ twin carriage up the steps of
a CTA bus.
David Callahan is the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation’s director
of communications and can be seen around town with two twin baby
girls.
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