About a week ago I helped my dad out by picking up his Subaru station wagon from the auto shop – it was getting some upholstery work done on its 21 year old interior. So I rode my bike to the shop, threw the bike in the back of the wagon, and sat down in the drivers seat, keys in hand.
It took me a few minutes to re-familiarize myself with the controls of what used to be my regular ride to high school. It took just a second to figure out which key starts the engine, and another few seconds to get the radio and mirrors adjusted, but it was the essentials that took the longest–the pedals. I’m sitting in the parking lot looking down in the footwell, thinking “OK, I know one of these things is to accelerate and one is to stop, but which is which? And more importantly… what does that third pedal do?”. By this time the autoshop guys who handed me the keys after I told them I was picking up the car for my dad were starting to wonder if maybe I was lying and perhaps they should be calling the cops… Fortunately I was able to reload my stick-shift driving program, figure out the clutch again, and avoid hitting the shop’s garage door and bushes on the way out.
So lets just say I don’t drive frequently these days. It definitely saves me some money though. That said, I still get rides from friends or family fairly often. But if one reason for doing this experiment is to see if I can live without needing to interact with a system that relies on money, then getting others to pay for things like gas — essentially buying by proxy — is technically cheating. The other more immediate and important reason not to get free rides is that in the end, someone is giving money to the oil companies who are doing a darn good job ensuring our society stays car-dependent (thus resulting in over 42,000 automobile crash deaths per year), and keeping us in places like Iraq (thus resulting in a hellofalotof American soldiers and Iraqi civilians dieing) so we can ensure our petroleum security.
So here’s my new, reinforced, resolution:
In 2008, I will minimize the number of trips I take in cars. Also, to offset the money that goes to Big Oil’s lobbyists when I take trips in automobiles, I will track how many miles I travel by car and give 10 cents per mile to the Bicycle Transportation Alliance and the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition so they can encourage cycling and walking for transportation as an alternative to driving.
