The Pros & Cons of Going Carless

Back in January I was savagely rear-ended on the freeway by some idiot going 90-100mph and somehow managed to escape without injury or crashing my car into the freeway divider or another car. (Like, it was a close thing. I cannot BELIEVE how lucky I was.) While I was fine, my 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid was totaled. AAA towed it to a body shop for me, but the kind manager there very gently informed me that repairing it would involve essentially rebuilding the back half of the car, and that I'd just done $10,000+ worth of damage to a car that at this point was worth *maybe* $4,000.

WEAR YOUR SEAT BELTS, PEOPLE!

Sure enough, my insurance company concurred, and although I had to pay my $1,000 deductible since it was a hit & run, I still received a $3,200+ check for the remaining value of the car. (I am told that I may still get $800 or so of that back, because I had uninsured motorist coverage.) So that was something.

I'd like to say that I was all very objective and rational about this process but that is not the case. At least twice that day and two more times in the following week I broke down sobbing over that car, not over practical concerns of not having a car, but because that particular car and I had been though so damn much together. My parents never had the money to get me a car, so I was carpooling and biking it up until I got my first post-school grown-up job offer letter at age 24. The day I got a paper copy of it in hand, I rode my powder blue bike from my campus dorm to the Honda dealership 3 miles away, walked in, pointed at the car, & said, "I would like that one, please, here is a down payment."

(Fun fact: I knew nothing about car shopping. I said "That one please" and they said "All right, that will be $xx,xxx" and I said "Sounds good, where do I sign?" I did end up getting it a bit cheaper because they didn't have the color I wanted & I kept bugging them about getting the other one for me from a different dealership, so maybe in the end it was all a wash. But I will never forget the look on my dad's face when I explained to him how all this went down & he was like, "You're kidding, right? Please tell me you're kidding.")

Anyway, that car had been with me through my entire adult life. Cross-country trips to visit family & boyfriends when I couldn't afford plane tickets. De facto living quarters during a few periods of homelessness. My one real worldly asset when I quit my job in 2010 without a plan. (Though thankfully I'd just paid the car off!) I spent so much time stressing about something happening to that car because no, it was not fancy, but it was the only way I had in the world of generating an income, and there was no way I could possibly afford to replace it. It was kind of startling to realize how emotionally attached I'd become to it, but I am not too proud to say I gently stroked the steering wheel before I got out of it for the last time and told it how sorry I was. I just didn't expect to say goodbye so soon, but I suppose we never are.

In the immediate aftermath, my brain went "F*********ck, now I have to engage in that most unsavory of all grown-up rituals, car shopping." (Or is that visiting the DMV? Shit, I can't remember.) I started doing budget calculations and cringing at how I've gotten used to not having a $420 car payment every month, then trawling the internet to try to get some idea of the 2018 automotive scene. Don & I talked about it, going back & forth about the pros & cons of different types of cars, new or used, gas or electric or something in between.

And then he said hesitantly, "Is it worth asking whether we really need another car right now?"

Which stopped me in my tracks because I had never considered not getting another car as fast as humanly possible.

I mean, it was an option. He has a car, and has only been driving it to work in SF because virtually all street parking is neighborhood parking and we don't have a permit for our temporary digs. It would be easy for him to take public transit to work 90% of the time so I could drive the car to my office (a ~30 mile commute), and my work is generally flexible enough for me to work from home on days when he needed to drive. Besides, there are car services, rental cars, & car sharing apps in the world, and the cost of all that is almost guaranteed to come out to less than the cost of a monthly car + insurance payment.

So, that's what we've been doing lately. There are some pluses, but also some minuses:

PLUSES:

• I am spending less time driving and less time looking for parking, both things I hate in this life. I don't love taking car services but not dealing with parking is .
• No insurance bill
• No car maintenance bills (not that mine were all that high)
• I didn't have a car payment before, but I would if I were to get a new car so that's nice.
• I am not constantly worried about parking a car on the street in SF. Before I lived in constant fear of break-ins (which I've been a victim of twice) and street cleaning tickets. (Last thought every night before going to sleep, without fail: Where is my car parked & is it safe there until I get up in the morning?)

MINUSES:

• I have to drive Don's car when I drive to work. It's a fancy sports car so it can be fun to drive, but I also find it a little more difficult to drive than my car. It's also a little bigger so a bit harder to park, and gets way, WAY worse gas mileage which pretty much wipes out any gas savings due to driving a little less.
• Less flexibility. Yes, it's nice that I can work from home sometimes if Don needs the car, but if he does take the car, it's a little less easy for me to just pop out for a quick errand or two. Our temporary digs are not super walkable to almost anywhere, so I have to think pretty hard about how badly I really need to go where I want to go.
• Related, if I run from the house, I have to do the massive 3-4 blocks of 15% grade down and back up, which really sucks, and if I want to do a track workout, sometimes I have to actually run to the track first, which sometimes sucks depending on how long the workout is. I used to drive my car down the hill to run & then drive back up, but you're really not supposed to do that with Don's car (gas mileage, engine wear & tear) so I don't.
• Related, Don is driving the car to Tahoe the weekend of the Oakland Marathon, so I'll have to rent a car to go to that as BART doesn't run early enough for the marathon start.
• So many Lyft rides, you guys. Sooooo many.
• It's a little harder to do transportation-related favors for others, which I always felt was part of the responsibility of having a car.

I DO plan to get another car sometime this year, mostly likely when our place is done and we move back in and actually put Don's car in the garage and see how much space is left. My car was small and the garage was designed with the dimensions of our cars in mind with little room for error, plus there are always small real-world adjustments any time you're doing construction. I'm hoping I'll be able to get some kind of electric car (I always said I wanted my next car to be electric, I just didn't think it would be so soon!), as we put a drop in the new garage and I would love to offset a car payment with some gas savings.

I'm kind of into these older Chevy Volt hatchbacks, TBH.

The nice thing is, I think the above minuses of going without a car for a while will make me extremely appreciative of finally having one again, in spite of having a car payment again for the first time in 8+ years.