The first day of the rest of our lives?...

A car like our car, but not our car

Over the last couple of months, our car (a 1991 Subaru Liberty GX) has been having some fairly serious mechanical problems, culminating with what appears to be a blown head gasket. Faced with a steep bill to replace the engine and with renewal of registration at the end of July, we decided to stop throwing good money after bad and try and live without a car.

If the truth be told, the decision was fairly easy to make. We both work in the Melbourne CBD, use public transport to go to and from work on weekdays, live in an area with good radial (one train line and two tram routes) and orbital (four good frequency, 7-day-a-week bus routes) public transport links within 10-15 minutes walk from our house. The majority of our car use was at nights and weekends, largely because of psychological factors that made the car easier to use than walking, cycling or using public transport.

Our car use was on average about 10,000 kilometres a year, with the majority of the distance travelled taken up with driving holidays and the odd weekend tour beyond Melbourne. The majority of trips on the other hand were fairly short, most of them among the 60% of motorised trips less than 5 kilometres in length that could be done using other means.

We did try to use the car responsibly, which meant trying to minimise single-occupant trips in the car, or to plan our car use in a trip chain to avoid lots of point-to-point single purpose journeys, as well as trying to use our car to full capacity carrying both passengers and freight, althoguh a lot of times there were still lots of single occupant journeys, mostly 'hauling air'.

Of course, going without the car will mean some changes to how we live our lives. The convenience of having the car to pick up things you can't take on public transport, like the fortnightly runs to pick up mushroom compost, manure or hay for the garden (that we could fit in the back of the car) is one example of a benefit we'll forego along with the car. But most of the problems from not having a car will be psychological rather than physical. Being practical people, we'll find a way or make a way and no doubt share it with you along the way.