Taking part in World Car Free Day

Wednesday 22 September was World Car Free Day. A worthy idea for sure, but I wonder whether it smacks of tokenism. After all, it's easy to assuage your guilt over car use by not using the car for one day.

On the other hands, for those of us who can't or won't or don't drive for whatever reason, every day is Car Free Day. And so it was for us. More walking, cycling and public transport was the order of the day.

A new model of car use.

A few weeks into the experiment of living without a car, we activated our membership with Flexicar. It's a good way to enjoy many of the benefits of car ownership, but without the sunk costs of insurance, registration, maintenance and petrol. Not to mention the repayments on a car loan. In many ways the system runs like a car fleet - filling out logbooks, booking vehicles and centralised fleet management.

Instead of having the fleet garaged centrally, the Flexicar fleet is dispersed among council car parks in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. Fortunately, we have a car park near us, about a 20 minute walk or a 15 minute walk/tram ride away. The Flexicar fleet has gradually been working its way up Sydney Road and it would seem that as demand grows, they'll cross Moreland Road and be even closer. Hopefully our membership of Flexicar will mean there's more demand for a Flexicar to come up our way soon.

While all the cars in our area are Honda Jazz (which by the way are great to drive), Flexicar have a number of car models in their fleet. Like the work car fleet, where I've had a chance to drive lots of different models of cars, Flexicar has given us the opportunity to try some different cars. If we decided to go back to owning a car again, the Honda Jazz would be at the top of list.

The day they took the car away

It was a bit sad when they took the car away. It was all over so quickly. The tow truck man turned up, winched the car up onto the tray and then drove away. All over in minutes. One door closes and another door opens.