Doohickie

I guess I would describe myself as car light, but newly so. It's only been the last couple weeks that I knew such a classification existed. I was on a business trip to Orlando and was away from home for two weeks and during that time I read a lot of threads on BF including the car-free/car-light stuff. Honestly, such a concept had never occurred to me!

I got a new bike on Labor Day weekend, and leaving town the next week, I was jonesin' pretty bad for it the whole time. When I got home I started riding it much more often than I had been riding bikes (I started part-time bike commuting in February- maybe about 1/3 of the time).

I'm starting to think of my bike as the default means of personal transport, which kind of seems like a decent definition of what "car light" means. In the week and a half since I got home from my business trip, I've probably ridden my bike twice as many miles as my car. In fact I've only had the car out of the garage four times in that week and a half:

. Driving home from the airport after the business trip,
. Driving over to someone's house to pick up a bike I bought,
. Grocery shopping (Costco sizes don't go well on my bike),
. Getting my state inspection done for that car.

Before this car light thing dawned on me, my youngest son got his license and we bought an older car for him to drive, which brings the number of cars in my family to four right now- one for each driver. But since he is getting himself from Point A to Point B without my help, and I'm bicycle commuting, and probably a couple other factors, my car use has gone way down. I bought a new car in 05. The first year I put 20,000 miles on it. The second year, 16,000 miles. This year I've only put 8,000 miles on the car. I think that makes me car light.

I probably could sell one of our cars and get even lighter, but three of the four cars in our household have more than 100,000 miles and/or are 10 or more years old. So... maybe I'll just wait for one to die and not replace it.

Once my sons are out of the house, I still don't see going personally car-free. What I may do though is buy a car that's really just a toy/hobby that I only take out occasionally.