Originally Posted by John E

For the first three years of our marriage we lived car-free in west Los Angeles, in a little apartment a mile and a half south of the UCLA campus. We bicycled, walked, or rode transit everywhere, other than occasionally using my grandfather's car. (Our apartment was conveniently located halfway between my maternal grandparents' house and campus.)

We bought our first car, a year-old 1976 Pinto Squire ("woody" vinyl decal) station wagon, when we bought our first house. The house, a formerly beautiful Spanish style duplex from the late 1920s, was a real dump of a fixer-upper, so we needed some way to transport drywall, lumber, and other building materials. After I suffered a concussion and fractured collarbone later that year, courtesy of a left-crossing motorist, my wife gradually lost her taste for cycling in traffic, so I can relate to those who responded "only on trails." I am sure she worries about me when I am out on the road.