Auto(Less) in Seattle

02 May, 2006
Posted at 23.00 PDT

Seattle, as I’ve said more than once, has a few things going for it that appeal to me to no end. Once of those things is its electric trolley bus system. What makes it so interesting to me is, IIRC, the fact that being in the Pacific Northwest, and thus having access to the ample hydro-power around the region, allows the city to run its electric bus system—and its entire power grid—free of oil. Now this certainly doesn’t include the entire bus system, as it wouldn’t be efficient to try and string electric lines everywhere the buses need to go. Still, it’s kind of cool.

Almost since they were introduced, cars have been a symbol of freedom and independence in the U.S. To be an adult meant buying a car; it was part and parcel of the American dream: a secure job, a house with a two-car garage in the suburbs, and 1.8 children. You can thank Henry Ford in large part for that. His application of assembly line techniques (already in use, but don’t let that spoil your enjoyment of the myth around the man), brought the price of cars down low enough for the average middle-class American to purchase. As a society, we’ve never looked back.

In the thirties, Germany’s Adolf HItler looked at what we here in the U.S. were doing with our road system, and the result was the country’s much vaunted autobahn. (Yes, copied from us, not the other way around, surprisingly). We had a lot more ground to cover with shiny new highways than they did, and after Germany began feeling frisky in 1939, we had to postpone major work for a few years while the Soviets and the West showed them just how useful a modern highway system could be for invading armies.

At any rate, after we finally finished fighting the last of the nineteenth century wars for lebensraum, and the advent of the atomic bomb had put paid to any major power’s desire to conquer neighboring countries, the U.S. finished up its national highway system—and did so with a vengeance. Since then we’ve been wholeheartedly addicted to our cars, designing our lives and our very cities around the automobile’s convenience. Cars, and the modern highway system especially, destroyed our cities, allowing the wild growth of suburbs and flight of the middle class from the hearts of cities. It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that our major cities began to heal from the damage caused by shoving interstates right down their centers.

At any rate the point of all this was to make note that I am now, for the first time since I was old enough to drive, without a car.

By choice, no less.


Wednesday I got rid of it, and it feels good. It’s not like I was using the poor old thing much anyway. It mostly sat out on the street, fired up every week or so only to move it and keep it from getting ticketed. Now that summer’s here, more or less, I’m biking in to work most days anyway, and grabbing the bus on those days when I can’t be bothered.

This past Winter was my test run of trying to get by without the car as I figured that if any time of the year might break my interest in doing without, the endless rainy gray days might do so. It wasn’t a problem. I’d already reached the point where I rarely drove the car, and with everything I could possibly need within walking distance here in Seattle’s Capitol Hill area, I’d already given it up for everything but driving to work, which seemed a bit silly to me. Why pay for insurance and gas every month just to make an eight mile round trip? So now I’ve taken the plunge. The car is gone, and I’m seeing just how easy it is to do this. I don’t miss it so far, anyway.

It works for me. Your mileage may vary.

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