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Sometimes, I must admit, having only one car is a royal pain in the butt.  I fear that my friends are probably sick of me bumming a ride to get to book-club or a party when my husband’s got the car with the boys.  I get tired of having to work our weekend schedule around our transportation needs.  I’m sometimes annoyed when I have to ride my bike.  I get crabby when I have to delay or cancel plans because I have no wheels.

We’ve been a 1 car family for about 3 years now.  My husband works in downtown Minneapolis and he either rides his bike or takes the bus to work every day – he’s the real eco-super-hero around here!!  After he started riding his bike we hardly ever used our second car.  Our poor VW Jetta was ignored for so long that it wouldn’t start when we finally tried to use it.  That’s when we realized that we really didn’t NEED two cars, it was just a habit we had fallen into.

At first I was convinced that we would need to use a car sharing program like ZipCar but we decided to hold off on getting a membership until we had seen what living with one car was really like.  Surprisingly, we found that we didn’t need a second car very often at all.  Granted, we do have to plunk down money for rental cars when one of us needs to go
somewhere for the weekend.  And we even take the occasional cab when we run
into a jam.

What happened was that having one car forced us to get creative.   As much as I might complain about having to ask for rides and change my plans, it really isn’t that big of a deal most of the time.

Are you a one car family or do you think that you could be?  If not, what’s holding you back?

{Ironically, at the time of this post, we are a 2 car family.  We just bought a new (used, but new for us) Toyota Highlander to replace our beat-up old Honda minivan.  Would have loved to have bought a hybrid Highlander but we are just not willing to spend that much money on a car!  We won’t have 2 cars for long though. We’ll be getting rid of the Honda after a few trips to get mulch and possibly some building supplies (we’ve got a big project up our sleeves!)…and then we’ll be back to the status quo….as a one car family!}

This is my post for the Green Moms Carnival, which is all about transportation this month.  Diane at Big Green Purse is hosting.  Visit her blog starting Monday, May 10th for a great round-up of posts about everything from the oil spill to using mass transit to biking to…..