not a good week for my car
Since we moved downtown, I’ve been driving my car less and depending on my bike as my primarly means of local transportation. On top of that, I’ve been investigating the pro’s/con’s of exchanging the car for a scooter, eagerly anticipating using the new light rail coming to PHX in December, and seriously looking at using the new ZipCar recently parked downtown. In short, my car’s future isn’t looking good.
Then this last week - a blown radiator assumably from the intense summer heat. And then last night - a wicked monsoon rolled through with winds strong enogh to topple trees, toppling a tree on top of my car. Nothing too extreme, a cracked windshield, a couple of small dents, and some minor scratching, but still things that I must fix. Might this be my car’s way of getting back at me for my wandering eye, or is this just the tipping point for me to rid our family of the car and move on to new (and more wallet/environmentally friendly) forms of motion?
I’ll let you know.
jamie
on August 11th, 2008
Well…you know what my vote is for.
Zack
on August 11th, 2008
yeah - did I hear you’re going to the scooter rally in Flag this month?
jamie
on August 11th, 2008
well, I was considering it, but the people I was going to go with can’t go now. And no one else I know is going…sooo…
matt
on August 19th, 2008
I say do it. Get rid of it. We do have 1 car. but my wife and I ride our bikes 90% of the time here in town. And only really need the car to “head to town”.
Part of us being able to pull this off, is our recent shift in shopping habits. We buy only whats needed, and thats it. We have strict rules for defining needs, and anything we buy, must have an item it replaces, as well as a pre-defined storage location. Its hard.
It helps that most of our veggies come from the farm.
We may get a scooter for some trips that a bike would take to long to get to, or the speed is needed for safety. (riding at 12mph on the high way is a bad idea).
Zack
on August 19th, 2008
Thanks for the thoughts Matt (and it’s good to see you here BTW). We too ride our bikes as much as possible. Unfortunately, between the dual-young-kid issue and the fact that Kelli works about 30mins away - the car is an everyday necessity. She’s trying to find a job in downtown to change that, but nothing yet. What’s gotten interesting in this whole transportation equation for me is that our son is going to school near our house while our daughter goes to school with Kelli (she teaches at a preschool in PV). So we have both kids split around town this school year and I need to figure out how to get Kellen to school each day. So here’s the latest:
I am ditching the scooter idea for now. A scooter provides me with more range at the expense of less kid-transportability. I can use our bike trailer to transport kids, groceries, etc while riding my bike, but can’t do these things while on a scooter.
So - I will fix the car for the times when I need to transport the kids across town with me, while trying to use it as little as possible. Once the heat dies down a bit - this will be much easier. And maybe next summer I will re-engage the scooter option.