Day 6 - Snow everywhere

Not too much happened today. It was a Sunday mostly at home. Of course I've stuck to my pledge not to use my car. In fact I have a picture that captures the essence of my quest:

I have no need to clean my car of snow anymore! On the other hand, I did get another ride from a car driver today and so I helped Suzanne clean off her car so that we could go grocery shopping. I know, this doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice if I still drive everywhere, but I'm trying my best and sometimes it's tough to say no. I did ride a bike to a church meeting on campus and that was a little tricky in the snow and everything. Tomorrow I'm heading down to Bayview and I'm also getting a ride from a co-worker (check my Friday post about car-pooling). Also check out the month of January and my 'No Car' calendar:

Day 5 - Snow Biking

Dear Internet,

I thought I'd start my new post this way in memory of Conan O'Brien's last show. On one of the last shows he made a joke about writing to the internet.

So Day 5 was another tough one. I woke up really early to volunteer for habitat for humanity down in Pigtown. After contemplating using the bus system again, I decided to just bike it. I used Suzanne's bike again (by the way I've used hers a few times since my pedal broke) and picked up a sandwich at 7-eleven. I made it down there pretty well, though it was again very cold biking. Working there was pretty awesome. I felt like I was really helping to make this house. Most of the day was spent moving debris. They had taken down the roof of this old house and we had to throw all the junk down, and then take it to the dumpster on the street. Not a glamorous job by any means, but it was hard work and necessary work. After a few hours we started working on constructing the walls of the house. We just used old fashioned hammers and nails. Anyway after lunch the snow was coming down so bad that they canceled the rest of the day and I rode my bike back home. This was the toughest biking I've done in a while. It's mostly an incline back up to Remington from Pigtown so that in addition to the snow blinding me and the slow speed of snow biking made it a bit more difficult than usual. I decided to just take it one pedal stroke at a time. Once home I took a long nap to recover. Afterward I played a bit of Monopoly with my friend Belle and Alexis (my couchsurfer from France). Suzanne isn't too keen on my recent Monopoly craze, so she sat that game out. I guess I'm getting a bit distracted from the purpose of this blog so I'll leave it at that. Good night internet.

Love,

Dan

Day 4: Broken Pedal, two rides bummed...

So I was biking a few days ago and my pedal began to act funny. Then it just broke in half (I took a picture). It's very uncomfortable to ride with just one half of a pedal. The rod of the pedal really digs into the arch of your foot. I decided to do some work on it and order some new pedals. I ordered these on amazon and then I thought I'd try seeing how easy it is to take off a bike pedal. Turns out there's like a dozen ball bearings in pedals and they all came out and fell all over my living room. There was no way I was going to put them all back in so I just screwed the pedal back on without them. Turns out ball bearings make a HUGE difference when biking. Don't ever take these little metal balls for granted people. Now when I pedal the pedal stays frozen and doesn't allow me to rotate it around the axis. So each rotation of the pedal I have to lift my leg off and then bring it back down. It's very awkward and must be interesting to watch from an outsider. It's a very asymmetrical bicycling pattern. I kind of feel like a one man band street performer who constantly has to hit a kick drum or high hat with one leg while doing some kind of constant circular thing with the other foot.

Today was also a viciously cold day. I had some big time runny noses from my bike to and from work.

For lunch my colleague and I went to Holy Frijole's on the Avenue in Hampden. He offered to give me a ride in his car and I accepted. I told him I don't want this experiment to turn into Dan's bumming a ride from people project. I figure if people offer I'll take them up for it, but I'll always attempt to take the bike or public transit first. I also realized that the rides I bum from people will kind of be a small payback for the rides I've given to so many people over the years. During grad school I was the only one of my friends with a car so I drove people everywhere. I also would often give people rides to the airport who needed them. I also donated some drives for my local church as a fundraiser a few times. Plus it promotes carpooling which, though still not solving the problem of evil cars, still lessens it in someway. It's kind of a compromise so that I can still exist in the real world. Plus one of my main reasons for quitting the car is the anti-social nature of driving (since so many people drive alone). Carpooling allows for great conversation because the scenery is constantly changing and there's always something to talk about. Look at the sign over there!, Do you remember that building? Where are we?

Anyway, I also bummed a ride to the party in Canton. The couchsurfer I'm hosting this weekend, Alexis, stayed with a different couchsurfing host, Caroline, on Thursday night and she offered to give me a ride. I had my bus system all planned out when he called, and decided to take the easier option of just getting a ride. It was kind of sad that I won't get to test out the Baltimore bus system just yet, but I'm sure I will have to soon. It's just too damn cold out there to be waiting on the busses. I'm going to dedicate a whole blog post to bus systems so stay tuned for that one.

The party was really cool by the way. Couchsurfers apparantly know how to party. There was a keg and they made pigs in a blanket! Fun times. One of the guys who lived there had this extremely complex salt water aquarium. In retrospect, I should have taken a picture of it on my iPhone. I talked to him about it all night. For a while I was just staring into it and some girl came up to me and was like, are you okay? He had see urchins, crabs, starfish, shrimp, and even a clownfish (I guess every salt water tank has to have a clown fish nowadays - Thanks finding Nemo). I kind of felt like when Dwight Schrute went to that dinner party and all he did was test out the structure of the house. Overall it was a pretty good house party.

Anyway I'm going to bed so I can rest up for my long bike ride down to pigtown for Habitat for Humanity! I'm so excited to be working on a house. I wonder what I'll get to do - saw, hammer, staple, paint.......

First tough times coming up

So I realized that my first really car-tempting events are happening soon.

I woke up today and it's absolutely freezing outside (feels like 9 degrees according to weather.com). It's going to be a face-freezing ride to my work (it's like a 15 minute bike ride).

Also I live near Johns Hopkins homewood campus and I was invited to a couchsurfing party in Canton tonight. I'm hosting a guy this weekend and he invited me (check out couchsurfing.org if you have no idea what I'm talking about). It would take about 20 minutes to drive there, and I'm thinking of trying out the Baltimore bus system (which estimates 45-60 min). I haven't really tried bus riding in a city before so I'll be sure to tell you all how it goes.

Next up on Saturday (tomorrow) morning I'm volunteering for a day with habitat for humanity. It's down in Pigtown and I suppose I can just ride my bike down there in maybe a half hour, but it's also supposed to snow that day - should be fun.

Next up on Sunday I told my church that I'd get the bagels and donuts for our 11am mass. This would be much easier with a car, but I'm going to attempt it with just the bicycle.

Finally on Monday I told a Neurology professor I'd meet with her at Bayview. Bayview is crazy far away, at least a 30 minute drive and I think I'll attempt to follow my friend Johns advice of taking the Hopkins shuttle to JHMI, and then switching onto the bayview shuttle there. That's going to be a really long ride.

Anyway, wish me luck internet.

Days 1,2,3

Hello World. So this is my blog about quitting the car. I've decided to give myself a one month trial period to see if I can live without the vehicle and I'm going to chronicle this adventure on here. I started 2 days ago on Tuesday January 26th 2010. Why you may ask? That's a good question. I've been thinking about it recently and I've come to the conclusion that cars are a source of great evil in this world and that if you want change it has to start with you. Cars are very dangerous for drivers and pedestrians alike. They get you from A to B faster and in comfort, but they also come at an expense. They're dangerous, bad for the environment, don't allow social interaction (like public transportation), and are not physically healthy for you like bicycling and walking.

I consider myself a very good driver. Perfect driving record, very careful, but also skilled at parallel parking and all the other rules and regulations of the road. I've never had an accident and I've been driving since I was 16 (I'm 26 now). Driving with other people can sometimes scare me, so I offer to drive as much as I can.

I keep good track of all my expenses and I've calculated that I've spent about $880 in the past six months on car expenses (gas, insurance, maintenance, parking). My fiance and I are currently saving money for our wedding in June and I can't believe how much more we could save if we didn't have all these car expenses.

So I've decided to try giving up the car completely. I hope I can make it. I realized this time period, January & February, is a good time for a trial period since it's about the worst weather that Baltimore has to offer. I can handle heat with no problem. I think if I make the full one month period, then I'll just donate my car to charity (WTMD). By the way, this is a picture of my car. It's a 2001 black Pontiac Sunfire. I really like the car a lot and it's given me a lot of great experiences. It's kind of like breaking up with someone you've been dating a long time, I can tell it'll be pretty emotional when I finally say goodbye. I bought the car with my parents in 2001 right off the dealership lot brand new. I checked the bluebook and it's gone down to somewhere between $1,600 and $2,400.

I'll try to keep this blog as up to date as possible. I think it would be fun to pretend like I have like a million readers when in fact I think just my fiancee and mom might read this. So periodically I'll try to say things like, "Let me know what you all think about ___"

Without further ado, let's catch up on the past few days.

On Day 1 I rode my bike to work - no real big deal. It was while I was at work that I really started devising the plan and thinking about life without driving. Then I remembered that there was this mayor's bicycle meeting downtown after work and I realized if I was really going to commit to this, I need to show that I'm willing to do some crazy biking, so after work I biked all the way downtown (about 3 miles through traffic) and went to this cool meeting. There was just 9 of us there and it was my first time so I just listened. They have a lot of cool things happening in Baltimore for bicyclists. There's a lot of streets currently being converted to 'bike-friendly' streets, and the committee presented a gigantic map of all the current and future bike route's in baltimore. It's a beautiful sight. Afterward I rode home and hung out with my dog the rest of the night. I cooked some food for myself (Suzanne, my fiancee, usually does the cooking, but she's out of town). Anyway that cooking turned out to be a very bad idea because the next day I got pretty sick. Maybe I should just leave the culinary stuff to Suz.

On day 2 I had my first predicament. I work at a biomedical research startup company and I've been working on this paper with a PhD student at Johns Hopkins Medical Campus. He called me and asked if we could ride together to my office to print out the paper in high quality color to give to all of the authors (the lab printer only does black and white). It was pretty tempting but I finally decided to tell him that my car was acting a little funny and that I was planning to ride my bike, but that I had a color printer at home and could print them there. So I printed them and biked over to his place to hand them off. First dodged bullet of the experiment. I'm sure there'll be more tempting occasions. During the day at work my stomach started to really ache from the dinner the night before, so after lunch I went home. Riding a bike with a bad stomach isn't that fun, but it's not too hard. Once home I just laid in bed for the rest of the afternoon. Around 6 or so I felt much better so I rode my bike to Charles Village and got some sushi for dinner.

On Day 3 (today) I rode my bike to work again. My friend's wanted to go to a restaurant for lunch because it's Restaurant week in baltimore. The restaurant's called Fogo de Chao and it's downtown. I rode my bike back home and met my friends and my friend Alex drove us all. This was the first time in the experiment that I rode in a car. I know it's pretty wrong to even do that, but carpooling is good for the environment, and I don't think it'll be possible for me not to drive at all in any vehicle for a month. I'll need to take busses and shuttles to get to some places, and that's not much different. Anyway the food was delicious. It's like a meat overload. We all maxed out our bellies since it's all you can eat. Riding my bike back to work was a bit tough because of this over-eating. Let me know in the comments what all of you think about over-eating and then bike riding.

P.S. - I forgot to mention that on Day 3 I accidentally split my jeans while getting on the bike. Big time bummer. I'm down to just one pair of jeans that I really like now. I guess going without a car will have consequences that I couldn't even imagine.