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.