The Pedestrian Life for Me

When I was just about to get married and move to Scotland I had the idea that living without a car would be great. I had driven since I got my license at sixteen and drove my eight younger siblings and all their friends places. Everyone seemed happy to entrust me with their kids' lives.

Having a friend die in a car accident made me nervous every time I got out the car keys and the responsibility of driving so many children weighed on me like eight white, 11-passenger conversions stacked on top of each other. 

When D and I married and moved to Scotland, I saw it as an opportunity to throw off driving for good! I was thrilled at the idea of no more hassle related to maintaining a car. Clearly it's a lot easier to do in Europe but I managed to talk it up so much that two of my brothers are now living car-free in Berkeley and Seattle. Other friends lived car-free in a non-urban setting in Florida, with the help of bicycles. It can be done in the States!

Six years ago my pro and cons list looked like this:

Pros

• Saves money - no forking out money for yet another car repair!
• No oil changes
• No running out of water (why do cars need water??)
• No tire changes
• No driving for hours
• No waiting in traffic
• In Europe there's good public transport so it should be easy to live without a car!

Cons

• No cons!

I was naive. Six years later, I have never driven in Scotland. On brief trips to America, I have borrowed one of my parents' cars. The pedestrian life is not exactly what I imagined.

Here is in insider's perspective on living without a car:

Pros

• free!
• snow, ice doesn't stop you
• healthy 
• nice people give you lifts - without which we could not have managed this
• saves money
• saves time - cleaning/maintaining car
• saves frantic parking maneuvers
• accessibility to shops - no bus money = no problem, just hop into the corner shop and buy a ridiculously overpriced snack and ask for change in the right coins
• accessibility to help - you can ask for directions more easily than someone in a car, you can also pick up random gloves off the ground and wear them as one desperate friends of mine with cold hands has been known to do!

Cons

• broken toe = skrewed
• broken leg = skrewed
• injury of ankle/knee/foot/any part of leg = screwed
• any other kind of injury = not good. I have hobbled three blocks to the bus stop two days after childbirth and it is not fun. Public transport only gets you so far.
• takes long time - I thought it was tedious waiting 45 minutes in traffic of cars but I have since walked more than hour to get places and that is a lot more tiring - especially if pregnant and breastfeeding
• rain - there's nothing so miserable as the rain starting fifteen minutes after you have left home and knowing you have another 30 minutes to go without a rain jacket, hat or gloves
• cold - till I moved to Scotland I thought I loved the cold - but I really just liked hopping out of the car and walking 10 minutes in a t-shirt to wherever I needed to go year round. I never quite realized the power of body temperature dropping, especially with the sun going behind clouds and wind picking up, over the better part of an hour's walk.
• heat - I can't complain too much about this in Scotland, but when it's hot there's no air conditioning outside of John Lewis and I have been pregnant in the summer before so 'nuff said.
• sun burn - my sister says I can burn under a reading lamp so yes I do burn in Scotland though I don't think most people have this problem. It usually happens in April so I can't really relate to 'Oh to be in England now that April's there....'
• wind burn - my face has never been so chapped or dry as in winters in Scotland! 
• health - if already thin and poorly, a long walk in the cold might not be the best thing. A long walk when already 'low' in health terms might push you over the edge to getting a cold or some other infection.
• distance - obviously there are upward limits to how far you can walk (like no more than 3 miles and back in my case. D can do 7 or 8 in a day with no complaints.)
• groceries - there's always that milk or one ingredient you've forgotten. And it's always cheapest at the shops more than a mile away. 
• food bill - Do you know how many extra calories you burn when you walk everywhere? The medieval man burned 2,000 more calories than we. I wouldn't say a pedestrian life burns that many. It depends how many hours you walk and how many stairs or hills are involved. If you walk 1 hour a day - which isn't much if you think about it - that's an extra 287 calories. Kiss goodbye the ideal of having a yogurt and piece of fruit for lunch everyday like your mom and granddad. It's something to take into account if you're trying to pinch the food budget.
• anything large - plant sale, skip-ful of rocks, abandoned furniture is not really an option - I don't even look at bulky free stuff! It's a recipe for being discontent.
• stinky smells - people in Edinburgh seem to feel entitled to wee on the street like in medieval times
• transparency - I knew a single mom in the States who used her trips in the car as her only opportunity to cry. One of the things I love and hate about Edinburgh is you can't do that without someone asking if you if you're okay. You can't talk things out with yourself either. Not without funny looks anyway.
• requires energy - sometimes let's face it, we don't feel  up to walking 3 miles for groceries. We just don't. So order groceries online you say? Yes I have found you can do all things if enough planning-ahead has happened but sometimes you're just inexplicably tired when you thought you'd be fine, and just didn't see a huge flop coming.
• you buy a LOT of shoes with fancy insoles, and they all wear out in 6 to 9 months.
• OR you do not buy shoes with fancy insoles and suffer ingrown toenails, cracked calluses, and frequent trips to the podiatrist where you see signs on the walls recommending shoes that fit at heel, arch and toes with fancy insoles - and you feel stupid. You feel you would happily have forked out the extra 25 dollars to avoid this level of feeling stupid. 

  

  our shoes after 6 months

• roundabouts which take forever to cross (one of the negatives to living in Europe; American crossings are much faster)
• no matter what kind of shoes we buy, three pairs wear out per year
• I can rarely buy more than £20 worth of groceries while at the shops because I can't carry more than that - lack of upper body strength is part of it but so is that more then £20 is a LOT of stuff if you are as cutthroat frugal as I am. The average UK family spends 80 pounds on food per week. That would be 4 trips to the grocery store for me if we spent that much and didn't get online shopping once to four times a month.
• long waits for lights
• mud splatters from passing cars - I seriously think some people are careless and stupid but others do it on purpose
• emissions - you may not drive or smoke but everyone around you does!
• slow people - nothing more trying than on a day when you're in a tearing rush that the universe conspires to put a gaggle of four slow-walking women spanning the entire pavement. I have almost been run over a few times when taking to the open road whilst trying to outmaneuver the slow-moving pack.
• angry people who punch random passersby (D saw this once! And in Edinburgh - not Glasgow!)
• pigeons poo on you - I am going to have to say you have not lived in Edinburgh if this has not happened to you or your favorite coat. I knew someone this happened to her baby. 

Despite the negatives, I am thankful we were able to live as pedestrians despite a growing family for 6 years because of the amounts we have been able to save.

In a time when people spend more on running a car than on a house, the running costs for a car in the UK are between 100 and 500 per month for most people though some claim the average is 557.

I calculate we have saved a minimum of 10,000 but probably more realistically 16,000-20,000 on car-related costs over the last 6 years. Which makes it all worth it.