Car Free: A blessing and a curse

In the post below this one, Brendan asks whether planned, suburban, German-engineered carlessness is everything its cracked up to be. (I know, you can't tell from the post, but follow the links - they're interesting). I don't know much about German suburbs, but I will tell you this: My own experiment in carlessness is proving alternately delightful and collossally annoying.

To begin with, I didn't sell my car for the privilege of moving to a smart-growth-designed Teutonic suburb where the swish of bicycles and the laughter of cherubic aryans drowns out the distant growl of BMWs powered by the ground-up bones of orphans. I actually abandoned happy, bike-centric, urban living in Somerville, Mass., for the cartastic burg of West Hartford, where I actually purchased a second car. Unfortunately, the first car gave up the ghost, and the third car (purchased to replace the first) turned out to be a disaster of the sort that now sits immobile on my driveway (I'm thinking of taking the wheels off and putting it up on blocks just to spite the neighbors; that might get them even more exercised than when I have black houseguests). So now I am out of car money and obliged to figure out ways to get from here to there (by which I mean Hartford to Bridgeport).

Yesterday, this situation proved craptastic: Between child's doctor's appointment, other child's having to get to daycare, and wife's having to get to work, I only worked four hours of my workday and spent the rest shuttling people around (but don't worry, boss-who-surely-isn't-reading-this: I made up for it by working from 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.). And today, it looked like another pain in the ass: I missed catching a ride with my neighbor to Hamden, and needed to get to New Haven with enough time to get ready for a meeting at noon and a hearing at 1:00, but ma petite wife had to be in Cromwell at 9:15, and kids had to get dropped off (and of course, once you miss the 7:55 Amtrak to New Haven, you can't go again till 11:15). So the only solution was the bike.

I got dropped off at the Middletown-Durham line and headed south on Route 17 for a solid twenty-mile jaunt, dreading the time it would take me, the sweaty mess I would become, and the foolish moment in which I plunked down $1800 for that stupid Ford Focus. But you know what? It was awesome. Know why? Because between Middletown and New Haven is a handsome little swath of real-life rural America - with cows, even. And you know who drives there at 8:30 in the morning? Nobody! So it was me, the chirping birds, the lush greenery of springtime, and even some rabbits (so it was pretty much like Bambi without the hunters, the fire, and the annoying other deer that tries to steal Bambi's girlfriend). I rode at a reasonable but not strenuous pace, got to New Haven in about an hour and twenty minutes, and felt like a health champion.

Conclusion: Carlessness works really well in cities and in carefully planned German suburbs. In Connecticut, maybe not so much. However, it's still nice to ride a bike a lot, especially in the springtime, and (unrelatedly) there is nothing better than filing a motion that is so clever, well-researched, and unexpected that it makes the other lawyer totally lose her cool and start yelling at you. Also, this is Bike Week, so hooray!