One-Car Family

by Rachel Dunstan Muller

With 560 cars for every 1,000 people, Canada ranks fifth in the world for car ownership per population—ahead of every G8 country except Italy. If our family of seven were keeping up with the national average, we’d have four vehicles on the road. Instead we share a single car, which has been the norm for most of my 20-year marriage. But don’t feel sorry for us. We’re a one-car family by choice, and we’ve benefited from this status in countless ways. To start, the small fortune we’ve saved in car payments, gas, insurance and maintenance has helped make it possible for me to stay home with our preschoolers. I’m also a lot fitter, since much of my transportation over the last two decades has been human powered.

Then there are the environmental issues of vehicle ownership. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the automobile. Yes, they get you where you need to go quickly and keep you out of our West Coast rain. But they also consume dwindling fossil fuels, spew pollution, and contribute to smog, acid rain and global warming. They change the landscape, as green spaces and public squares become highways and parking lots. And they kill people (about two per cent of all deaths in Canada are the result of motor vehicle accidents).

Making the decision to draw the line at one vehicle was easy when we were still newlyweds living in Victoria. Our first apartment was only a few blocks from the university where I was a student, and the bus system took me everywhere else I needed to go. Things got a little more challenging when we had twins and moved to Nanaimo so my husband could take his turn at school. In order to leave our Volkswagon van at home as much as possible, he walked the few kilometers to campus. When he wanted faster transportation, he found a secondhand moped that consumed only a few dollars in gas a week. I did my share, pushing the twins in their double stroller everywhere I could. I’m sure I put a thousand kilometers on that stroller. When our third daughter arrived, I simply added a baby backpack to my transportation system.

Some of our earliest experiments in one-car living were less successful than others. While still in our starving-student days, we tried to make a “pedal-powered family vehicle” with two mismatched bikes and some salvaged metal and lumber. It was a beast to steer, and was terrifying on even the slightest incline. Our preschoolers thought it was an amusement ride. Their parents thought it was death-trap. We took it on a few test rides, and concluded it wasn’t meant to be.

Getting by with one car got more difficult when we moved to Ladysmith and my husband took a teaching position 10 kilometers away. Ladysmith is a wonderful little community, but up until last year it was the largest municipality in the province without any form of public transportation. I was sure we’d need a second vehicle as our kids got older and I took a job outside our home, but somehow we made things work.

Fast-forward a decade. We’re in the same house and we have two more children, but there’s still only one car in our driveway. I was able to bike to work for the three years my office job lasted. And with some advance planning and carpooling, we’ve been able to get everyone in our hyper-busy family everywhere they need to be. It helps that we live within walking distance of a grocery store, the bank, the post office, the library, our doctor’s office, several parks, a playgroup, and the high school. Of course my definition of “walking distance” might be a little different than most people’s, since I’ve relied on my feet for transportation for much of my life.

We know several other families who have made the decision to own a single vehicle, even though financially they could afford a second one. In most cases one member of the family commutes to work by bike. (Bicycling, by the way, is by far the most energy-efficient form of transportation. It’s up to five times more efficient than walking, and dramatically more efficient than driving. One hundred calories can power a cyclist up to five kilometers. The same one hundred calories would only power a car 85 meters.) It takes commitment to be a one-car family, but all our like-minded friends agree that the sacrifices are worth the rewards.

The true environmental pioneers are the families who are foregoing car ownership altogether. There are a number of blogs on the Internet dedicated to this topic. Google “car free family” and you’ll get links to half a dozen. I was particularly inspired by “No Impact Man’s” website, and was delighted when I was able to borrow his book from the library. I walked there, of course.

In a perfect world we’d consider going car-free too. Better public transportation within our small town and linking our town with others would make it a lot easier. So would dedicated bike lanes along major roads and highways. Access to a car-sharing network would be another plus. In the meantime we’re grateful for the vehicle we have, and are doing our best to use it responsibly.

Rachel Dunstan Muller is the mother of five, and a children’s author. She and her family are working at reducing their environmental impact, one area at a time.