Here’s how I’m making a difference in the world: I’m waiting for my car to drop dead. When it does, I’m not buying a new one. In the meantime, I’m practicing not having a car by riding my bike everywhere I can. This year I hope to get farther with this experiment than I did last winter, when I mutinied and resorted back to my car for our four dampest months.

In comparison to most cars, my four-door 1994 Nissan Sentra looks like a little bar of soap on wheels. Even so, from inside it seems gargantuan to me, and to engage such a hulking pile of metal to transport my sole person across town feels painfully excessive.

I could just get rid of the car now, but it still works – I don’t want to add to the landfills by junking a perfectly good car. Nor do I want to pass it on to someone else who will almost surely drive it more frequently than I do. At least for as long as I own it, I can group all my car trips together on two or three car days a week and keep it parked the rest of the time.

My partner and I can’t predict which one of our cars will die first, but we plan to condense down to a one-car household. The minute one of our cars bites the dust, we’re there. From that point on, we’ll make do with a combination of one car, our 2 bikes, the bus, the Max, and Flexcar.

Eventually (probably in the same week) our remaining car will also die. And then we’ll begin the odious process of procuring another car — an ordeal which both my partner and I hope to postpone for as long as possible — because after examining our lives through the ruthless lens of reality, we’ve determined that we can’t live completely without a car.

Among other things, my job requires me to drive far and wide to teach classes or meet with case-management clients. My employer isn’t paying me to spend hours on buses and at bus-stops while I make triple-transfer journeys to the various corners of Multnomah County. And there are limits in mileage, altitude, weather, time, and darkness to how much I can ride my bike. Not every job can be properly executed by a sweating, breathless, frozen, wet rat festooned with blinking safety lights.

But the day we finally have to break down and buy a new car, our search will be narrowed and simplified by one criteria – we’ll be shopping for a Clean Car — whatever that proves to be. Whether we’ll opt for a crunchable little Smart-car, a hydrogen car, a hybrid, or (my personal favorite) a Flintstone car remains to be seen. Whichever constitutes the biggest step toward cleaner air, that’s the one we’ll buy.

Thanks to what Governor Kulongoski is presently trying to do, we should have ample access to clean car choices by 2009. He plans to adopt the clean cars program by the end of this year — and guess who’s unhappy? The auto industry. We just hope the governor can hold up against the undying pressure of that eternal force, which can be counted on to raise its ugly head every time someone dares to gasp for still cleaner air to breathe. They’ve pledged to do everything they can to talk him out of it.

The car industry people aren’t the ones to ask about whether clean cars are a good idea. Just like the tobacco industry people aren’t the ones to ask about whether smoking is a good idea. Why should their opinion be considered at all? Raise your hand if you know someone outside the car industry who will not benefit from cleaner cars.

Ask the bicyclists — truly the canaries of our cities – if cleaner car emission standards are needed. No one breathes more car fumes than we do. I for one won’t complain when the clean car of our dreams costs more than the dirty cars of our reality. I’ll breathe less carbon monoxide, I’ll use less gas, and I’ll warm less globe. In the long run, I’ll spend less money.

Kate Gawf publishes a blog about using the bicycle as a means of daily transportation. www.ridemyhandlebars.blogspot.com

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Environment, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.