Car-Free Pittsburgh

At first, I loved living in Chicago without a car.  My only obligations were rent and utilities.  For the first time in my life, I was able to save some money. 

I remember thinking about the trade offs of living in the city versus living in the suburbs.  A lot of people move to the suburbs for lower-cost housing, however, I was looking at the whole picture.  I could have lived in the suburbs for about $800 in rent versus the $1000 I was going to have to pay to live in the city.  Living in the suburbs would have required me to keep my car withthe $200 a monthpayment.  Add in $100 a monthin gas (It was cheap in 2001) and $75 a month in insurance and the total monthly expense for living in the suburbs was $1375 plus utilities.  Living in the city without a car would run m $1000 in rent plus $60 for a transit pass (at the time) for a total monthly expense of $1060 plus utilities.  Even if my car was paid off, living in the city was cheaper…..not to mention the hours of my life that I could spend doing things other than commuting.

In the summer of 2002, GE moved me back to Louisville, KY, so I guess I had to buy another car.  But now that I had a good job and a steady paycheck, I wanted a NEW car.  A used car just wouldn’t do.  Purchased a new Mitsubishi with no money down and a payment of $500 a month (how American of me).  I rationalized this because my rent in Louisville would be about half of what it was in Chicago and I was getting a raise to take the new job.

Aftr a year there, GE moved me again.  This time to Chattanooga, TN.  How the hell do people at GE ever have families????  Beats the hell out of me.  I’d never work there again.  In a nutshell….Chattanooga…same story…needed to keep the car to get to work…spent a ton of money on gas and a lot of time commuting to NorthGeorgia.  Finally, I got fed up withliving in the country and fed up with GE.  On a vacation to Arizona in the summer of 2004, I interviewed for a job in Phoenix and 6 weeks later, I was living in the desert.

 Now Phoenix is a huge city, the 5th largest in the US after Houston.  For a city that size I was more than dissappointed with the mass transit network.  The city is so spread out, mass transit just doesn’t work.  As the suburbs stretch further and further from the city center, people drive furthur and furthur to work.  Hour-long commutes are not uncommon.  I know because I had one.

It was living in Phoenix where I first began to think about the environmental impact of all my driving.  Where the rest of Arizona is blessed with endless blue sky, Phoenix sits choking on its own brown cloud.  There were days I would commute into the city and couldn’t see tall buildings a quarter mile in front of me.  This is what happens when 5 million people drive individually to work.

While in Phoenix I married and for the majority of our time together there, we each commuted separately.  After my wifes car finally broke down, we decided to donate it to charity and carpool.  It was a small step in the right direction for the air quality in Arizona and a big plus financially as gas was climbing toward $3 a gallon.  By this time, I had an SUV (the American dream right).  Phoenix was full of people just like me driving big, gas-guzzling SUVs 50 mile each way to work.  Was it any wonder why the air quality was so poor?

Earlier this year, when we decided to move back east to be closer to our families, we were considering several midwestern and northeastern cities.  Mass transit and proximity to work were our two biggest issues because we were so burnt out from our commutes in Phoenix.  We settled on Pittsburgh because of is location (midway between Chicago and New York), geographic size (much smaller land are than Phoenix = shorter commutes), and public transit.  Within 2 weeks of living in Pittsburgh, we cut the cord and ditched the SUV.  Back to having no more car payment, no more insuance premiums, no more $70/tank fill-ups.  We were free again, but not without issues.  This is a small city and we are definitlyin the car-less minority.  However with the right intentions, knowledge, and tools, almost anyone can live in this city and without ever owning an automoblie.