We all start out car-free.  I purchased my first car my junior year of college when I got an internship at General Electric.  Until that point, I was 100% dependent on on my feet, my bike, and mass transit. 

As a kid, I loved to bike.  I biked most places even when I got a driver’s license, because I wasn’t always able to borrow a car.  I remember being in high school and wondering if I could survive as an adult without owning a car.  My father worked about 5 miles from our house and my mother worked only about a mile away.  I thought certainly i could get by biking those distances.  Then winter came.  We lived in Illinois where we got quite a bit of snow and winter temperatures can be in the single digits.  Ok, so I need a car in the winter.  The other nine months I could get by without one.

After I graduated, I attended the University of Illinois.  It was located in Champaign-Urbana, a small town of about 100,000 people in the middle of a corn field in East-central Illinois.  It was here that had my first real experience with mass transit.  For a town of 100,000 people, Champaign had an excellent mass transit system.  This was probably thanks in part to the university.  Our school IDs allowed us unlimited use of the city’s transit system.  Of course, the cost was built in to our tuition, but I could get nearly anywhere in town without a car.

As I mentioned earlier, I got an internship with GE my junior year.  The internship was in Louisville, KY, a city with a less-than-impressive mass transit system.  How could this be?  This was an area of nearly a million people!  After some research, I came to the conclusion that I would have to break down and buy a car.  I purchase a used 1992 Mitsubishi Eclipse for $7000.  I drove a lot, since it was the first time I had a car.  I think I put 10,000 miles on it in that first semester.

When I got back to school after my internship two things changed.  First my income stream dried up.  That was never a problem before, but now I had a $200 a month car payment for the next 2 and a half years. Second, being back in Champaign, I wasn’t even driving much.  Finding parking on campus was a nightmare and I was paying $30 a month to park a car I wasn’t driving at my apartment complex.  That’s a $230 monthly expense for a car I was barely using.

What was I going do?  I did what any other auto-addicted American would do…I got a job.  It was a minimum wage job repairing audio/visual equipment for the university.  I took home $90 a week, $360 a month.  $230 of that went to my car payment and parking…that left $130 a month for beer.  So I was trading 80 hours of my life every month to pay for a car I never drove and a couple of beers to make me feel better about paying $230 a month for a car I never drove.  I was car-poor…

In 2001, I graduated an moved to Chicago.  I lived downtown and commuted out to the West side of the city for work at a GE facility.  I found an apartment in the West Loop 4 blocks from the 54 Cermak Blue Line (now the Pink Line) which meant a 30-minute commute by train.  I had no complaints.  I read books, or took a nap.  I noticed that I was in a much better mood at work than all of the people who suffered through hour-long commutes on I-290.  Within a month, I sold my eclipse and was again car-free.  But it didn’t last long…