Each semester I ask my students at the University of Maine to write about their relationships with cars. One option I give them is to go without a car for a week and report on the experience. Another is to tally the true total cost of their vehicle over the time they’ve owned it.

The responses reveal a range of commitment to the car. On average, I’ll have about 18 car owners in a class of 21 undergraduates. Many have owned a car since they were sixteen. A few come from vehicle-enthusiast households, with six or seven cars in the driveway. And some come from cities and haven’t owned a car in their lives.

The assignment also gives me a glimpse into the lifestyle of today’s university student. I’ve noted previously that students seem to travel home on weekends more than they did in my college years, and that more of them seem to own cars. I have a scattering of non-traditional students, older adults squeezing college classes into schedules defined by work, kids, or both. Most of them have cars.

But many of my students live in off-campus housing developments less than a mile from campus, and a surprising number of them use their cars to get back and forth, often several times a day, without a second thought. I’ve lost track of the number essays in which a student describes a routine of driving to a morning class, driving home to hang out in the middle of the day, driving back to campus for an afternoon class, driving to the gym to work out, driving home to change, then driving to a friend’s house for the evening.

They typically note that much of this is doable without a car, but that it requires a bit of advance planning – a valuable lesson for any college student.

I can’t remember doing any of that in college. I lived in off-campus houses, but I rode my bicycle or walked to school. Only a few of us had cars. We hung out on campus during the day, even on weekends. Only the athletes on teams went to the gym to work out. The rest of us got our exercise playing softball and ultimate Frisbee, and taking long walks in the neighborhood. Many of us had jobs off-campus, but few of us drove to them.

This may come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog, but the only time I drove as an undergraduate was at work. My off-campus job was as a school bus driver for the public schools in Beloit, Wisconsin. The bus yard was four miles from campus. In the winter I carpooled; in warmer weather I rode my bike. I’d drive in the morning, spend a few hours in class, drive in the afternoon, study in the evening, and still have energy to party with my friends at night. Those were the days.

My students think it’s normal that four people live together with four separate cars parked outside. The Black Bear Express Bus stops at their apartment complex every half hour, from 7 in the morning to 10:30 at night. Yet they navigate their daily lives in their cars, and then complain about the inconvenience of campus parking.

To their credit, the students who took up the car-free week challenge reported getting more done, feeling more energized, and keeping more money. Many wrote that the experiment had changed their outlook on the habitual use of cars.

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When I gave up owning cars in 2007, I discovered that I not only felt better, but I had a lot more money at the end of the month. I thought: Someone ought to write a book about how to do this.

Turns out someone had. Chris Balish published How To Live Well Without Owning a Car with Ten Speed Press in 2006. The book is a guide to freeing yourself from the tentacles of car ownership. Among other things, Balish provides a worksheet of all the expenses associated with car ownership. It runs four pages, from the mundane to the occasional and accidental. Things like parking tickets, car washes, in-car phone and music accessories, tools, towing fees – all must be factored in.

My students are surprised to learn that the average annual cost of owning a car is around $9,000. That’s a lot of ramen noodles.

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Much of my attitude toward cars was formed and solidified during the 16 years I lived in southern California.

For a time I lived in Oceanside, thirty miles north of San Diego and adjacent to the Camp Pendleton U.S. Marine base. I lived in a duplex three blocks from the beach, and worked at a newspaper office that I could walk to. It was 1991, the year of the first Gulf War and a riveting World Series that wasn’t decided until the tenth inning of Game 7. (The Twins beat the Braves, 1-0.)

I went to the beach every day, often in the morning before work. On exceptionally clear days, I could see Santa Catalina Island, far off to the northwest. The island was 50 miles away, and only visible because of its altitude. I could see it from the top of the steps, but when I got down to the beach itself, the island disappeared.

One day a friend asked me, as we stood above the beach, how much of the island we were seeing above the “hump” of the Earth’s curvature. Channeling my inner math geek, I estimated the distance to the island and the height of our vantage point, drew a crude diagram that incorporated the radius of the Earth and a tangent line to the Earth’s surface, did a little algebra, and came up with a reasonable answer. We were seeing the island from about 1,400 feet up. Since Catalina tops out at 2,097 feet, we could see the peaks of its hills. Everything else was “hull down,” as they used to say of sailboats.

I’ve been there twice. The island is 22 miles long, and home to roughly 4,000 people, the bulk of whom live in the island’s only town, Avalon, which encompasses one square mile of land and a famously photogenic harbor with a big casino at one end. The author Zane Grey lived and wrote there, and Phillip Wrigley’s Chicago Cubs baseball teams trained there for 30 years. A hundred or so bison roam the hills, descendants of 24 brought over in the 1920s by a Hollywood film crew. Catalina has an airport, at the top of the island, but I took the ferry out from San Pedro.

Most of the island is off-limits to cars, and the town regulates the number of vehicles. There’s a 14-year waiting list. Transportation is by golf cart, moped, or bicycle (plus tourist buses to the island’s interior). It’s a pedestrian town of pint-sized apartments and small shops, a slice of urbanity twenty miles offshore.
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But Catalina is visible from Oceanside fewer than 20 days of the year. On the other 345, the emissions of all the vehicles plying the coast between Mexico and Malibu, where the number of cars is not regulated, conceal it from view. The sky is cloudless and clear, save for a scrum of yellow gray around the horizon. You’d never know there was an island out there.

Immediately south of Oceanside is the city of Carlsbad. The Pacific Highway runs right next to the beach, with an unbroken view of the ocean and the smudged horizon. In 1990, a public art installation went up along the highway. Called “Split Pavilion,” and created by New York artist Andrea Blum, it featured sections of metal bars taller than the people invited to walk through them, rectangular reflecting pools of differing sizes, triangular and trapezoidal benches and pedestals.

Many locals hated it. They gathered signatures on a “Remove the Bars” petition. I wrote about it in a piece for the Los Angeles Times:

From the highway, all one can see is the bars. (One can, to be sure, see the ocean through them.) To fully appreciate the park, one must get out of the car and walk through. When you stand between the bars and the shoreline, the artwork functions as it should – it complements, even augments, its surroundings.

“Do you think,” the man asked me,” that the few people who have the time to get out and walk should take precedence over all the people who drive by and see this thing?

Well, yes I do. You see, with that question, he had put his finger on the crux of the problem.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. The anti-art forces won, and “Split Pavilion” was destroyed in 1999, the year I left California. Drivers can once again enjoy an unobstructed ocean view, but on most days the haze lingers offshore, like a bad aftertaste.

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