Celebrate World Car-Free Day on Monday, Sept. 22nd

Monday is World Car-Free Day. People around the world will be imagining a world free from cars and the social ills cars can promote.
What do you imagine the world might be like with fewer cars on the road? Would we have more parks and open space? Would we have a greater sense of community? Would [...]

Car-Sharing and out-of-town guests

I’ll soon have my first out-of-town guests since becoming car-free. Of course, I’ll need a car to collect the guests (and their luggage) from Union Station. And what will I do when I’m ready to show them the sights?
First, I looked into where the sights are. A lot of LA hotspots are far from where [...]

Safe Cycling

When I first started cycling to work, I was more than a little intimidated by the traffic. It’s scary to navigate cars that get impatient with each other for hesitating a moment at a red light, let alone a little lady cycling on a 10-year-old bike. Still, once I realized that biking was my most [...]

Getting Started: Imagining the Possibilities

One of the first things I did when I got the notion to become car-free was head to the library. I needed expert advice on how to get around, and I figured someone somewhere would have written about this stuff. I was right. Among the car-free books, I found Chris Balish’s How to Live Well [...]

Beginning the car-free journey

In January of 2008, I made one of my first new year’s resolutions ever. After a string of bad luck with my aging car (including a hunk of metal just falling off and scraping along the street for a few miles), I was sick of my car. I was sick of getting it fixed, putting [...]