Minneapolis man survives – and thrives – without a car

I sold my car.

And I have no plans to buy another one.

It was a hard decision — and something of a radical one in Minnesota, where cars are a staple. In fact, it took me many months to ease out of my Subaru Impreza and to prove to myself that I really didn't need it.

Now, two months after selling my car and nearly a year since I stopped driving it, I no longer worry about traffic or parking, my wallet is thankful, I'm in better shape and I feel much more connected to my adopted city.

So, how do I get around?

My primary modes of transportation are buses (in the winter) and bicycling (in the summer), interspersed with a lot of walking. But I credit two tools for getting me to take the plunge: car sharing and my smartphone.

For a long time, I held onto my car because I wondered "What if?" What if I have to make a large purchase at Target or pick up a lot of groceries? What if I need to get somewhere quickly?

The other night as I left work, for example, I checked Metro Transit's mobile site for the arrival time of the next bus traveling down Nicollet Avenue. Within minutes, I hopped the bus from downtown to a friend's improv show on 37th Street. Later that evening, after dinner at a nearby restaurant, I checked the same site and learned that there wasn't another bus for an hour.

Instead of waiting, I opened another app and found that a Car2Go ride-share vehicle was just around the corner. I drove home, locked the car and left it on the street for the next Car2Go user to find. The ride cost me less than $6 — a marginal cost after subtracting the expense of maintaining a vehicle.

I had never owned a car — nor driven one for very long — before arriving in Minneapolis four years ago. In both Washington, D.C., where I had been working, and New York City, where I grew up, owning a car isn't the norm, in part because both cities have expansive transit systems.

Knowing I'd need to have a car in Minnesota, I hired a driving instructor in Washington to help me brush up on my technique. I drove at night for the very first time when I peeled out of the dealership lot in White Bear Lake in my used car.

For a while, I was hooked on the novelty of driving. After about two years, though, I started to question my car logic.

"I think we're tied to our cars so that people refuse to go to certain parts of the city because they don't want to park, they don't want to pay for parking or they have to leave somewhere early because their car is parked in a certain spot," said Bill Lindeke, the carless host of the transportation-focused streets.mn podcast. "And in a way, the car sort of owns the person, instead of the other way around."

I have no children, I live along a bus line in Uptown and work downtown, about 4 miles away. My company has a few vehicles for work-related trips during the day. Yet I was still one of 61 percent of Minneapolis residents driving to work solo.

Last spring, I bought a bike and started riding to work. Come fall, I got serious about understanding the bus system. Late this past winter, I took the Subaru to a carwash, took some photos of my car, then sold it on Craigslist.

For grocery runs and trips to the suburbs, I have access to a Zipcar near my house, which must be returned to the location it was taken from. (Locally owned Hourcar has a similar model.) For short trips, I use Car2Go.

Of course, it made little sense to pay $9-$10 an hour (or about 46 cents a minute in the case of Car2Go) to rent a car when I was already paying more than $300 a month for loan payments, insurance, gas and parking for my own vehicle. Subtract my vehicle, however, and the occasional cost of car sharing has quickly become negligible.

The Minneapolis bike infrastructure has grown rapidly, but I'll be the first to admit that becoming a bike commuter was a bit intimidating. It took time to determine what kind of bike to purchase, locate the best routes and learn the etiquette. (Raising your left hand to signal a right turn was a bit baffling at first.)

I'd never been that into biking, so each ride was a lesson. Google Maps bike directions were often my best guide. And only recently did I discover the wisdom of attaching saddle bags to transport groceries or hold a spare jacket.

Bike commuting requires more thought about the weather than driving does, though I can take the bus or use a bus bike rack in the event of rain — something New York City doesn't have. Parking is plentiful and traffic — apart from stoplights — is nonexistent, especially on the side roads I frequent.

I also discovered the joy of biking down Nicollet Mall on a warm summer day as shoppers peruse the farmers market, smelling food cooking at nearby restaurants from the Midtown Greenway after a long day at work or cruising home with a friend along the Mississippi River after a night in Northeast.

Busing was also somewhat complicated at first. I first had to purchase a GoTo card, Metro Transit's bus pass, at a local grocery store.

"The transit system works reasonably well if you're going to go downtown, or to one of the downtowns," said Prof. David Levinson, a transportation expert at the University of Minnesota. "There's relatively fewer cross-connections. So if you're not going to downtown, but you want to go from Point A to Point B, Car2Go might very well be faster."

To plan my routes, I turned to Google Maps again, but its app only uses scheduled bus arrival times. For real-time data, I rely on a combination of Metro Transit's NextTrip (a valuable, if somewhat cumbersome, mobile site) and a similar but more user-friendly tool created by local developers called OMGTransit.com.

Are there hiccups with taking the bus? Sure. While Metro Transit is expanding nighttime and weekend service (a 3.9 percent increase in off-peak service last year), missing an off-peak bus can still leave you stranded.

Is it colder waiting for the bus? Yes. But it was a lot warmer after I bought a better coat, wore long underwear and wrapped my head in a scarf.

Taking the bus helped me discover something rare in the Twin Cities: a public environment where strangers occasionally talk to each other.

Bus interactions aren't always this pleasant, particularly when alcohol is involved, but observing and encountering a variety of people on a daily basis is one of the things that makes city life so interesting.

Going carless isn't for everyone, of course. I happen to live along a transit corridor and not far from where I work. Many people in the Twin Cities have long commutes to and from the suburbs and rely on their cars to get their children to the soccer game and the orthodontist.

"Kids plus no car seems like a Triple Lindy level of difficulty," one Twitter follower told me when I asked about managing without a car.

Not everyone has the mobility to ride a bike, and the bus system isn't convenient if you work in a location that's off the beaten track.

"A lot of it just depends on how you arrange your life," said Levinson, whose five-member family owns one car. "In the city it is very different than in the suburbs because there's a lot more choices in the city itself. I think that it [being without a car] is certainly more possible now because of Car2Go than it was previously. Places that were accessible by transit, but inconveniently, are now less inconvenient."

They just might find — as I did — the many intangible benefits to becoming car-free.

Eric Roper • 612-673-1732

Twitter: @StribRoper