summer without a car

Summer is in full swing and even without a car, we have had an activity-filled season involving a variety of modes of transportations .

Camp: When we signed the kids up for camp in the spring our only criteria was whether the camp was in walking distance to our house. Blue Camp, where Leah is going, has an elaborate pick up and drop off routine that involves hundreds of cars driving up to the camp then camp counselors radio-ing down to the "holding" area where the campers are hanging out; the children are then escorted to their parents' awaiting cars. If you're a walker, then you are, apparently, a low-priority in the pick-up hierarchy. I realize that they need to move the cars quickly so as not to create (even more) gridlock, but you would think that those of us who are helping to ease the traffic congestion by walking instead of driving would not be made to wait in the hot sun while they attend to the needs of the drivers. If there's one thing this carlessness experiment has taught us, it's that cars seem to always get priorty over pedestrians.

Swimming: No summer is complete without lots of water time. Luckily we live within walking distance to two pools. Willard Pool has family swim in the evenings and is some eight blocks from our house. Going out for an evening swim is an easy activity that can be done quite spontaneously. It's a bit more of a hike to get to Strawberry Canyon pool on the Cal campus but once you're there it's bonus not to have to go through the frustrating parking routine that UC has set up there.

Movies: The Elmwood Theater and the Pacific Film Archive have both had screenings of kid-friendly movies. They are both in walking distance. To see Up in 3D we took BART into San Francisco.

Farmers market: When we can, we try to bike to the Berkeley Farmer's Market on Saturday mornings. The ride home from the market is slightly uphill but Anna has been a trooper and, riding her single gear bike, can keep up with those us with 24 gears. (Leah rides on the trail-a-bike behind Keith.)

Day trips: We spent a day at Gilroy Gardens, a family theme park south of San Jose. For this, we used up on of our CityCarShare "extended freedom credits" that allowed us to reserve the car for 24 hours and pay 10 cents a mile. We've had a couple of day trips to San Francisco: for one of them, we took the Alameda/Oakland Ferry home. Nothing says summer like a boat trip on a large body of water.

Friendships: One of the things that we told ourselves when we decided to ditch the car was that we would not deprive our kids of a normal social life. If one of them gets invited to a birthday party in a far flung location, we would find a way to get them there (bumming rides has proven to be one successful strategy). Many of Leah's buddies are pretty nearby. But Anna made a new friend at camp this summer and was invited to her house for a couple of get togethers. Turns out Sierra comes out every summer to spend three weeks with her aunt who lives in Oakland slightly out of our usual walking radius. Aunt Sandy is also very generous and happily picked Anna up and dropped her off. (Perhaps, Sandy is not hip to the notion of "driving currency" in which a parent will willing drive your kid around so long as you agree to drive theirs around at some point in the future. Read more about this phenomenon at "The Perils of Carless Parenting" ).

a new bike!

Ever since we ditched the car, I've been planning to get a new bike. It's been about a month since I got my new Cafe 24 and in that time I've started a love affair with biking. You would too if you had this set of wheels in a fetching robin egg blue.

commentary on carlessness

Responding to the article on Vauban, the German suburb that's gone carless, the Times asked some experts to weigh in on whether carlessness is feasible in the US. Read Car-Free in America?. Check out the reader comments (hundreds of 'em!).

a car-free suburb

The most e-mailed article in today's New York Times profiles Vauban, a car-free suburb outside of Freiburg, Germany. As one resident stated in the article, In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars, "When I had a car, I was always tense. I'm much happier this way." Others say that what they like best about their community is that it is a better place to raise their kids. "With no cars on the streets, many residents call Vauban a children's paradise, where youngsters wander from a young age in safety."

mayor gives up car

First he was homeless (Mayor's night out), now Berkeley mayor Tom Bates is carless. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Berkeley mayor gives up his car for the bus. But does it count if his wife (State Senator Loni Hancock) still owns a car? (Note that Oakland mayor Ron Dellums is chaffeured to work in a Lincoln Town car.)

walking

Needless to say we do a lot of walking. During the week, there's school and work. On the weekend, there's grocery shopping. But recently I had to fill out a survey about travel habits and realized just how much we really walk.

On a recent Saturday, these were the trips I took. They were all pretty short but, as you can see, they add up:

• Grocery store (15 minutes each way)
• Walk Anna to a friend's house for birthday party (also 15 minutes each way)
• Return to friend's house because Anna forgot to bring present (add another 30 minutes)
• Drop off Leah at Emerson for playdate (does 3 minutes each way even qualify as a trip?)
• Since both kids are at playdates, Keith and decide to take a neighborhood walk. We walk up College Avenue and through Rockridge, then back by way of the Uplands and Claremont Avenue (45 minutes total)
• After dinner, walk to video store, stopping off at bookstore (5 minutes each way)

Total minutes walked: 2 hours and 31 minutes.

it's not the destination, it's the journey

On Sunday, we visited the newly renovated California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Here's how we got there:

• Leave house at nine. Walk to the Rockridge BART station. (About 25 minutes, at a kid-friendly pace.)
• 9:34 train to downtown San Francisco, Powell Street Station. (About 25 minutes travel time.)
• Before leaving BART station, we get transfer for 25 cents off Muni fare.
• On Market Street wait for 5 Fulton. (See photo.) Bus stops now feature a ticker tape-like feed from nextmuni.com announcing when next bus will arrive. (It has been a long time since I was a regular Muni rider so, for all I know, nextmuni.com could be old news. When we were in Sweden two years ago, bus stops there also indicated when the next bus would arrive and we cited that as yet another reason -- along with fantastic urban parks and liberal maternity leave policies -- why Scandinavia is superior to the US.)
• #5 bus winds its way up through the Tenderloin, past Civic Center, through Hayes Valley, past the USF campus and eventually up Fulton Street which borders Golden Gate Park. We get off at 8th Street. (About 20 minutes)
• 10 minute walk through the park. Arrive at Cal Academy at around 10:45, a mere one hour, forty-five minutes after departure.
• Bonus: visitors to the Cal Academy who travel there by public transport get a $3 discount on the price of admission.
  

Oh, and did I mention it was raining the whole time?