Why I Don't Drive

I don’t own a car. I get around my city of San Mateo and everywhere else by walking, biking, and taking public transit.

I’ve never written this down before. It’s not something I announce.

But I’ve been thinking about why I do it, and I think the reasons are worth spelling out.

The opportunity cost case

My household can afford a car and all its attached costs. Most of my neighbors can too. My story isn’t a story about financial necessity.

It’s a story about what car ownership actually costs you–in money but more importantly in time and mental overhead.

The AAA puts average annual car ownership at over $12,000 per year. That’s real money I’d rather deploy elsewhere (housing, healthier food, childcare services).

But the subtler cost is the administrative tax that comes with owning a vehicle: hunting for parking, scheduling maintenance, renewing registration, dealing with insurance claims, getting smog checks, remembering to move the car on street cleaning day. None of these things are catastrophic. They are just a persistent low-grade drain on your attention that never fully goes away.

I ride a Yuba Mundo cargo bike that carries more groceries than a sedan trunk, plus my kid. For longer trips, Caltrain or the SamTrans bus works.

The financial comparisons are staggering, and my household banks those savings.

A barometer I care about

There’s a second reason I don’t drive–and the biggest:

I want to know what my community looks like to someone who cannot afford a car.

Can a person without a car in San Mateo get groceries safely? Get their kid to school? Access a bank, a government office, a doctor?

The answer to that question is one of the most honest measures of a community’s social health.

A city that has quietly made full participation contingent on car ownership–whether it admits it or not–is an exclusionary city.

It is a city that has decided through its infrastructure choices that some residents matter more than others.

I don’t not-drive to prove a political point. I do it partly to stay calibrated. To feel firsthand whether the streets, the transit, the bike infrastructure are actually functional for someone without a car. To notice when they are not.

Most of the time in San Mateo they are adequate. Sometimes they are even good! Occasionally they’re genuinely hostile. I want to keep knowing which is which.

What it actually costs me

Honestly, it costs me a whole lot less than most people assume to go car-free.

An e-bike extends your range and carrying capacity dramatically. Hills disappear. Trips that would be a slog on a regular bike across town with a full load of groceries, or with a kid on the back become unremarkable.

Your mental map of what’s reachable expands considerably once you have one.

The biggest difficulties are weather and daylight. San Mateo is mild by most standards, but rain still means raingear and a potential change of clothes.

Winter’s short days mean more trips happen in the dark which is fine with good bike lights, but it shapes when I run errands and how I think about timing.

I adjust my schedule around daylight in the winter in a way that I don’t in the summer.

The case I care more about

When you drive you leave your neighborhood.

Not physically but experientially. You experience your neighborhood as a series of obstacles between you and parking. Stoplights. Pedestrians crossing. Narrow streets.

When you walk and bike, you are in your neighborhood. You notice the new restaurant that opened. You run into your neighbor. You watch your kid point at the fire truck going by. You feel the weather, hear the birds, exist in the place you actually live.

This sounds soft. It isn’t. It is the entire difference between living somewhere and merely sleeping there.

Ivan Illich called this the “remoteness” that speed creates–a framing I’ve written about before. Beyond a certain speed, you stop inhabiting space and start skipping it.

I have a new baby. I want him to grow up knowing his neighborhood–the coffee shop owner, the librarian, the bus driver. That intimacy requires slowness. It requires being present in the same places repeatedly at a human pace.

Driving takes that away from us all.

Driving is the privilege

We have it backwards when we say “going car-free is a privilege.”

Driving is the privilege.

American roads, parking minimums, free street storage for private vehicles, highways bisecting neighborhoods–these are massive public subsidies, built and maintained at collective expense, that primarily benefit people who can afford to drive. The person who can’t afford a car doesn’t opt out of a neutral system. They’re excluded from one that was engineered around everyone else.

When I don’t drive, I’m not enjoying some luxurious, exotic lifestyle. I am just refusing to depend on infrastructure that was built by displacing people poorer than me.

The question worth asking is not “can I afford not to drive?”

It’s: “what kind of community am I building by driving through it?”