The Long and Winding Road: How We Ended Up Not Owning a Car
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| Yes, the BCAA will "tow" your bike! |
Setting the Stage
Being walkable was important to us for several reasons:
- We'd moved years before from an "inner suburb" to a place just a block or two from a walkable village centre and loved it.
- Walking is good "free" exercise, and long walks were a passion for us!
- Walking aligned with our environmental goals.
- We wanted to live in a place where we would still have options if and when the time came that we could no longer safely drive.
When we moved from the suburbs to the place near a village centre, we owned two cars. By the time we left we were down to one. That transformation was easy for us, and it would have been even easier in Victoria. It's a very comfortable way to live.
Still, not owning a car was not a priority, nor was getting around by bicycle. Irene hadn't ridden regularly in 40 years! We'd enjoyed bikes, but mostly for recreation, not transportation. I was curious about cycling for transportation, and had played around a bit, but never seriously. And the cycling network in Victoria was very different than what it is today. We brought our old bikes with us when we moved, but they mostly sat in our building's bike room.
But we did not bring a car with us. We were living on the east coast of the USA at the time, and, after Irene's beloved Subaru Forester expired, had picked up a used Nissan Versa Note. The Versa Note was a GREAT car, but it made absolutely no sense to bring it across the continent and across an international border. Besides, we didn't know how we would use a car in Victoria anyway. Would it be used daily or mostly for trips "up island"? If we drove to remote areas, would we want four wheel drive and more ground clearance? We didn't know, so we decided to put off buying a car until we knew what we'd want, or even if we'd want to own one at all.
This didn't mean that we'd never use a car. We knew about car-shares, like Victoria's Modo, which had two cars near our new home (Evo is another one, but it hadn't started up in Victoria when we moved).
In addition, we knew that when we visited cities on vacation, what we loved to do was find a "home base," and explore the city from there. We'd found that we got a better feel for a place by walking around in it, than we did by ticking off a list of "must see" locations. Our home was only a ten minute walk from downtown, and we thought this would be a great way to learn about our new home.
Experiments Are Good
Framing not owning a car as an experiment worked really well!
Looking back, and after talking to other people who have wrestled with the same issues, I think the approach we took gave us the following:
- It let us postpone the decision of what car, if any, we'd want to buy while we were in the middle of downsizing and preparing to move over 5,000 km to a new city in another country.
- It gave us a model for how we'd settle into our new home: this move was always an adventure, so we'd treat it as if we were on vacation.
- Walking everywhere helped us learn the details of the city. We met people, and discovered restaurants, that we never would have if we were driving to destination.
We anticipated all of those reasons. However, we did not anticipate the most important advantage of our experiment. We hadn't realized that keeping a car in a convenient location turns it into the default for every trip. By making it just a little bit harder to access a car, we found ourselves, without any real effort or planning on our part, being much more intentional about how we got around.
Cars Are Swiss Army Knives
Cars are amazing machines. They can be used for short trips, for day trips, for vacations, for work, for shopping, to drive to the mall, to drive to a resort, on a road trip across the continent. They work in cold, in heat, in heavy rain, in snow. Cars are the Swiss army knives of transportation, and there is really nothing else like them.
The versatility of cars comes at a cost. Before our move, and certainly before we left the suburbs, cars were the way Irene and I went places. We rarely thought about the trip, or about different ways of getting there, or about whether we could combine multiple trips. We wanted X, we drove to get X, we returned with X. We rarely thought "is driving the best way to get there". We rarely thought about the costs of driving, or storing, our car—those are sunk costs, and people are good at ignoring them.
When accessing a car is even a little bit harder or more expensive, like when we have to pay for parking at the destination, or when we need to use the car share parked outside our door, then we think about alternatives. I wrote about this in my blog post Light Bulbs and Protected Bike Lanes back in 2023. Nowadays, pretty much any time I go somewhere I choose whether to walk, bike, take transit, or use a car share. I've replaced the versatility of the car with the versatility of choice.
I think the very versatility of cars makes it difficult to say "let's try to use the car less for a while." When the car is sitting there in your parkade or garage or driveway, and all you need to do is climb in, turn it on, and go, it's hard to try something less familiar. Now imagine that your bicycle is hanging on a rack in a bike room that's on the other side of two doors, or hanging on the wall of your garage behind your car. If you're in a rush, it's hard not to hop in the car.
Before moving to Victoria, I'd owned a car continuously since 1981. I could own one now. After living without owning one for a while, my wife and I realized that, for us, at this point in our lives, owning a car wasn't worth the hassle. It is cheaper and easier to use car shares or to rent a car when we want one.
In addition, putting a bike rack in our parking spot made our lives a lot easier! However, if we had put a car in that parking spot, I don't know that we would have learned to navigate the city without driving. Driving places had been our default for decades, and I doubt we would have changed.
It’s Good to Have Options
I mentioned at the start of this post that we chose Victoria because it was a walkable city, not a bikeable one. In fact, we chose Victoria before the first protected bike lane was installed in back in 2017.
But, as I wrote in a recent commentary for the Time Colonist:
Joints don’t improve with age, and my wife now finds long walks painful. Without our walks, our world started to get smaller, but we adapted.
Although walking hurt, physical limitations are not “one size fits all” and my wife discovered that riding a bike was pain free and often made her feel better.
So we, like many older Victorians, bought e-bikes. I have a compact cargo bike, which is great for groceries, and can even carry the two of us to a restaurant. My wife’s bike has an upright seating position and is designed so her feet sit flat on the ground when stopped, which she finds easier for balance.
So, now we bike a lot. Down the road, we may take more transit. If my balance fails, maybe I'll switch to a trike, or start taking a mobility scooter on the AAA network. I suppose we might even buy a car someday, but I hope we're never forced by the lack of decent options and safe infrastructure to drive a 2,000 kg vehicle when we really shouldn't.
At the same time, I'm glad that our apartment had a parking space, that we could have used if we had to, and that the rules were flexible enough that we were able to repurpose it for a bike rack.
However, if we hadn't had a parking spot, and still wanted to store a car, there are still options. For example, monthly parking is available around the city starting at around $150/month and topping out at around $400 for a reserved spot. That may seem like a lot, but it appears that each parking spot adds about $50,000 to the cost of a condo, and that's a lot of money to spend on something one may not need, not to mention the $10-15 thousand dollars a year it takes to own a car in the first place.
What's the Point Already?
- Making an experiment out of it removes much of the stress.
- Going from two cars down to one was very easy for us, and that was in a place without good bicycle infrastructure and before we knew about e-bikes.
- Electric bikes are a game changer when looking at bicycles as transportation. So are cargo bikes, especially for hauling groceries (or, I imagine, children).
- If you can, try the experiment without having a private car be easier to climb into than your bike.
- Make sure you have transportation options. Are there stores you need frequent access to withing walking distance? Are there safe cycling routes nearby? Is there good transit available nearby? I love walking and cycling, so transit isn't usually my first choice—but on a cold, wet, January night that bus starts looking pretty good!
- Parking is nice to have if you've already paid for it, but, never forget, parking is expensive!
- And, if you're a member, the BCAA will happily "tow" your bike when you get a flat!
Most of all, though, there's nothing "right" or "wrong" about how we get around. We make choices that reflect our values, our abilities, and our finances. My wife and I don't own a car, but we're not "car free"! We drive when we want to; we just rarely have to, and don't want to very often.
A Little Light Reading
- Modo Cooperative, Modo, retrieved 2026-02-09 from https://modo.ca
- Evo in Victoria, Evo, retrieved 2026-02-09 from https://evo.ca/victoria
- Sunk Cost, Wikipedia, retrieved 2026-02-08 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
- Jim Mayer, Light Bulbs and Protected Bike Lanes, Boomin in Victoria (blog), published 2023-01-27 at https://www.boomin-in-victoria.ca/2023/01/light-bulbs-and-protected-bike-lanes.html
- Jim Mayer, Jim Drives a Car, Boomin in Victoria (blog), published 2023-02-27 at https://www.boomin-in-victoria.ca/2023/02/jim-drives-car.html
- How This Small City Tripled Its Cycling In Just 11 Years, Oh The Urbanity! (YouTube), posted 2025-11-26 at https://youtu.be/mpWm45qting
- Nic Laporte, How to Build a Bike City...FAST, Nic Laporte (YouTube), posted 2025-12-03 at https://youtu.be/FKMDMekErQ0
- Jim Mayer, Comment: How Victoria’s bike and roll network changed my life, Times Colonist, published 2025-12-25 at https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/comment-how-victorias-bike-and-roll-network-changed-my-life-11669689
- Andrew A. Duffy, Victoria wants province to allow mobility scooters in bike lanes, Times Colonist, published 2026-02-06 at https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/victoria-wants-province-to-allow-mobility-scooters-in-bike-lanes-11848272
- Parking Locator, Robbins, downloaded 2026-02-09 from https://signup.robbinsparking.com/selfsignup/parkinglocator.html
- Leo Spalteholz, The cost of parking, House Hunt Victoria (blog), posted 2024-09-09 at https://househuntvictoria.ca/2024/09/09/the-cost-of-parking/
- Kea Wilson, An Epic Mistake’: Donald Shoup Reflects on America’s Parking Failure, StreetsBlog USA, posted 2021-11-19 at https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/11/19/an-epic-mistake-donald-shoup-reflects-on-americas-parking-failure-and-his-hopes-for-the-future
- Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, Updated Edition, Routeledge, 2011, https://www.routledge.com/The-High-Cost-of-Free-Parking-Updated-Edition/Shoup/p/book/9781932364965
- How does BCAA Bike Assist coverage work for Members?, BCAA, retrieved 2026-02-09 from https://faq.bcaa.com/s/article/How-does-BCAA-bike-assist-coverage-work-for-Members
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