Could I live with no car?

After reading a blog about how some minimalists have gone so far as to get rid of their cars, it got me thinking about if it would actually be possible.

In America our sprawling cities and their adjacent suburbs have grown based on the influence of automobiles.  Chain stores and strip centers spring up on main traffic arteries which run for miles.  This type of growth is far different than it was before everyone had a car.  In older cities and towns, all commerce was packed into a city-center where everything from shoe repair to hardware to the butcher shop was located within a radius that rarely exceeded one mile.  After all, if your best and fastest transportation involved a horse and buggy, chances are your business wouldn't last long if it was located 10 miles from the center of town.  Now, to drive 50 miles around town in order to "pick up a few things" is commonplace.  Everything is spread out.

While on vacation in Europe, I noticed how many old city and town centers are largely intact.  I found I was able to walk to everything.  In many cases, a car isn't needed.  Part of the reason is expensive gas.  But there seemed to be another underlying reason.  It seemed to me as if many in Europe like to "keep it simple" and stick with what has always worked.  Folks enjoy getting out and walking or biking.  Purchasing the day's food needs at the street market is a pleasure, not a chore.  Some cities, like Amsterdam are configured such that 40% of commuters use a bicycle instead of a car.  A large percentage of transportation spending is directed at encouraging bicycle use and maintaining bike lanes and signals.  I couldn't even imagine how nearly half of our local population could bike to work.  Everything is just too far apart.  Plus, it's way too   i n c o n v e n i e n t. 

One thing is for sure...there'd be far less obesity if we actually used our own body power to transport ourselves around.

The thought of giving up the car is enticing.  No insurance, which keeps going up.  No gas expense.  No repair expense.  No car payments.  The savings would be more than a bit significant.  I could probably get away with it in a place like Manhattan or Paris, but I live in an average mid sized city where a good amount of what we buy comes from places like Home Depot, Target or Costco.  None of these places is next to the other.  Not even close.  This fact perpetuates the use of automobiles.

Although the distance between most shopping destinations (I hate that expression) is relatively far in miles, it isn't so far that it couldn't be tackled on a bicycle.  I'd go for it IF there was a safe way to do it.  Frankly, there just isn't.  The thought of biking on our main traffic arteries makes me shudder.  These are the ribbons of asphalt frequented by folks in a big hurry...always in a hurry.  They drive Escalades and Yukons while texting or engaging in  heated phone conversations while adjusting their neckties or applying makeup.  Oh, and did I mention they're late?   Always late?  Add this to the fact that the shoulders of most main roads are littered with whatever was pitched out the window, fell off  the undercarriage, or flew out of the open bed of any number of vehicles.  Were talking hubcaps, glass, entire exhaust systems, lumber....you name it.  I've even seen artificial ficus trees, bed frames and <gulp> crushed bicycles.  Top that off with having to breathe in a cocktail of vehicle exhaust.  Nope.  Not even going to try.

And bike lanes?  Ha!  There are a few paths in town...mostly recreational, circling lakes or winding through parks.  Most aren't crowded...ever.  Why sweat on a bike when the TV remote and a bag of potato chips are only steps away?

I got so disgusted over it all that I fought back in my own little way today.  A giant Lowes just opened about a mile away from our home and we needed a few things (replacements for those things that keep breaking - see my earlier post about this) so as I reached for the car keys I stopped and declared "I'm taking the bike."  My family looked at me, stunned, as if I had said I was from Mars.  "I'm doing it.  It's good for me." I said with more conviction.  And so I did.  I took the back roads to a gravel path and cut behind another local strip center to get there.  Surprisingly, they had a bike rack.  One.  I made my purchase, tossed the items into my pack and pedaled home.  Total time, 30 minutes.   Not bad, and I got some exercise.

Within one mile we now have the huge hardware megalopolis, two supermarkets, about four restaurants and a smattering of other stores that would probably satisify most of our fairly meager needs.  I plan to use the bike more often if I can effectively avoid the main roads.  Hopefully, I'll stick with it.  We've managed to stick to other healthy choices, so I'm optimistic. 

It would be nice if we (society) placed more emphasis on biking to work, for health and just to get outside.  It could only be a good thing.  Will I get rid of the car?  Enticing, but not likely unless I move to a big city center or a city that is more bike friendly.  I hear Portland Oregon is the most bike friendly with 9% of its citizens biking to work.  A far cry from Amsterdam, but not bad for America.

This would work...

We're almost there...

We needed some paper to provide our customers with some wrapping for a sale that had lots of fragile items...  What better place to get newspaper than at the recycle center.  When I pulled up I had to wait in line.  A steady stream of cars were filing in to drop off recyclables.  This is heartening.  Considering we live in a world where nobody seems to want to go to any effort to do something that that won't directly benefit them right now, it is nice to see that folks are taking the time to separate recyclables and actually using their own gasoline to haul them to the recycling center.  (It's stupid that we don't have widespread curbside recycling here...absolutely stupid.)

On the other hand, I regularly watch folks pitching recyclables into the trash when there is a bin that says "Bottles Only" or "Aluminum Cans Only" sitting right beside it.  Somehow recycling on a small scale throughout the day doesn't seem to register for many quite yet.  We're doing better, but statistically, when it comes to recycling we lag behind most first world nations by a considerable margin. 

As a family of three, we recycle everything we possibly can.  We even pay a company to collect our recyclables since they actually accept more types of plastics than the recycling center does.  Between that and our dedication to composting everything organic, we only generate enough trash to fill one white tall kitchen bag in a  week.   Our trash service comes once a week and we often take a month or more to fill the bin with trash while our neighbor's bins overflow every week.

Recycling isn't hard, especially when you've built it into your life.  It is normal for any of us in our home to quickly inspect, without thinking about it, any item before it ends up in the trash.  A surprising number of products and packaging materials have recycling symbols on them.  We just need to take the time to look.  The trash bin should be the receptacle of last resort when all other possibilities for recycling have been exhausted.

With only a few exceptions, our government has not been a role model for recycling activity.  A few well proven programs would dramatically improve our scores when it comes to keeping usable materials out of the landfill.

1. A national bottle bill with no exemptions for certain types of beverages.  If it can be recycled, it should be included.  Several states currently have a working bottle bill and there's no question that it gets results.  What better way to encourage recycling than to attach dollars to it.  When I was in college in upstate New York, there were recycling machines on campus that dispensed a nickel for each empty aluminum can we fed it.  Since NY had a 5 cent deposit on bottles and cans, we often accumulated plenty of drinking and pizza money by cleaning up the campus.  I remember walking into the College Union with a green trash bag slung over my shoulder and walking out with two pockets bulging with nickels from the machines.  This was in the 80's and nearly a quarter century later, it seems we've made little progress.

2. Mandatory recycling.  This is a reverse incentive.  Failing to recycle gets you slapped with a fine.  Now there's a revenue generator for cash-strapped municipalities.  In NJ, everything recyclable goes into one bin.  It is then separated at the recycling facility.  Talk about making it easy.  The facility created jobs and can sell the materials.  Where's the downside?

3. Packaging requirements.  Sure, the big corporations will whine about it but they need to get over the whole idea that they can contribute to the wasting of our resources and the polluting of our planet.  Packages would need to be either fully recyclable (at today's standards), or completely biodegradable.  With the technology we have, that shouldn't be very hard.  A better idea would be to make sure EVERYTHING we can buy can be recycled somehow.  Nice, but what are the chances of that?

Even three decades ago this was a no-brainer... more so now.  I don't understand why the rest of the developed world can do this really well and we can't.

We can do this well...if we really want to.

An Increasingly Disposable World

Use it today, then throw it away.

Welcome to today's world of consumer products.  Now, more than ever, thanks to Wal-Mart and the recession, consumers demand products they can buy at low prices.  Simple enough.  What most people don't understand is that a low priced product has a variety of non-monetary costs.  We (Americans) don't seem to care about that as long as it means we can keep a few extra dollars in our pockets.  We should care.

I hear laments daily about how China has become the manufacturing capital of the world and how jobs are vanishing in factories.  No secret there.  In China, young girls work grueling hours in factories making things like electric toothbrushes.  They get paid just a few cents an hour.  Because labor is so inexpensive, it is more profitable to make things in China and ship them here.  That means there's a reason you can buy an electric toothbush for 3 bucks....someone on the other end was exploited.  Additionally, materials and workmanship are often subpar because the focus is on quantity, not quality.  The result... Use it today, then throw it away.

It would be great if we could make things here, but nobody would work in a factory making $3 electric toothbrushes.  The workers union would make sure employees got paid $25 an hour and received full health benefits, pensions and a variety of other perks.  When all was said and done, that toothbrush would cost $12.  When placed side by side at the store, which one do you think would sell better?  We can make all the arguments we want for buying American.  When we get to the checkout counter and have to count out the dollars, things change.  This is simple economics.

The deeper problem is that we've made physical price the most important attribute when shopping.  We want more stuff for the amount of money we have so the compromise is to make items of inferior quality that can be sold for less.  Nothing is made very well anymore.  What used to be made from steel is now plastic and what was made of thick plastic is now made of thin plastic.  More and more, the products we buy are designed to last a shorter amount of time.  Lower price means shorter product life.  Planned Obsolescence.  Made to break so we'll buy another, then another.  The words "They don't make 'em like they used to." are very true.  Instead of one good $12 electric toothbrush, we'd rather buy six $3 toothbrushes over the course of a few years.  That's five extra broken devices in the trash.  A monumental waste.

It is amazing how many products end up in the trash.  To illustrate...Just today....I was working in the garden.  I decided to take the tarp off of the henhouse since the intense summer sun is no longer a threat to the well being of our chickens.  The tarp is about disintegrated...after one season because it was manufactured using the thinnest material possible.  Into the trash it goes.  We have two oscillating sprinklers in the garden.  Neither of them oscillates anymore.  They just flood one area of the garden.  We thought they looked pretty sturdy when we bought them last year, but I guess they weren't.  I'm tossing them in favor of a sprinkler with no moving parts.   The hose guides we placed in the ground to keep the hoses from crushing the plants are all broken.  They're made of plastic.  Our patio umbrella needs to be dumped as well.  It broke on a breezy day.  The ribs were thin and cheap and could hardly stand anything more than a light breeze.  One of our lawn chairs needs to go as well.  One of the welds in the frame broke.  None of these items are more than a year or two old.  They all need replacing...already.  Multiply this scene by the millions of households in our country and you know why the Home Depot is jammed every weekend.

For most products, there is a lack of high quality alternatives and so we are stuck buying and re-buying the same products.  This all but ensures a predictable cash flow for the manufacturers.  Great for the stockholders, bad for the average consumer and the rest of the world as our landfills accumulate all the stuff that was designed to break.  Engineers spend hours in back offices designing products with a very predictable life cycle.  A critical part is designed to last only so long under average use before it fails.  That length of time needs to be long enough for the customer to feel like he or she received "enough" service out of it to justify buying the same product again when it fails.  If it breaks too soon, there is a risk the buyer will choose a different product.

When I was a kid, the thought of any "durable" product lasting only one year was unconscionable.  We had the same lawn sprinklers until I was a teenager.  Stuff actually lasted for awhile.  Now we're used to constantly replacing things.  It can only get worse from here.

It might be nice if we could get past needing more junk that costs less and focused on buying only what we really need.  Then we'd have a few bucks to pay a fair price for something that might have a life cycle that isn't measured in weeks.  We'd also stop wasting our natural resources that are currently used for making junk that ends up in the landfill.  Time to get past "Low price trumps all."  We really do get what we pay for and indirectly, we even pay for what we don't get in the form of exploited resources and people.

How long should this product last?

Out of Sight.....

" I'll just put it in storage until the market gets better."

When I hear that, I want to tear my hair out. 

I'm reading a book called "Predictably Irrational."  It deals with how people don't make decisions based on logic.  Really?  The auction business and life, for that matter is loaded with examples of people acting irrationally...heck...ridiculously if you ask me.

The prevailing attitude about storage units proves this point.

Before I go on, here's my take about putting possessions into storage:  Unless you have been involuntarily displaced from your home by some real estate closing mess up or perhaps a fire or flood, there is no rational reason to be paying for a storage unit.

I hear folks bragging about HAVING a storage unit like it was a beach house or a yacht.  "Oh yesss, we have all of mummy's things over at OUR storage facility.  We keep things there until we decide what to do with them."  Nothing like paying $100 a month to not make a decision. 

I recently read that the average storage unit is rented for 8-12 months.  That's just average.  Around here a storage unit without climate control averages 75-85 bucks a month.  Add AC and it climbs to $120 or more.  A year's worth of payments could buy you a very nice shed with the same interior dimensions.

Here's the irrational part.  If it's in storage, you obviously don't need it.  Why do people pay to hang onto things they don't need?  And why do people treat storage units like they're free?  I recently told a potential client that her dining room set wasn't in high demand since people don't do much formal dining anymore.  As such I didn't expect the entire set to bring more than a couple of hundred dollars.  There was also a huge, heavy 1960's dark wood bedroom set and some 70's upholstered stuff.  Way out of style.  Not worth much.  Now here's the quote that got me:  "If I won't get much for it, I'll just put it in a storage unit for a couple of years until the market gets better."

Rational.  Most assuredly.

In my opinion, her furniture was worth maybe $400 total.  So, lets do some math.  Two years times a good deal at $75 a month equals $1,800....and everything will be two years older and probably mildewed, delaminated and arachnid infested from our stiflingly humid climate.  Yup, makes perfect sense.  Isn't it enough to be upside down on your house?  Sure, go ahead, be upside down on your old furniture too.  Can somebody 'splain this to me?

I've looked at hundreds of storage units full of stuff.  Some folks admitted they had been storing the contents for five years or more.  I wouldn't admit that.  That's like admitting you fell for the Nigerian Your-long-lost-cousin-just-left-you-3.2-million-dollars e-mail scam.  Even funnier is that most people don't even remember what is in the storage unit(s).  Let me get this straight....The stuff in here is important to you, but you've forgotten what it is?    Madness.  Many, but not all of these corrugated cubicles are filled with items of minimal market value that have now sucked up enormous amounts of money in storage fees.

A good friend of mine once said  "Everyone is entitled to my opinion." He was smiling when he said this.  So here's my "professional" opinion that will make life lighter, and cheaper.

1. If you don't have a storage unit, good for you.  Don't ever get one if you can avoid it.  Have a cookie.

2. If you have one, ask yourself why you have it.  I know there are legitimate reasons to have one, but not wanting to make a decision about what to do with things isn't a legitimate reason.  A storage unit makes it easy to put off dealing with things.  Deal with them.  Dispense with what isn't essential.  If it holds memories, take a photograph of it and then sell the item.  Does it make sense to drag around grandma's old 200 pound sewing machine?  Are you ever going to use it?  Is it worth paying hundreds or even thousands over the years to keep it?  Would she demand that you keep it if she knew how much it was costing you to do so?

3. Add up how much you have spent on storage fees.  Write it on a piece of paper and leave it somewhere conspicuous.  When you get another rent statement, cross off the old amount and write the new total amount under it.  Look at that number and think of all the better things you could do with that money AND the money you'd get from selling everything that was sitting in there growing mold.  Even if you don't get much for the items, you'll still be way ahead because you won't have the rental fees.

4. Still not convinced?  Get rid of the storage unit anyway and bring the contents home.  After tripping over some of it for a few months you'll be ready to make some decisions. 

Just do it.  You'll be happy you did.

Self Storage:  For a monthly fee, you can choose to not deal with the stuff cluttering your life...indefinitely.