Living in the Phoenix, Arizona area without a car


It's 2021, and it's been four years now that I've lived without a car. I sold my car in 2017 to a nice young man, a Vietnam veteran, who had always admired it as a "cream puff" with very low mileage. And even though I had rarely used it, it was a difficult decision to make. I like cars.

Owning a car, and driving every day, is something that was very important to me. Getting a driver's license was the beginning of my freedom in life. I bought my first car when I was 18, and it was the car that brought me to Phoenix a year later. Over the years the cars that I owned (only one at a time!) were an indication of where I was in my life. I "graduated" from tiny two-seater cars in my late twenties, and moved into more reliable cars as I got older, and by the time I was in my fifties I was more impressed by the tremendous air conditioning in my GM car than anything else about it. That was the car that I sold in 2017. Honestly, that car was awesome - even if it were sitting out in a parking lot in the heat, the moment you switched on the A/C it was cool comfort. I loved that car!

Most of the work that I've done in the 21st Century has been done online, and while I mostly ignored things like Uber, I knew that they were available to me. I'm a technology person, and the day after my first Uber ride I called my friend to ask if he was still interested in buying my car. He was, and it was his right away. I asked a fair price, he made a fair counter offer, and we even went to the bank and the DMV together. It pleased me that my old "cream puff" would be in good hands!

I've loved living in Phoenix and Los Angeles, but to me they're not very enjoyable places to drive, mostly just staring at taillights. When I lived in California I would try to get out on an interesting canyon road, and there are lots of wonderful Arizona highways near Phoenix, but over the years I just lost interest. There was a time in my life when I wanted to do some racing at Bondurant, but my interest in that faded, too.

I live in the suburbs, and always assumed that a car was absolutely necessary. And it would be for someone who needed to commute - there's no light rail around here! But I found that an Uber was always just a few minutes away, and I also invested in a recumbent trike, which is not only fun for me, it can carry groceries - not as much as a car, of course, but most of what I need from the grocery store I have delivered (I told you that I was a techy guy). I make trike runs for milk, beer, that kind of thing.

As I drift into my senior years, I realize that I've been able to make a smooth transition from something that older people are very reluctant to give up, long after they know that they're a danger to themselves and others on the road. I'm lucky that I've always been a techy person, and am comfortable using the kind of apps that allow me to do things by "remote control". My background as a teacher also taught me how to delegate, how to communicate clearly, to accept minor difficulties that people have (and technology has!), and mostly to show appreciation.

I like living without a car in the Phoenix, Arizona area. They said it couldn't be done, but I did it, anyway.

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more