Why You Should Get Rid Of Your Car Today

Folks: I’m a functional adult, I raised two kids, I’ve had success in several fields, and yet I’ve never had a car. Here’s why.

I was born in Los Angeles in 1974, and lived there for most of the next 22 years. That’s a city where folks say you can’t live without a car, especially back then before they put the light rail in, but they are wrong. I got all around L.A. from when I was little, on the bus and roller skates and a skateboard and a bicycle and whatever else worked.

There are so many excellent reasons to get rid of your car. In a way, you know this already. Still, let’s review:

1. The Environment. Cars produce a ton of pollution: exhaust fumes, waste oil and other fluids, broken plastic and metal parts, old batteries, the extraction of oil, and the shipping and manufacturing industry behind all of it. There’s a school of people who will accuse me of “lifestylism” whenever I suggest that individuals can take action in their own lives to offset environmental damage, and show me some graph about how it’s corporations who do all the big environmental damage. Of course, in the case of cars, those corporations exist to sell things to us. It’s really not complicated to see people reducing the amount of driving they do, or eliminating cars from…