Car Free Life in Los Angeles
Trying out a car-free lifestyle in the land of freeways and traffic
I've been voluntarily car-free in Los Angeles for two weeks now, and so far my life has not spontaneously gone up in flames. Dare I say it has gotten... better?
That's right, two weeks ago I sold my beloved Subaru Crosstrek. My new whip is a Tern GSD E-Cargo bike, the Toyota Sienna of E-Cargo bikes. It is awesome. Pedal assist up to 20 miles an hour, capacity to fit a full load of groceries and then some, plus a comfy back seat for a full grown adult passenger.
It's too early to draw many definitive conclusions... but, well, here we go anyway.
Two weeks in I have ZERO regrets! Here's my experience so far:
A quick primer on E-Bike Classifications
if you don't care about technical differences between e-bikes, it's best that you skip this part.
E-bikes have blown up in the last 5 years, and not all e-bikes are created equal. E-bikes, in a technical sense, come in three flavors:
Class 1
Pedal assist up to 20mph, no throttle. If you want to go, you've got to pedal. The electric motor puts out power directly based on the input it receives, and provides zero additional help above 20mph. This is what I have.
Class 2
Pedal assist & full electric up to 20mph, with a throttle. The only change from class 1 to class 2 is the addition of a throttle. No pedaling necessary when you take off from stop signs or just don't feel like it, these are extremely popular.
Class 3
Full electric up to 28mph, with a throttle. These are the fastest e-bikes on the market that are still legally bicycles.
Anything with a motor more powerful than 750 watts, or that can go faster than 28mph, is categorically not an e-bike. These are electric motorcycles. and can only be operated legally on the road with proper registration, insurance, and a motorcycle license.
Many brands (ahem, Surron, looking at you) sell electric-motorcycles-branded-as-e-bikes with 20,000 watt motors and top speeds of 50-70 mph.
Very very cool. Probably very fun to ride around. Categorically not an e-bike.
I get it. E-Bike is a great SEO term to slap all over your website, but at some point we need some market differentiation like we did with "dirt bikes" and "mountain bikes" anyway I digress...
I'm not weird, WE'RE weird
Ditching a car in favor of a bicycle feels like an act of rebellion in Los Angeles. A masochistic rebellion, if you ask my mother-in-law, one resulting only in longer travel times, constant exposure to the Southern California heat, and a loss of autonomy and agency. But a rebellion nonetheless.
Los Angeles and car culture are inseperable.
In Los Angeles, only ~1% of commuters bike to work (which is, shockingly, almost double the national average of 0.6%) making me one of around forty thousand people in LA who bicycle to get around.
But globally, I am in the company of hundreds of millions. Worldwide, around 1 in 10 people use a bike as their primary form of transportation.
Bicycles are the single most efficient, cost-effective, reliable, and popular transportation tool to ever exist. There are over a billion bicycles in use globally. Until the last few years, they outnumbered cars, making them the most widely used personal vehicle in history.
Bicycles are the most energy-efficient form of human transportation ever invented, significantly more efficient per-calorie than walking, driving, or even taking trains or public transit systems. They are mechanically simple, easy to maintain, and significantly less expensive than cars.
A small caveat…
We still do have one car. My wife's job does not lend itself to bicycle commuting, so during the week she uses it and I am 100% reliant on bikes/transit to get around. But on the weekend, the car is around for both of us to share. I drove it to go get bagels just this morning.
In two weeks, I've driven it one time, so I guess technically I'm living a car-lite lifestyle. Sue me.
The pace of bike
I've been biking around Los Angeles for years now, and a big factor in my decision to try a car-free lifestyle is an intentional choice to slow down. Life already moves faster than I can keep up with. Choosing to slow down my mode of transportation has, unexpectedly, left me feeling like I have more free time.
It seems backwards. Getting places takes longer... why does it feel like I have more time in my day? Apparently, this is not an uncommon phenomenon among people who switch from driving to biking.
For most of us, driving is a neutral activity at best. You can sip coffee, listen to a good podcast, call up a friend, and make it relatively painless. But in a car, a huge portion of travel is waiting. Waiting at stop lights, in traffic, or circling a parking lot.
Biking shifts your attention from dead time to alive time. On a bike, even if the trip is longer, you're actively moving the entire time. And when you do find yourself waiting for a light, it's usually a welcome rest, not an inconvenient delay.
Exercise is built into the day. No more driving to the gym to hop on a stationary bike. My ride to the climbing gym is a perfect warm up, PLUS my workout starts the moment I leave the house.
Driving in LA (and most other places, in my experience) tends to all blur together into one largely unconscious and forgotten "going places" activity. Biking slows things down, yes, but simultaneously raises the quality of the experience.
Consistent travel times
Although travel times are longer on a bike, they are largely more consistent than in a car. It takes 12 minutes to bike to the climbing gym, almost exactly, no matter the time of day or traffic conditions.
4 minutes to the grocery.
14 minutes to my friend Joe's house.
16 minutes to downtown Pasadena.
35 minutes to downtown Highland Park.
A few minutes longer than driving, yes, but predictable and consistent.
My default headspace in a car is can I shave a few minutes off this google maps estimate and the default answer is hahahaha, no... no you cannot you fool, in fact here is a construction delay because you deserve it.
On a bike it's easy to stop wherever you please to eat tacos, check out a shop, or take a scenic detour through a park. There's almost always a place to park within a few steps of wherever you're going. It's a different way of moving through and interacting with the environment. I feel like I live in a fully connected world of places on a bike. In a car, the in-between places blur into the same fuzzy blegh as standing in line or waiting for an YouTube ad to end.
A case study
A few weeks ago Nicole and I went to a Dodgers game.
Driving to the stadium takes 30 minutes. Parking was $60, plus a 10 minute wait to get in the parking lot, and a 5-10 minute walk across the asphalt to the gates. Not to mention the traffic jam when the game ends - 15 minutes to make your way out of the parking lot, and another 30 minutes home.
Total car travel time: 1:30 - 1:40 + $60
A combination of Metro and the E-Cargo bike took 55 minutes each way. Metro is $1.75 per ride. We parked the bike 20 steps from the main entrance gate, for free. After the game, we zipped out through traffic and were on the metro home before most fans had even made it out of the parking lot.
Total bike/transit travel time: 1:50 - 2:00 + $7
At face value, biking takes twice as long as driving. In reality, once all the driving-adjacent activities are factored in, we probably lost 20 minutes by biking, and saved $53 and the whole headache of stadium traffic.
The economics of a cargo bike
This is what I’m most curious about over the long haul. My back of napkin math (and common sense) says biking instead of driving is cheaper, but I’m still gathering data. Here are the numbers to-date:
I sold the Subaru for $8000. I bought the bike for $6000. We're already $2000 ahead.
Taking the car off our insurance policy immediately saved us $1600 per year. I did buy bicycle insurance, which comes out to $1 per day, $365 per year.
I would normally fill up the gas tank twice a month. With today’s gas prices, we’ll call that $1200 annually, conservatively.
Car registration in CA is something like $180 per year.
Maintenance is the biggest financial question mark. Over the long haul, it’s certainly cheaper to maintain a bicycle than a car. New tires on a bike are ~$200, compared to the last set of all-terrain tires I put on the Subaru for ~$850. Assuming you do your labor, new brake pads and rotors are ~$500 for a car, or ~$150 for a bike.
Routine things like oil changes, air filters, car washes, and wiper blade replacements will probably come out in the wash with tune ups, replacement chains, inner tubes, and brake pads.
What about long trips?
I assume I will have to rent a car several times a year for longer trips or larger loads than I can tackle on a bicycle. Next week, in fact, I am renting a car to go to Yosemite and Big Sur. For a week rental it's $164, all in.
Based on that figure, even if I rent a car for a full week every single month (which I don’t anticipate doing) it will only cost a few hundred dollars more than paying for insurance on a second vehicle.
More case studies
Figuring out how to haul various loads has turned out to be a fun puzzle (so far). A few of my favorite hauls:
A trip to Home Depot carrying my wife Nicole + 2x hanging light fixtures + 8x garden path lamps + a gallon of paint.
Another trip to home depot, this time hauling 16x 6-foot garden trellis poles.
A trip to the nursery with 2x adults and a 5 gallon fig tree.
A 30-mile round-trip to Griffith Park with Nicole to pick up ~100 liters of mulch (this one did push the range limit, which was sort of the point of the experiment, and I had to pedal the final half mile back to our house on full human power)
A couple dozen trips to the grocery and other various errands
Conclusions
Like I said up top, I’m in the honeymoon phase with rose colored glasses and this relationship has ZERO issues!
I’m sure there will be issues, and I plan to reveal all here on LA Field Guide as my car-free(lite) lifestyle unfolds.
So whether you think this is a fool’s errand and want a front row seat to watch a granola LA transplant crash and burn (hopefully not literally) or whether you’re considering ditching a car yourself, I invite you to join along for the ride!
Thanks for reading, and have fun out there, LA.