Erin L. McCoy: How I Survived Breaking Up with My Car [View all]
from YES! Magazine:
How I Survived Breaking Up with My Car
Erin McCoy tells the story of how she gave up driving, despite her love for cars, and examines the challenges facing drivers who don't live in cities.
by Erin L. McCoy
posted Dec 14, 2012
Where I grew up, owning a car was a necessity rather than a choice, and where it’s not a choice it can quickly become an emblem of pride.
I was the kid of an environmental science teacher in the skeptical South—in high school I once delivered a punctiliously researched speech about global warming after which I was heckled by the teacher. But still, I loved cars. My first car was a four-door 1989 Nissan Maxima with a spoiler and chrome trim. You could push down the back passenger window from the outside and crawl in if you’d locked your keys inside. I was even proud of that.
There’s a good chance I was proud because I was 17 years old and that car offered me my first taste of real independence. A kid that grows up in New York City can hop on the subway anytime she wants. But I grew up in Kentucky, and by fifth grade I was living in a rural county about half an hour outside Louisville. To go to any friend’s house I needed a ride. In fact, I needed a ride to do more or less anything: to buy a snack, a shirt, even a pack of gum.
Every morning in central Kentucky, well over 100,000 vehicles pour onto Interstate 65, which runs north to south, bisecting the state between Franklin and Louisville. They drive 45 minutes, an hour, even two hours to work, crossing county and state lines and filing en masse through the fast food drive-throughs at outposts in Shepherdsville or Elizabethtown. They need their cars to go where the work is, where the grocery is, where the stores are. ............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/how-i-survived-breaking-up-with-my-car
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