Tweet I’ve hit a wall with the car-free lifestyle. I’m exhausted and cold. Today, a cold and rainy day, with appointments on Maryland and 16th Street and at the Funk Lab down on Grand Avenue, I couldn’t face the reality of taking two buses, the light rail and riding my bike in this weather. I suppose it’s a cumulative fatigue. Over the past month or so, on our car-free stint, everything has taken twice as long and has been at least twice as taxing. I’m tired of having to lift my heavy bike hurriedly onto the bike rack in the…

Tweet “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” – Buddha This Saturday was the third annual Tour de Coops, an event put on by the Valley Permaculture Alliance showcasing cool chicken coops throughout Phoenix. In years past, people visited the coops with their cars. But this year, urban farmer and architect Bryan White, one of the main organizers of the event, had the insight to cluster the coops within Central Phoenix and added a bicycle component to the tour. I was asked to head the bicycle effort. Knowing that there was no way I could do it by…

Tweet Thanksgiving is a nice day to get together with friends and family and celebrate everything that we’re thankful for. The three days after are great for shopping, recreating and running errands. But how do you do all that without a car? Paul and I found out. Thanksgiving Day We figured out a way to get to my parents’ house in Chandler, who live on Ray and Alma School, from Indian School and 11th Avenue. How did we do it? We planned our car-free trip with the combination of Valley Metro’s online Trip Planner and the Transit Book which is…

Tweet Andrew Ross calls Phoenix the least sustainable city in the world. One of the big reasons is our sprawled-out, car-dependent, bike/ped unfriendly city planning that dates back to the post-war boom of the 50s and 60s. Sure it was an age of optimism (and really great Modern design) but it was an era that set our city up so that, even to this day, you MUST have a car to comfortably and reasonably get around. Since the post-war boom, there have been people who simply can’t afford to own a car and they have generally been facing an uphill…