Dashboard Confessional: Breaking the Oil Addiction

Where I grew up, deep in the ever-expanding sprawl of Boston, a car meant freedom and individuality. The car was a predecessor of the avatar, customizable with bumper stickers, accessories, bass-boosted speakers, and the peculiar mix of junk in the backseat – all of which represented the individual cruising the web of suburban streets and parking lots.

But each time I drove to college, soccer games, malls, mountains, apartments, and jobs over the years, too often in a great deal of traffic, I was burning foreign oil and adding carbon dioxide and asthma-causing particulate matter to the Boston area air. No one wants that!

So I’m working on my oil addiction. My biggest step, and the hardest, has been giving up my car, and the perceived freedom and success it once represented to me.

The transition is going really well, so far! I decided to only take a job on public transportation, so now I take the subway or the bus to work. I’m getting a lot more exercise and fresh air walking and biking to the grocery store and carrying home my purchases. Despite my mom’s concerns, I feel pretty safe biking in traffic, since Cambridge has decent bike lanes, and I quickly got used to watching for taxis swerving in front of me and for drivers opening their doors. I carry everything I need in a backpack, including the stuff I once stored in my trunk, like shoes, extra layers of clothing, and rain gear. When I want to visit my parents in Suburbia, they pick me up at the commuter rail.

I definitely miss being able to head to the mountains or the beach on a whim. But these trips are still possible, they just take a little more planning (and a friend with a car, which is more fun anyway!).

I can’t say I will never get another car. I could be swayed if Tesla Motors comes up with an affordable Roadster charged by solar power and built of 100% recycled materials (Motor Trend Car of the Year, 2012?). But every early morning that I wake up to the blaring street sweeping megaphone announcement and no longer have to rush downstairs in my pajamas to move my car before being ticketed or towed, I’m really grateful I don’t have a car.