Six months ago I got rid rid of my car. In other words, the Brain family, which has four kids (ages 11, 9, 7 and 7) and lives in the heart of suburban America…

…went from a two-car family to a one-car family.

In the process, we drastically lowered our “carbon footprint”, we probably contributed to the collapse of the U.S. economy in some small way, and we moved up several notches in the national frugality rankings. What I’d like to do here is report on what Leigh and I have learned in the process.

Here’s a little background. Six months ago I was driving a Jeep Liberty, and it was a great car. It was my first car with power windows, for example, and that was pretty exciting all by itself. It had electric locks and a CD player too — also firsts for me (my prior car had been an inexpensive 1995 Ford Ranger pickup, which I purchased new and then drove for 130,000 miles in 10 years. It had crank windows and manual locks. Did I mention we trend toward frugality? We donated the Ranger to NPR when I got the Liberty.).

I was driving a Jeep Liberty because, three years ago, Jeep was basically giving Jeep Liberties away. We leased the Liberty fo less than $200 per month. Because the Liberty was so cheap, it made more sense to lease the Liberty than it did to put a new clutch and new tires on the Ranger.

When the lease on the Liberty expired, I had to turn in the car. We had several choices. Recall that, six months ago, gas prices in the U.S. were peaking at $4 or more per gallon, and there was no indication they would be falling anytime soon. So we could have:

1) Purchased a new or used SUV for a very low price, since people were dumping them as fast as they could, or…

2) Purchased a new hybrid vehicle.

But Leigh and I had been contemplating the more radical idea of actually eliminating the second car. Looking at SUVs, we abandoned that idea. Even though they were dirt cheap, an SUV made no sense with gas at $4/gallon. We did go to the Honda dealership and look at the Hybrid Civic, and I have a friend who owns a Prius so I knew all about the Prius, and Ford has the Escape Hybrid. But the more we looked at these cars, the more intrigued we became with the idea of going whole-hog and eliminating the second car.

So we turned in the Liberty, and we thought, “let’s try being a one-car family for a few days and see how it goes.” I told several friends about this experiment, and they uniformly said, “you won’t last more than 24 hours without your own car.” And they were right. That first week was hell for two reasons, one of which was obvious and the other of which was not.

The obvious thing was that Leigh and I were used to having our own cars, and that meant total freedom to come and go as we pleased. With one car, it requires a LOT of coordination. Especially with the kids, and most especially on evenings and weekends. If you have kids, you know about the whole evening/weekend air traffic control problem because of soccer practice, Cub scouts, Brownies, sleep-overs, birthday parties, Lego League, etc. With four kids we have that in spades. With only one car, it becomes a fascinating exercise in orbital mechanics sometimes.

But after the first month, we were coordinating much better and most of the scheduling conflicts had worked themselves out. I had also discovered that a bicycle is a great way to get to places that are less than 10 miles away. I have ridden my bike to the dentist, to the doctor, to the kids’ school for meetings with teachers, to restaurants for lunch meetings, to the in-laws’ house, etc. I have lights on the bike and can ride at night, although I do that sparingly. We also have a safety valve. We could, in a pinch, call a cab or, worst case, rent a car for a day or two. But we have never had to do that.

The other reason why the first week/month was hell was totally unanticipated. I never knew how much of “self” is invested in a car in America because I have had a car since I was 16. I guess its because we live in a car culture, and every day you see and hear perhaps a hundred car ads, and EVERY adult has a car (unless you live in NYC or SF). Being without a car you feel naked. That naked feeling lasted about two months for me, and then, like an addiction to nicotine broken by going cold-turkey, I got over it.

And now, like a reformed smoker, a funny thing has happened. I’m not sure I would want a car. It is a lot greener to not have a car, because it takes a huge amount of energy to manufacture and operate an automobile. Without the car we also save a lot of money. We don’t have to make the lease payment (even though it was super-cheap), we don’t have to pay to insure the car, there are no maintenance costs (tires, oil changes, windshield wipers, unexpected breakdowns, clutches, etc. add up), and we don’t have to buy gas. That last one is strange actually. You would think that all the miles I was driving in the Jeep would have transferred to Leigh’s car, since it’s the only car we have. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Leigh’s car is also leased (under the same super-cheap logic as the Jeep) and it has a hard 1,000-miles-per-month cap. If we drive more than that, we have to pay by the mile when we turn the car in. So we keep track of mileage. We haven’t gone over the limit once in the last six months.

Which is weird. Where did all the Jeep’s miles go? It would appear that the need to cooperate and schedule all of our driving has made us a lot more efficient in the way we use our one car. We now blend multiple trips into one because we have no choice from a timing standpoint. We share rides with neighbors (e.g. – we take their kids, they pick our kids up). We try to schedule things like soccer closer to home. We think ahead more too. For example, say we need to go to a store on the other side of town. We will now wait until we have two or three things to do on that side of town and do them all together. We’ve also moved some of the miles to the bicycle.

Is this idea for everyone? No. Absolutely not. If both spouses have to commute 20 miles to separate workplaces in opposite directions from each other, obviously you need two cars. Since I telecommute and/or fly for most of my work, it has been easier to get rid of the car. But I would suggest that one spouse could consider a bicycle or an electric bike or a scooter instead of a car if you live in a place where it doesn’t snow. It would be a lot cheaper and a lot greener than a car.

There is one thing that irks me. If we had purchased a hybrid (which we seriously considered), we could have gotten a tax credit. Presumably the government is doing that to encourage people to purchase greener cars. How about a big tax credit for people who get rid of their cars, since that’s even greener? Why don’t we give a tax credit to all the people in NYC and SF who use public transit, or to people in suburbia who abandon their second car and use a bicycle?

Anyway, it has been a fun and educational experiment. Overall, it worked out better for us than we ever would have imagined. It is definitely something to consider if you want to go super-green and save a lot of money.

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PS – Hey ZipCar — we could really use you out here in Suburbia! How could you do it efficiently? Locate the cars in shopping centers that have big subdivisions and apartment complexes within a one-mile to two-mile radius. Here in Cary, NC, there are a lot of shopping centers that fit the profile. If ZipCar was available, many more families might consider a one-car option.