An Update On Our Carfree Life Now (elementary aged kids)

It’s been years since we’ve written here regularly. But we’re still here. The kids are bigger. The jobs, commutes, and schools have changed. Our house is still tiny and we still don’t own a car or drive on a regular basis.

While we’ve done a lot of writing about biking with young kids, and we’ve done a lot of work helping other families figure out how to bike themselves, our approach to keeping life manageable without a car has always been to use a range of approaches. We walk a lot, we ride a lot of buses and rains, we bike, and one or two times a year (almost always vacation) we rent a car.

These days our kids are older (ages 7 & 10), and over the years our approach has shifted to be much more Public Transit reliant than it was when our kids were younger. The infrastructure for safe biking in our area is paltry at best, and we’ve found that while it was manageable when kids were cargo, it has been challenging to get our kids to a truly independent for daily transportation biking. They are good bikers, very conscientious, very aware on the road, and fabulous on a bike path, but until they are older or the biking infrastructure changes substantially, it just has not worked for us to get them biking on independent bikes for our daily transportation needs. Bikes are still in the mix, but they are not the daily tools they were for us with toddlers and preschoolers.

But as we dialed down the bikes, we were able to dial up the buses and trains and still get everywhere we need to go. This has perks for both of our kids. Our younger kid, now 7 , remains an avid public transit enthusiast (yes, this kid), well versed on all the bus and train routes in the MBTA (it’s a little like living with a bus app), and still happy to take the train and bus all day for fun. This kid is only happy when we take more trains and buses (and often advocates for more complicated routes).

Our older kid has just this year (at age 10) gotten to a point where in certain circumstances she can take the bus completely independently. In particular, two days a week she takes herself from school to sports practice on the city bus. If it’s light out after practice, she can take the bus home. If it’s dark, then I meet her at practice and we bus home together. When our kids were little, I hoped this day would come, but now that it’s here, and I see we have a sensible independent kid who can take responsibility for some of her own transportation, it does feel like a wonderful payoff.

There is more to say, but this is where we are now. Carfree life is still possible and enjoyable for our family, even with bigger kids that have activities (and opinions)of their own.