One Bike, No Car

Of my few monthly expenditures one may immediately notice my lack of a car payment. A little over a year ago now I decided to give up owning a car. I had more than enough of the monthly payments just to keep it, the insurance payments, the rising costs of gasoline, the parking tickets one is more than likely to get in a city, and, more than anything, the random unforeseen repair expenses of having a used car.

So now, other than the occasional ride I take from a friend going to the same place, I use my bike. I ride to the grocery store, to my friends’ houses, to the bars—just about anywhere not in walking distance. Economically speaking—and I’d say that’s the biggest reason I do not want a car anymore—I figure it saves me $2000 alone on gas and insurance alone over the course of a year, and that’s an amount based on having to pay lower insurance rates for a used car and only accounting for $20 a week in gas. Not to mention, as another example, that a bike, for all the people spending money to join gyms, is free daily exercise for me.

Best yet, bike time is slow time, allowing a man to think about nearly anything without the stress of hoping to hit each light green or of having to slow down due to traffic. No matter how fast I ride I won’t really make up any time, so I plan my time much more accordingly on a bike (though, not currently having a job, I rarely have to be anywhere by a certain time). The streets and people are more personally accessible and all the surroundings of a city within reach. The breeze more noticeable, the heat and cold more personable.

A common assumption generally made is that in hearing an endorsement of one thing, one can then assume the opposite to be something the endorser is against. But this is based on the one-dimensional thinking that we have been trained to think within—left or right; blue or red; black or white; wrong or right, never a third option or another possibility. But my personal endorsement in my own particular way of living, such as abandoning a car for a bike, should not be viewed as a complete rejection of its opposite. It is such a frustrating and seemingly natural instinct amongst the human species to assume that one is either for us or against us when the overwhelming truth may just be that one is completely disinterested in, but unthreatening to, us—or anything for that matter—because they have their own personal ways of thinking, unalterable by others no matter how convincing or convenient.

I have friends who make far more money than me, have far more traditionally secure jobs and others who drive cars. And yet at the end of the day they are my friends, not enemies. I do not expect them to think exactly as I do. If we are to surround ourselves only by those who are exactly like us we seclude ourselves from our own weaknesses, our own inevitable narrow mindedness.

So in living in this manner, I am simply seeking to set an example and show how it is possible to live in this manner and endorse it, and all the details that come from it, for my own self and no further. I do not find it necessarily any better or worse than any other way except in the way it directly relates to my life and my experience. Perhaps it’s stubborn mistake but I trust that everyone is the one best capable of deciding what’s best for themselves so long as it does not directly harm others. I am no different and will not encroach on one’s own ability to think for themselves so long as they grant me the same.

That said, this past Sunday I met up with a group that meets at midnight for a late night ride to somewhere and anywhere in Buffalo. Other than the Forty I bought, the ride was free. I’d say the group this week, my first time on the ride, had at least 80 people along for the ride, maybe more. We met just off of Richmond, headed down to Allen and then back up Elmwood before ultimately heading towards the river. I found new bike routes, traveled through the cool Sunday night Buffalo air—an air I remembered and missed since the moment I originally left it—and also got to meet a few new people who, refreshingly sharing in our common interest of riding our bikes, might have different views on other ways of living and thinking.

And I hopefully will never get tired of hearing and finding new ones of those.