A car-free life

MY inner miser grudges handing money over to oil companies, multi nationals and governments and, having been brought up in the village where the high-priest of self sufficiency, John Seymour, learned many of his country skills I have always liked the concept of not being dependent on the system. That’s why a car-free life has real appeal.

On the other hand, since my first Morris 8 Series E rattled around the Suffolk Lanes 40 years ago I have also been in love with the ideal of freedom that you always hope driving a car will bring you, that ability to go wherever you want at the drop of a clutch – and that means I have been a petrol addict most of my life.

Miracles do happen - and for the past five months I have been virtually car free – and now I don’t want to go back to my addiction.

Over the years that myth of freedom on the road – when experience says the reality is delay, frustration and expense - has resulted in a wide variety of vehicles passing through my hands, among them a glorious Humber Hawk, a rusting Fiat 127, a new Land Rover Discovery V8 and an almost new Jaguar Sovereign and several less memorable ones in between.

Sometimes life smacks you in the face and insists you re-assess things and for me it was a heart attack at 50, followed by a by-pass operation. Millions go through it, but it brought me up short and we moved out of running a pressurised business, downsized our lives and decided to turn our narrow-boating hobby into a lifestyle.

For the past five years we have enjoyed the freedom of living on our narrowboat on the English canals, able to slip the mooring and head off at a steady three or four miles an hour whenever my journalistic work allows. It has been the beginning of a withdrawal from the addictions of modern life such as TV.

But we had still not shrugged off the tyranny of the car. Having realised (belatedly for me) that it isn’t what you earn but what you spend that decides the quality of your life, I was willing to accept that older, smaller and cheaper cars were necessary to help achieve that financial balance. For some time I ran an ageing Citroen Xantia and my wife an even older Fiesta.

One of the children needed a car and we realised that we could – probably – cope with just the one, especially as I was writing more and more from the boat . We became a one-car couple.

That wasn’t too difficult but, even at the bottom end of the car market you can indulge yourself and I persuaded myself that as I was not longer driving 30-40,000 miles a year I could buy an old, N-reg, Volvo 850 estate – ideal for shifting bags of coal and wood for the boat’s stove and for grandchildren – as well as being big and a bit luxurious in an old fashioned way.

If virtue has its own reward so does economy and I was really pleased to have spent just £1,000 on the Volvo and proud of selling the old Citroen Xantia for £400 – giving me a £600 car – in fact, I boasted about it. But it did mean we were moving further and further away from that obsession with personal motor transport, almost without noticing.

Then the opportunity presented itself to spend several months out on the canal system in our boat, as all my work could be done with the aid of a mobile broadband modem attached to the laptop.

We travelled up to Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales for several weeks, leaving the Volvo at the marina and, on our return, moved our home moorings to Derbyshire, taking the car an hour or so by road before spending over a week doing the same journey by canal.

Within another week or two the car was again abandoned, at its new home, and we headed off again, finally remembering to declare it off-road with the DVLA a month or so later.

Our journey meant we would have to shop on foot and travel by public transport from wherever we moored for the night and over the weeks we travelled around the Midlands, Birmingham, Shropshire and the borders Wales.

After 40 years as a driver, never without a vehicle for more than a few days, could we cope? I even bought a folding bike on e-Bay, in brilliant yellow, from an IKEA employee who had been given it by the company as a way of establishing green credentials.

The bike hasn’t been used much, one trip down the towpath ending in a puncture as my substantial weight on top and a large rock with a sharp edge beneath proved too much for the tyre.

Instead we have covered more ground on foot than at any previous period of our lives and walking shoes and rucksacks have become the necessary accessories of our lives.

Mostly we have shopped in small stores in the villages and towns through which the canal took us and it has been a delight. We shop more often; there is a limit to what you can carry in a rucksack, even if you fill the two foldaway bags that are always stored within it.

Not all small shops are delightful and not every local butcher has a supply of wonderful meat – but enough of them are and do to make it worth finding out. Of course, it costs more to shop like that and we didn’t abandon the supermarkets completely.

When we arrived near a small town, like Market Drayton on the delightful Shropshire Union canal, we might well gather all our shopping bags – about half a dozen – trudge the mile and a half into town and raid the local Morrison’s before getting a taxi back to the boat.

And public transport is not wonderful in rural areas, although it was fairly cheap and simple to get a train from Staffordshire into Manchester when I needed to visit an office on business.

Five months later we are back at our Derbyshire marina and rather pleased with ourselves as we have walked further than ever before and enjoyed not having the car.

The freedom means you can stop at a pub for a drink and not worry about the breathalyser, you can see so much more as you walk, as well as hear and smell the world around you, and you are not handing large lumps of money to government and those big businesses on a regular basis.

We have complained at times about the cost of taxis, buses and trains but the biggest shock came when we looked after our daughter’s house for a week, borrowed her fuel efficient modern car - and spent £65 for three-quarters of a tank of diesel.

And now we are back, are we going to stay car-free?

We have thought about it, and we would really like to, but the reality is that our children are between an hour and two hours away in three different directions, to say nothing of grandchildren, and making those journeys on public transport would be expensive and time consuming.

Those may just be excuses, but our cowardice means that we have put the Volvo back on the road. It was an exercise that cost well over £500 without any fuel, as it needed work done to pass an MOT.

The irony is that, after complaining about train and bus fares, we did it without thinking twice about the costs of car ownership. On top of that £500 there is another £400 for insurance, a further £100 for the second six months of tax and probably £600 at the least for petrol in coming months.

That is £1,600 – cheap motoring by many people’s standards - but it would buy a lot of train fares, to say nothing of new walking shoes.

Perhaps we will be a bit braver in a couple of years’ time when I hit 60 and the free bus pass makes the economics even more compelling. I know we could do another car-free six months next year – and maybe we can manage longer as our new base marina is in a small town with two rail stations, regular bus services and even reasonably-priced taxis.

At present we still walk when once we would have driven and we still like to get trains. One on our doorstep takes us into delightful Buxton in the Peak District in less than half an hour and Manchester city centre is the same journey time the other way.

We constantly measure the fares against the cost of taking the car. Most of the time it is more expensive for two to take the train than for two to use the petrol – but we don’t allow for the fixed costs of the car.

Longer journeys can be either dramatically cheaper or more expensive, depending on the whims of the ludicrous train pricing system that day, but they almost always take considerably more time – seven hours to wonderful Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast, rather than three in the car.

Once the car has gone, of course, we can measure our total spend on public transport against what the car would have cost us over a year and the sums may make more sense, they certainly will once we both have our freedom passes and senior rail cards.

Copyright: News Services Ltd 2008