Six months without a car: what actually changed

I gave up my car in March, not as a grand gesture, but because the timing worked out. The lease ended, the repair bills had been climbing, and I live close enough to the city centre that I'd been telling myself for years I didn't really need one. So I decided to find out if that was true.

Six months later, the honest answer is: mostly, yes. But the exceptions are instructive.

The everyday stuff turned out to be easier than I'd expected. The commute is a twenty-minute cycle. Groceries come by cargo bike or delivery, depending on the week. For longer trips across the city, the tram is reliable enough that I've stopped thinking of it as a compromise.

What I hadn't fully anticipated was how much the gaps in public transport infrastructure would become visible once I was entirely dependent on it. Late evenings are where the system quietly fails. The frequency drops, the connections get uncertain, and the mental calculation of whether you can get somewhere and get back becomes a real constraint on spontaneous plans. Friends who live in the suburbs are, for practical purposes, less accessible than they were. Weekend trips to rural areas require either a rental car or a level of logistical planning that most people, reasonably, won't bother with.

None of this surprised me intellectually — I've read the arguments about transit deserts and last-mile connectivity. But experiencing it directly changes the texture of the argument. It becomes less abstract and more a question of what kind of freedom we're actually offering people when we ask them to make different choices.

The most important thing I've taken from this experiment isn't personal. It's that behaviour change, on its own, is not the answer. I can make this work because of specific circumstances — my job, my neighbourhood, my income, the fact that I'm healthy enough to cycle. For many people, those circumstances don't exist. Asking them to give up their cars without first building the infrastructure that makes car-free life genuinely viable isn't a climate policy. It's an aspiration dressed up as one.

We need both: the infrastructure investment and the cultural shift. They reinforce each other. But the infrastructure has to come first.