With the exception of a brief period when I first moved out of home, I’ve had a car of my own my whole life. At first, it was a necessity - living in the outer western suburbs of Sydney is not practical without a car. As I’ve moved closer into the city, though, I’ve tried to use it less and less. On top of that, I don’t really like driving. It’s stressful, being stuck in ever-increasing amounts of traffic sucks, and there’s so much aggression on the road.

It’s also quite expensive to own and maintain a car, and it’s not treatable as an “investment”; cars lose value as soon as you drive them off the lot. So when it came time to deal with my car no longer being roadworthy (it was passed onto me by my parents, and I’ve used the heck out of it), I seriously considered just trying to go without.

I live in an inner city suburb with fantastic transport connections, and car-share vehicles around for those times where you must need a vehicle. And not owning a car appeals to the part of me that wants to make more use of public transit, and walking whenever possible.

So we’ve done it. Got rid of the car, don’t have a replacement planned. I’ve signed up for a Goget account for us to bridge any times we need one, though it’s not the cheapest service around.

The one concern we have at the moment is around COVID and the risk of not always having reliable public transit at this time, but even if I did have a car, the places I’m taking public transport to most of the times at the moment would be inaccessible or a pain to park at. So we’re just going to take appropriate precautions and allow additional time for transport.