Anthropocene Reviewed: Car ownership

My oldest journal entry in my journaling app from July 8th, 2013 reads:

I had my 2nd driving lesson today. Originally scheduled for 5:00pm but rescheduled to 10:45am. It went pretty well. My turns were much better.

I was a rising sophomore at a suburban high school, I’d just turned 15 ½ (the minimum age to get a learner’s permit), and I was itching to start driving myself to school instead of taking the bus.

As is custom in most immigrant households, we had a single car about as old as I was, a trusty 2001 Honda Accord. After getting my driver’s license in early December of that same year, I became the de-facto family chauffeur for grocery hauls and family-friend parties but since we only had the one car, I didn’t get to regularly drive myself to school consistently until much later.

Fun fact: one of my earliest memories in life is getting buckled into the carseat in this car by my dad when my mom and I arrived in the US in 2001.

As luck would have it, however, that “trusty” old Accord crapped out just a few months later. I still remember slowly driving it to the Nissan dealership in Tracy. We took the backroads because–and I quote my 2013 journal entry–”the transmission leaps like a frog and it can’t go faster than 40mph without sounding like it’ll explode soon”. That same day, we bought a brand-new top-of-the-line 2014 Nissan Rogue. The upgrade from the Accord that still ran a cassette player was night-and-day.

Within a few weeks, we’d also decided it was worth the $3K investment to replace the Accord’s transmission and keep it around a while longer. As a result, it became mine to take to school.

Driving to school on my own and parking in that high school parking lot was perhaps my earliest true taste of adulthood. Sure, I was mostly only using it to do the same 15-minute commute back-and-forth (plus the occasional boba trip after school at Quickly) but I felt a very real sense of independence every morning when I clipped the carabiner of my car keys onto my belt loop (as pictured below).

Although both of those family cars carry a lot of nostalgic value for me, so too do those of my close friends in high school. One of my first friends to start driving was Alice. A year older than the rest of us and much more independent than most our age, she’d put thousands of miles on her beautiful light-green Toyota Rav4 before I’d ever gotten behind a wheel.

As an aspiring photographer, she wasted no time in using the freedom that car gave her in pursuit of the perfect shots. The rest of us in our friend group tagged along for many of the ensuing trips that took us all over California: from the foggy hills of Mt. Tam to the snow-capped peaks of Yosemite. The origins of my own affinity for outdoor adventure are inextricably entwined with Alice, that car, and the memories we made on those countless trips.

Before I knew it though, high school was over. I packed my life into the back of our spacious new Rogue and drove myself and my parents down to UCLA for what would be one of my last drives for quite a while.

After my parents dropped me off and drove back to NorCal, I spent the next year and a half relying on a Penny board as my primary mode of transport.

Then, on February 5, 2017, I got a call that changed everything—my dad had been in an accident and was in the hospital. I flew home immediately. Four days later, he passed away.

In the aftermath, I faced a major decision: stay at UCLA or transfer closer to home. Ultimately, we decided I should continue at UCLA but visit frequently. Weighed against flights and trains, driving proved to be the most practical option for regular trips. But with both family cars already in use[1], I needed my own.

So on a gloomy March evening, I became the unexpected owner of a lightly used 2015 Honda Civic. Ever the family documentarian, I insisted–despite my mom’s reluctance given the circumstances–on capturing a picture of the moment.

Over the next 2 ½ years of my time at UCLA, I made that 5-hour drive up and down I-5 dozens of times. It enabled me to show up for my mom in ways I couldn’t otherwise. Although I know those drives were exhausting in the moment and that they led me to miss many weekends on campus, the exhaustion and FOMO have faded from memory now. In its place lies a quiet confidence that I did the right thing even when it was really hard.

Despite not making much other use of it in my sophomore year, I made more of an attempt in my 3rd and 4th years to tap back into the sense of adventure I’d felt on those trips with Alice in high school. I used it to go on weekend hikes, took friends to explore parts of LA that we might not have otherwise, and even went on a spontaneous 5-day car camping road trip through Utah with a couple friends. To this day, it’s the coolest road trip I’ve been on.

Some of my roommates also had cars at various times so we all shared our apartment’s 3-car tandem parking spot. It was mildly inconvenient at times but overall, car ownership living in the apartments in Westwood wasn’t too bad.

After graduating from UCLA and moving back up to NorCal, I started a summer internship in San Francisco. I’d put up with the awful commute between Mountain House and San Francisco for an internship in the past (~2 hours one way) so I decided that wasn’t happening this time. I ended up staying at a long-term Airbnb with 4 others just under Twin Peaks. And just like in college, I used my car to ferry myself back and forth between San Francisco during the weekdays and Mountain House on (most of) the weekends.

During that summer, I began to learn just how hostile San Francisco is to car ownership. I’d figured street parking near my place would be fine but the rules around it were so complex that I had to download an app called SpotAngels just to make sense of it. Most of the spots around our place (the red pin) had some mix of street cleaning (either weekly or monthly) and stay maximums (usually 72 hours). As someone who only used their car on the weekends to shuttle myself in and out of the city, this added “Move my car for street cleaning” as a stressful new task to worry about on a regular basis.

As a cherry on top, towards the end of the summer, I got back from work one day to see that the front-left side of my car had been wrecked. There was no note on my windshield or any other indication of how it happened. My working theory based on the slight red-ness of the discoloration—though never validated—was that an SF Muni bus scraped it while making a right turn at the intersection just ahead and the driver never even noticed my pipsqueak car grazing it.

For my next internship in the fall at Stripe in SF, I decided to pocket the housing stipend, live with my mom in Pleasanton, and commute in by bike[2] and BART instead. At that point, the only biking I’d really done was casual rides with friends in high school. Using it to commute opened my eyes to a whole new way of getting around that felt really exciting. Looking back, I think this was the earliest point at which a car-free lifestyle started to feel like a realistic goal.

Not long after that internship, the COVID-19 pandemic began and what little driving I was doing came to a screeching halt. As both my mom’s and my car sat around collecting dust (and smoke from the crazy wildfires), I started getting really into cycling, racking up 60-80 miles per week with post-ride jaunts all over the East Bay.

Eventually, as the vaccines rolled out and the pandemic faded into the background, I moved to the Mission in San Francisco to be closer to work. Unfortunately, work moved to be farther away from San Francisco. Stripe, which used to be located in a near-perfect location by the SF Caltrain station, decided it was time to move to its forever home 10 miles south in Oyster Point[3].

I, along with so many other Stripes, was devastated by the loss of what would have been a delightful bike commute. Getting to Stripe by bike is still possible (and I’ve done it many times), but it’s just time-consuming enough to be difficult to justify as a regular option–just ask my friend and fellow Stripe, Lawrence.

With both work and family demanding more from me in terms of commuting, I decided to put my car-free aspirations to rest for the time being and instead lean into the other direction by upgrading to a Tesla Model 3. I figured that if I have to drive, I might as well try and decrease my carbon footprint (and in the long term, fuel costs).

Throughout the next several years, I felt an ever-present tension between embracing car ownership and living car-free. On the one hand, having a car made day-to-day life so much easier. I could carpool to work with my roommates in 15 minutes or less, visit my mom whenever I wanted (though I’d have to time it right to avoid heinous Bay Area traffic), and charge my car for free at work which saved me hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars over two years.

On the other hand, remember how I said San Francisco was hostile to owning a car? Well, that wasn’t an isolated experience. Once I moved to the Mission, I felt the full force of the city’s anti-car infrastructure. Shortly after signing the lease at my new apartment, I started backing into the ridiculously narrow garage only to learn that my car is too low to the ground to clear the 15º change in incline where the sidewalk ends.

So over the next six months, I spent dozens of hours hunting down street parking after work as my roommate Mat and I schemed a mathematically accurate model of the problem in Desmos so we could ask the property management company to install a ramp. It was a pretty glorious day when Morgan finally came and drilled those wooden planks into the concrete and I could rest easy knowing I had a predictable parking spot. On the bright side, it makes for a great memory and story.

In addition to the awkwardness of parking spots in SF, the sheer dearth of their availability makes apartment hunting much more challenging. I just tried adding “On-Site Parking” as a filter in Zillow and it dropped the list of available 1-bed rentals under $3.5K from 1,875 to 601 (68% fewer options). As you start adding other filters like in-unit laundry and pet-friendliness, those options dwindle as quickly as the average rent rises.

I air these car owner grievances not in the hopes that San Francisco might once again build monstrosities like the Embarcadero freeway. In fact, more often than not, I feel immensely grateful that this city makes it so difficult for cars to exist. I often compare my experience here with that in Dublin where I visit my mom so frequently. In place of gigantic intersections that could fit entire single-family homes and parking lots the size of parks, we have actual homes (at 4x the population density) and parks within a 10-minute walk for everyone.

The way this city is built—as well as its downstream effects like car traffic congestion–forces me to make small sacrifices like defaulting to biking places, struggling to find parking if I have to drive somewhere in the city, and paying a bit more for my privilege of having a car. These sacrifices may grate on me from time to time but the benefits–incredible walkability, a delightful biking culture, and the relative safety—are undeniably worth it.

As much as possible, I’ve tried to lean into the grooves that this anti-car city pushes its residents into. For a period of time in 2022-2023, I even experimented with simulating a fully car-free lifestyle (without actually selling my car) but realized all the biking and BARTing around introduced too much friction and commute time given the incongruous grooves of my own life. I also realized that all the self-deprecating negativity I’d developed around car ownership was preventing me from even enjoying its benefits.

For now, whenever it makes sense for my schedule and the season, I bike or group-shuttle to work and I walk, bus, or bike wherever I need to within the city. When the time comes to transition to my next job, I’m pretty committed to limiting my search to options that’ll allow me to commute car-free. Besides those principled defaults, however, I’ll allow myself to use my car when it makes my life easier, whether that’s to visit family more often, beat the rush-hour traffic on US-101 getting to and from work, or be the designated driver for fun weekend trips with friends.

—

My relationship with car ownership has gone through many phases that interweave with the broader chapters of my life. It started out by providing me a sense of independence in the suburbs of Mountain House, then enabled me to show up as a better son, and now semi-begrudgingly enables much of my day-to-day life, though I actively push against it with preferred alternatives.

Looking forward, I've been toying with the idea of setting a challenge for myself—spending an extended period where I log more miles on my bike than in my car. Perhaps it’s time to make that an official goal for my next set of seasonal goals?

I give car ownership a 3.5/5.

[1] My cousin, who lived with my parents at the time, had started using my old Accord–which I taught him to drive in–for work.
[2] Actually I started out with a Boosted board but switched to a bike after its battery randomly just stopped working on me one day only a few weeks after I had gotten it.
[3] It was deeply frustrating to watch a company whose sense of morality and culture I appreciated so much during my internship transition to a world where an employee’s most rational option was to own a car and drive it every day. But that’s not entirely their fault, SF was threatening pretty steep taxes plus the Bay Area’s public transit options leave a lot to be desired outside of the main city.