Car-Free Challenge Day 1: 0 miles!

I generally don't drive that much as it is.  I live in a very walkable neighborhood (downtown Mountain View) and take the train to work.  I try to take the train on the weekends when public transit access is decent (for example, to the Sunnyvale farmer's market).  And before my bike was stolen a couple weeks ago, I would try to (but admittedly not always) bike around town for errands such as grocery shopping, going to my community garden, etc.  

The one car trip that I have taken every day for the last year is dropping off my daughter at daycare every morning.  Daycare is only 1 mile from my house.  Close enough to walk, but far enough to consider other options.  I have looked at the bus schedule but it doesn't quite work out with the train schedule I need to take to work.  And I thought about biking her to daycare, but I never got off my butt and invested in a baby seat or a trailer (and now there's even more inertia since my bike was stolen).  So I had been resigned to driving because a) I wanted to be time-efficient and I already try to cram a lot into my work day to maximize the time I can spend at home, and b) it's unpredictable enough to get my daughter to wake up in time for me to drive her to daycare and catch the train without adding more time needed to walk. 

But with the car-free challenge, my perspective is changing.  I had been leaving the house at 8am to drive my daughter to daycare - this gave me plenty of time for drop-off, including a little slack if I was running late and time to check email or do stuff around the house after dropping her off and before going to work.  The car-free challenge has prompted me to think about alternatives, and I realized I have a couple options...

1. Walking my daughter to daycare is actually not that slow.  I was worried that I would have to leave 30 min earlier at 7:30am to make this work.  To the contrary, I found out today that I can leave at 7:45am and have enough time to walk her to school and back and still make the train (I just forego the 10 min I had at home for other stuff).  15 minutes earlier than I had been leaving the house before is not that bad at all - especially when I consider that the walk is nice and another opportunity for me to get outdoors, and it reduces my regular daily driving miles to 0!

2. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. I don't have to drive her everyday or walk her everyday.  There will be days when my daughter wakes up late, and I will need to drive her to catch my regular train (and there may be days my schedule is a bit more flexible where her getting up late is okay and I can catch the train that is 15 minutes later).  And there may be days when it's too rainy or I'm too tired to walk or it's too cold for Kaiya, and that's okay if I drive her to daycare.  If I am conscious of this choice that I have every day, I'm guessing that I will choose to walk at least half the time, and that can cut down on many hundreds of miles that I drive every year. 

If I don't get anything else out of this car-free challenge, this shift in my perspective on Day 1 has been well worth it.

http://transformca.org/blog/day-1-0-miles-0