Commuter Challenge

The past few weeks, fiancé and I have been having a car debate. At the moment we have two cars – a 2007 Dodge Caliber (my baby!) and a 2004 Pontiac Grand Am that is finished its lease next month. Suddenly talk of buying the car out has been at the forefront of my mind while I try to ignore as the sinking feeling that buying out the second car gives me.

Having two cars has always made some sense for us: I usually work in places that are out of the way and next to impossible to commute to without aid of a car. Add going to school full time to the mix and trying to get to and from work between classes became impossible without a car.

Finishing my undergrad last year was a godsend – aside from being terribly burnt out from a city politics degree (I had four 30+ page papers in my last month of school…still not over that) I was just ready to be finished. I wasn’t able to be engaged by theory anymore, I wasn’t excited to get my books, I wasn’t interested in making friends – I had my head down and was pushing through the last months as quickly as I could. I wanted terribly to just do one thing at a time like my fiancé was doing – just working instead of being sent in one hundred directions at once.

After a number of short and frustrating jobs I got hired in a place downtown that really works for me. It’s flexible, fun, a not for profit…and I’m actually excited to hang out there everyday! And shortly after I got this job, my fiancé – who up until December 2007 was my boyfriend – actually became my fiancé. And we bought a house. And everything started to change just slightly, but also in big ways because suddenly everything was a little more ‘us’ oriented than before, even though we’d been living together for two and a half years.

And then slowly, something about having two cars started to seem a little….ridiculous. We’re very young. We just bought a house that we would like to put work into. I can easily bus to work, and to any of the places I need to get to for appointments. Bussing will cost a fraction of the amount of parking – never mind gas and insurance and repairs if we get rid of one car. But something about even asking ourselves “Do we need two cars?” was hard. Way harder than I thought it would be.

Living in a little city where transit is sometimes unreliable and the winters are very cold will make this more of an adventure than if I lived in a city that had light rail or a subway, but in September when my fiancé hands over his keys to the dealership and I hand over my keys to my fiancé, I know I’ll feel good about the decision…even in the dead of winter.

And even if they strike tomorrow.

I hope.