Mapping a Carless Life
Could transit take you where you need to go?
There’s nothing like car troubles to make you think about the other transportation options available to you.
To pull back the curtain on my life a bit, for the last month or so, my car (a sexy 2002 Toyota Camry) has been teetering on the edge of disrepair. Then, this week, it finally plunged over that edge.
While it’s in the shop, I’ve been lucky enough to borrow a car (an equally sexy 2012 Toyota Camry), but what if I wasn’t so lucky?
What if I had to rely on other means to get around?
I live in Dekalb County, so the options available to me are pretty good. Though maybe they could have been different.
This is what MARTA had planned for metro Atlanta in 1971 before voters in Clayton and Gwinnett chose to keep their counties out of the transit system.
Anyways, that was the past. Back to the present.
According to Google Maps, I could make my four mile commute between home and work in about 40 minutes going one way on a weekday.
To me, that doesn’t seem that bad. (I know people who sit in Metro Atlanta traffic for longer than that on a daily basis).
But what if I tried to make a trip of the same distance in a metro Atlanta county that wasn’t tapped into the MARTA system? How about a county not in metro Atlanta?
I did some poking around on Google Maps Transit today to see how easy it would be for me to get around in life without a car.
I’d encourage you to do the same. Could you get around easily without a car? How long would it take you to get to work or the store?
How does that make you feel?
#whatmovesyouGA
Originally published at www.gpb.org on September 30, 2015.
