Multimodal Mom
Preparing to get around LA with a newborn on foot, bike, and transit
Last month, L.A. had one of those car-free events that opens streets to bikes and other non-motorized forms of transportation. We call ours CicLAvia and it happens three times annually — days I generally consider to be the best of the year.
Each CicLAvia I leave the house early on my bright orange Dutch-style bike. As a proud multimodal Angeleno who prefers to get around town on foot, bike, or bus — I even dubbed myself A Walker in LA — every day is CicLAvia for me, technically. But joining tens of thousands of my fellow Angelenos similarly unimpeded by automobiles just amplifies the beauty of experiencing the city this way.
This past CicLAvia, however, my day was a bit different. At seven months pregnant, my confident two-wheeled stance had begun to wobble, so I’d recently retired my bike to the garage. Not a problem, I decided; I’d tackle this CicLAvia on foot. This was the first thing noticed by the friends and neighbors I encountered along the way, who used it as a cue to give me their take on my now-uncertain car-free future:
Big changes coming for you!
Not on a bike, huh? Get used to it!
I guess you’re not going to be able to ride the bus anymore!
Some people didn’t even congratulate me first. They wanted to get right to the part where they warned me about how my swiftly swelling belly was signifying my impending doom.
I can’t say I was surprised. I’ve been receiving the same warnings, in various incarnations, for the past few years. The general consensus was always this: While it’s quite admirable to attempt to live without a car in an auto-centric city now — That’s so cool! — it simply wouldn’t last: Just wait until you have kids.
Across the U.S., there’s no doubt that cities are changing, being retrofitted to encourage more feet on our sidewalks and more bikes on our streets. Americans themselves are changing their behavior, too. We’ve heard plenty about how younger Americans are choosing not to get their licenses; now a new study out this week by the journal Transportation shows that Millennials are 3.4 times more likely to be completely car-free when compared to their elder counterparts.
However, those behavioral changes seem to be temporary. When Americans become parents, the trend reverts: Households with children are 22 percent less likely to be car-free.
In some instances, the way our cities are designed could prevent us from walking our kids to school, riding a bike to the park, or taking the bus to a museum. Even when American parents might have the best intentions, gleaned from a decade or more of their own adult car-free lifestyles, what is it specifically about “kids” that makes us go crawling back into the front seat of a car?
The reason may actually be more culturally ingrained than we think, according to a recent and rather disturbing study by UCLA that looked at why men in the U.S. continue to bike in higher numbers than women. Researchers found that despite years of progress, American women (in male-female parenting roles) are still shouldering a disproportionate number of child-serving tasks like getting groceries, running errands, and acting as chauffeur — stuff that’s simply not as easy to do on a bike:
According to the UCLA report, women with children make twice as many child–serving trips and nearly twice as many grocery trips as their male spouses. Even when women earn more, are better educated, and work more hours than their male partners, they still make 1.5 times as many child-serving trips and 1.4 times as many grocery trips. These findings reflect the fact that in most U.S. families women still shoulder the responsibility for caring for the household, and that responsibility is hard to manage on a bike.
The study compared American moms to Dutch moms, who bike as much as their male parent counterparts. It’s partially an urban design issue: Dutch cities have historically been built in a way that makes it easy to walk or bike to school or other activities. But it turns out that the Dutch parents are able to lean on extensive social services like longer maternity and paternity leave, government-sponsored day care, and shorter work weeks.
So even if it’s not our preferred mode of transportation, the real-world activities of food acquisition, diaper buying, doctor visits, guitar lessons, softball games, and endless playdates drive American moms behind the wheel of an automobile. Whether we like it or not.
While there are plenty of movements like 8–80 Cities, which promotes urban design for all ages and abilities, this is a bigger problem than outdated infrastructure. Many issues call for social reform— offering longer and more equal leave for both parents would be a start — but in the end, it’s a failure of our cities to produce kid-friendly communities at the neighborhood scale.
The reason I gave up my car in the first place was actually a matter of convenience, more than anything. I lived in a particularly congested part of Hollywood, where the perpetual traffic was made even worse on summer evenings when thousands of cars would converge upon the outdoor music venue up the street. I started riding the subway first, then the bus, then my bike, just to avoid the crushing gridlock. Soon, I realized I could walk most of the places I’d driven to mindlessly. I gave my car to my sister and spent seven years learning the prettiest sidewalks, the best bike routes, the most efficient bus schedules. I learned first-hand that living locally was better for my sanity and spirit.
When I moved in with the person who’d become my husband, we specifically chose our current neighborhood based on its transit accessibility. But we also picked it because we could easily reach most of our daily needs on foot. We now have pretty much everything we need within a very walkable two-mile radius of our home — including the hospital where I’ll deliver. Before I got pregnant, we switched doctors, choosing a medical center that’s a 20-minute stroll away. (I’m determined to make this walk while in labor.)
This series of decisions, I realized in hindsight, set us up for potential car-free parenting success more than anything else. In the last few years, we’ve consciously made other specific lifestyle shifts which we hope are baby-proof.
We buy most of our food from a farmers market in our neighborhood and I already rarely go to supermarkets. Between grocery delivery and Amazon Prime, we can have most of our household goods dropped on our doorstep. Diapers, check.
The schools in our neighborhood are so close to our house we could probably walk there faster than we could navigate the carpool line, and we have plenty of nearby options when it comes to preschools and day cares. We have sports fields, museums, rec centers, parks, pools, and music schools within easy walking, biking, and busing distance that I assume (hope?) will allow me to keep my kid well-rounded.
I also hope the act of attending a school in my own neighborhood will mean that my child will have a local network of friends and parents to interact with and learn from, meaning playdates and birthday parties will largely be walkable. (Although we can certainly ride the bus and train to go visit friends who live further away.) Walking, biking, and riding the bus takes a lot of advanced planning, something I’m told I won’t be able to do as efficiently when I have a baby in tow. But I see it differently: What better way to teach our kid patience and time management?
To answer the question that almost everyone is asking me in a hushed, concerned voice when I tell them my due date: Yes, we do have a family automobile now; my parents gave us a hand-me-down sedan which I do know how to drive, if necessary. A car is great for emergencies and for road trips, plus I am pretty sure you have to prove that you have one — and a car seat — to take your newborn home from the hospital with you. I’m not against driving my child around if time or distance warrants it. I just have a feeling I’d spend the whole time fretting about all the L.A. that my daughter is missing along the way.
There are many families in L.A. who are raising happy children without the help of cars — I see them every day on the bus. There are also many inspiring women out there like Emily Finch, who hauls around her six kids on a modified cargo bike in Portland, or Lenore Skenazy of the Free-Range Kids movement, who controversially let her nine-year-old son ride the subway home by himself in New York City. I hear great stories from my friends in Brooklyn and San Francisco and Tokyo and London — all raising their kids car-free.
My husband and I could compare WalkScores and transit maps and bike lanes from metropolis to metropolis, trying to find the best place to raise urbanist kids, but in the end, as I’ve realized, it’s not really a city-to-city issue as much as it comes down to how well our neighborhood supports our decision. Having a child will force us to live hyperlocally in a way we haven’t before, to lean on our neighborhood more than ever. But it also might cause us to make sacrifices. Do we choose a day care that’s not our first choice simply because it’s walkable?
I’m about to put my community under an unprecedented level of scrutiny, to test how safe and friendly and navigable it really is. Essentially, I’m taking a gamble on my neighborhood — on my neighbors! — to see if it can support me in this next life step. I’ll certainly discover its shortcomings, but hopefully I’ll also feel more empowered to improve it. (I already know the sidewalks are deplorable and have been looking for a stroller with SUV-grade suspension to summit their cracks.) And what about if or when we move? We’ll have to find a new neighborhood that fits all our criteria. Maybe what works in one part of the city will fail miserably in another.
With a few weeks to go in my pregnancy, my bike might be in storage, but I’m still busing to appointments and walking my errands — I’m still living the car-free life. And I refuse to give up my dream of raising multimodal kids in Los Angeles. I believe that my neighborhood is up to the challenge. I think L.A. is changing enough to meet me halfway. And I’ll report back on how well it works.
