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Next week is the Week Without Driving — a nationwide event in which people take a pledge to avoid getting in cars as much as possible, and to reflect on their experiences. Throughout this week, the Outpost — in conjunction with the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities — will be bringing you little reports and essays from people who have taken the pledge. How are they doing? We’re going to find out!

But first, to set the stage, I want to tell you about something. And I want to make a modest suggestion.

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It is almost exactly one mile from my house to LoCO HQ.

For well on 10 years, my daily routine was this: I would wake up in the morning; make coffee; feed the dogs; do some morning work; get my kids out the door to school, breakfasted and lunched; do some more morning work; shower; and, usually, eat something.

Then I would get in my car and drive the one mile to work, in Old Town. I would park in the same parking spot, which was one block from our office, every single time. I would work the day. Then, at quitting time, I would do whatever it is I had to do after work – usually, drive up to Arcata to pick up one or the other of my kids at the tail end of one of their afterschool obligations. Then we would drive home.

This year, things changed. My kids had both graduated from school. That meant I had no real need to have my car available to me at the end of my workday. Which meant I had no real need to drive.

Still, it took me a month or two to mentally switch gears. Why was I still driving to work, then driving back home at the end of the day? Why was I burning fossil fuels to perform this simple task? Why was I paying for gas, registration, insurance and upkeep on this stupid one-ton machine that spent most of its day, apart from 10 minutes at either end, stationary, just taking up space?

When I was young, bicycling was one of the great pleasures in life. Living in Willits, I kept two sets of quick-change wheels. One had mountain bike tires and one had “slicks” – perfectly smooth, treadless tires designed for maximum glide. The former were for weekend jaunts up logging roads to the Two Rock lookout, where you could see clear to the coast on a sunny day. The latter were for debauched midnight “drafting” sessions, where we would wait, poised, until a big rig poked its head into town. The trick was to get into its slipstream while it came south down the northern end of Main Street, then pedal like hell as it picked up speed en route to the straightaway on the south end. Do it right and you suddenly found yourself speeding along in top gear at a frictionless 50 miles per hour.

Humans can’t fly, but in my experience there are two things that come close to it – close to a thing that you dream of almost every night, if you’re like me. One is swimming. The other is riding a bicycle.

Still I drove to work.

But then, this summer, my kid’s beater pickup started sounding a bit shaky, as kids’ first vehicles tend to do. I gave him my car, because he needed it more than I did. And rather than spending money to get the pickup in order, I pulled my pandemic bike off the hook in the junk room, got it tuned up and started riding to work.

Reader, it has been amazing. There’s the pleasure communing with the elements, the feeling of the wind on your face twice a day. There are the health benefits of getting your blood pumping a little bit on a regular basis. There is steering, weaving, leaning, pedaling, downshifting, swooping around corners.

Then there is the inarguable fact that riding your bike to work, in Eureka, is just as fast or faster than driving. I cover the mile from the doorstep of my house to the door to our building in five minutes flat – easily faster than doing it in my car, when parking is taken into account. The ride home – mostly uphill – takes eight minutes. I had to start timing myself to fully understand it could be that fast. Even when I’m staring straight at the proof on my phone I can’t quite believe it.

Why did it take me so long to make this change? Why don’t more people do it this way?

I should not be unique. I am not a lithe young buck. Nowadays I am solidly in the wrong half of middle age, and my doctor would tell you that my physical apparatus leaves a lot to be desired. There are thousands of Humboldters who have essentially the same commute that I do, and who are at least as able as me. Most of them are more able still. They could be biking to work. Yet for some reason they are not.

How many? The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimates that there are some 51,366 Humboldt County people over the age of 16 who work at a job outside their home. Of those 51,366 people, it estimates that 46,355 – about 90 percent – get to their jobs in a private vehicle. And of those 46,355 people, it estimates that a full 11,499 of them drive less than 10 minutes to get to work.

Here is a map of those people in Eureka alone – Eureka north of Harris, which is in eminently bikeable distance to most of the city’s jobs. Click a census tract for the numbers.

Humboldt County, you may be surprised to learn, has the fifth-lowest commute times in the state. A full 22 percent of us, according to the the Census Bureau’s imperfect but best-available estimates, spend less than 20 minutes a day getting to and from work in our big, hulking, expensive, wasteful, air-polluting machines.

Why do we do that? No doubt some of those 11,499 people are less able than me. Some of them, I’m sure, need their cars to do their jobs. But I’d be willing to wager that the great majority of them are in the same place I was a couple of months ago – just doing it the same way they always did, for reasons they forgot long ago. If you’re one of those people, and especially if you’re one of those people who live in a town that is rapidly upgrading its non-motorized transportation infrastructure, then I urge you to give it a go.

There are three caveats.

One: Last week I pulled a calf muscle hauling my bike up the stairs. This put me back into vehicles for a few days. But then it got better.

Two: This has been summer. What will it be like when it’s raining? Will I brave the wet in rainclothes? Will I fire up my kid’s pickup for the little commute on very rainy days? Will I choose to fall back on pandemic-era privileges and work from home during the worst of the winter storms? I don’t know. It’s to be determined.

Three: Our household has a fallback, which is my wife’s car. We are blessed to have a house with a washer and dryer for the clothes, but there’s no good solution for grocery shopping. I’m not going to swing by the Co-Op or Natty Foods on my bike every night just to pick stuff for dinner. It would be too much – too much time spent shopping, and too much money on basics that would be cheaper elsewhere. I don’t see an easy way to avoid the weekend grocery store run. Also, we are as of yet still too young, my wife and I, to give up the opportunity to just up stakes for a weekend and take a road trip somewhere – a change of scenery for mental health purposes. And we also sometimes have family obligations out of town. I have a solution to each of these – robot taxis for the groceries, cheap and easy rental cars for the road trips – but as of yet society has not caught up to my beautiful vision of the future. One it does, I will happily divest myself of vehicle ownership forever.

So that’s that. I address myself to the people who have something tickling the backs of their brains, something telling them they should be changing up their car-bound lifestyle a bit. Do it! I think you’ll be very happy you did.

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The national Week Without Driving runs from September 29 through October 5, 2025. It is an opportunity for participating public officials and other community members to get first-hand insights into the way many seniors, kids, people with disabilities, low-income people, and other non-drivers navigate our communities. Each day during the week, the Lost Coast Outpost is publishing reflections from local participants. For more information, visit this link.