Week Without Driving 2026

Despite football Sunday, I managed to make a quick grocery run on foot during halftime. I live in a very walkable neighborhood. I easily walk to two grocery stores, my dog’s daycare, my vet, my hair stylist, my gym, my library, 3 bus lines, and more. That made it really easy to dabble with car-free transit — I could try a one activity at a time, identify the pain points, and adjust.

The ability to try on a more car-lite lifestyle is super important! This recent report describes 73% of drivers as feeling “trapped” by car dependence. And some neighborhoods exacerbate that feeling, boxing residents in through gates, dead ends, and lack of pedestrian infrastructure. From food deserts to gated neighborhoods, our current inequities of access and infrastructure reveal historic legacies of redlining and other legal violence. That goes for lower-income, majority-minority neighborhoods, where cities chose deliberate disinvestment as a strategy of segregation. It also goes for wealthy neighborhoods, who chose to remain unwalkable in order to prevent non-residents from using resources or even transiting through their neighborhoods. In both cases, the effect is that mobility — particularly for families — is mostly synonymous with car ownership. Sidewalk maintenance and construction aren't sexy, as urbanist topics go, but they are urgent.

Wanna know a secret? Sometimes I cheat a little bit at my car-free lifestyle and catch a ride back to the city with a friend. She drops me off at Jefferson and Gravois, and I catch the bus from there, usually shaving off about 20-30 minutes off my two-hour commute. That's not actually cheating, of course! Car-pooling is a great way to reduce car usage.

One way or another, I ride the metrolink just about every work day. Sometimes I incorporate it into my bike commute on one end or the other, and sometimes it's part of my standard bus-train-bus-bus commute.

Right now, Metro is piloting a one-car initiative, where they're running one train on each line that only has one car instead of the standard two. While I'm glad that Metro's seeking data-informed ways to reduce costs, I worry that it's rooted in an austerity mindset that asks what we can cut, rather than how we can grow. Time will tell!

Putting my money (or at least my email) where my mouth is, I emailed my alderman to ask that he support revising the 50-50 sidewalk program. The program is intended to support the maintenance and replacement of sidewalks by subsidizing homeowners, but in practice, it puts a significant financial burden on homeowners to maintain an essential public infrastructure. And the areas where the sidewalks have been most badly neglected by the city are the same neighborhoods where residents most rely on sidewalks to get around. Sidewalks are our most fundamental yet most neglected transit infrastructure.

It's the start of the month, so time for me to buy my new monthly pass! Up until this summer, I bought physical monthly passes, because Metro and MCT don't have compatible mobile fare systems. In July, Metro phased out the paper passes in favor of a new reloadable fare card. In theory, that's great! It allows for fare capping (so that you'll never pay more than you have to in a given day), and you can reload it from your phone. MCT accepts them too, although they don't yet have the ability to read the card and see what pass is active on it.

However, the card hasn't quite lived up to its full potential yet. The system's still really buggy. Last month, I reloaded my card through the phone app. Although the card and app are connected, the card never actually accessed the pass. Instead, every time I used it, it charged my cash balance and put me into a negative balance. Customer service wasn't able to identify or solve the problem, and every test cost me money that they don't refund. This month, I reloaded my pass through the ticket vending machine. It's now working perfectly. But TVMs are only located at metro stations, so you have to pay money to get there. Bugs are inevitable with a new product roll-out, I get that. But for people who ride and rely on transit, these frictions add up, adding needless frustration and costs to the transit experience. For people who don't regularly ride transit, those frustrations make them less willing to try again.

To me, the main takeaway here is that Metro hasn't sufficiently stress-tested this system. It's an easy mistake to make -- to test it as the kind of rider you would be, instead of the breadth of actual riders who rely on the system. People with disabilities, with children, with limited funds and tight time tables. It's a mistake that costs people real money.

I was so paranoid about the bus bike racks the first time I tried to use them. I looked up every video I could find, looked for written instructions, anything. Since I was catching the bus midway through its route, I didn't want to be the person to slow things down or look like a doofus. It turns out to be super simple! Trailnet has now made two great videos demonstrating how it works on the Metro busses.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Trailnet (@trailnetstl)

Besides our usual dog walks, we took a little stroll down the block for National Night Out. We have a small block, but we always get a nice turnout for the event. We chatted about local politics and the neighborhood association, recent bike rides, family updates, and just about everything else under the sun. Most of the time, I only see my neighbors in passing, so I always love this event as an excuse to be a little more intentional about our hyperlocal community.

That's busses, plural! I take a LOT of busses. My daily commute involves three busses each way (plus a train), and on any given day, that might include the 90 (Hampton), 11 (Chippewa), and 30 (Arsenal) on the Missouri side, and the 4 (Granite City-Edwardsville), 5 (Emerson Park-Granite City), 18 (Emerson Park-Collinsville), 19 (Collinsville-SIUE), and 20 (Metrolink).

I cheated a bit and got a head start on this one. I'm currently leading a reading group on spatial justice, and our September conversation wound up engaging with a lot of issues surrounding public transit and issues of access. So I went ahead and plugged WWD to that bunch a few weeks in advance!

If I can do something without a car, I do. It turns out that with good tires, good lights, and a certain amount of disregard for one's own safety, you can bike just about anywhere, from the grocery store to the hiking trail. Only occasionally has that mindset gotten me into any real trouble, like when I forgot to check the weekend bus schedule and wound up biking several miles on unlit streets to a different bus route. (I had lights, so I could be seen -- I just couldn't see very well!) Definitely do not do that.