Our five-month car experiment: a retrospective
Our goal for this summer was to get out of the city and into nature more often. We thought that a car might help us with that, but we weren’t sure. To find out, we rented a car for about five months.
A couple of weeks ago we returned the car, thereby concluding our little experiment. Here’s what we learned:
The good:
- Long road trips: the car enabled us to travel for over a month, driving all the way from Berlin down to the Alps and back again in a big circle, giving us several days in each of a dozen locations. Without a car, such a trip would have been very difficult at best.
- New places: Berlin is surrounded by beautiful places (e.g. serene lakes), many of which are difficult to reach with public transport. The car helped us get to some of them for the first time.
- Traveling on our own schedule: public transport is fairly rigid when it comes to timetables. Once you’ve booked seats for a particular train, you’d better catch it. Getting the kids ready in time isn’t always easy, though. Having a car gave us a lot more flexibility about our departure and arrival times.
The bad:
- Getting in and out of the city: living right in the middle of Berlin has many advantages, but it makes driving a horrible experience. Just getting to the edge of the city takes about one hour. The traffic is bad and stressful to navigate. And finding a parking space anywhere near our apartment requires a great deal of luck.
- The risk of accidents: during our road trip, I often noticed other drivers who were distracted, were making mistakes, or were breaking the rules. Luckily, we never got into an accident, but there were a few close calls. Given enough time on the road, something bad will likely happen.
- Being chained to a seat: when I was younger, I didn’t mind sitting for long periods of time. But ever since I injured my back, sitting for too long has been a painful experience. What’s more, our kids just hate being chained to their seats.
In the end, we found that owning a car isn’t worth it for us: getting in and out of the city is way too stressful. So stressful, in fact, that it took the joy out of our day trips, no matter how beautiful the destination was.
Even though our road trip was great, we won’t be taking many trips like that in the next couple of years (with jobs, school, and kindergarten to juggle). And when we do, we can just rent a car again.
I’m so glad we ran this experiment, because it allowed us to thoroughly explore how useful a car would be without the cost and commitment of actually buying one.
We still want to get out into nature more often, so we’ll keep looking for other ways. The next thing we’ll try is to travel mainly by train and to always bring our bicycles along. I don’t know how well this is going to work, but I guess we’ll just have to try and see.