![]() ![]() By the time I got to high school I was walking to school every day and exploring the city with my friends, on foot or by bike. But I retained a love for alternative transportation. My mom started getting higher-paying work, I started attending school, and we used our car more. But traveling without a car, I was present I could see the world around me.Īs I got older, our life stabilized. I read a book, or explored the wilds of Hyrule on my Gameboy Color, or simply imagined a world of my own. I was a very imaginative child, and as soon as I sat in a car I checked out of this universe. Any day-to-day car travel was struck from my mind, while even the most mundane bike trips stand out with a sort of magical glow. But I don’t have any memories of my time in the car with my mother, save for a few family road trips. The funny thing is, we did have a car for all that time! When gas fit in the budget, or our destination was too difficult for a single mother to haul her two children with alternative transportation, we drove. Even though they had been phased out of use by the mid-1990s, we used them to get on the bus for the next couple of weeks, the driver accepting them out of some combination of bemusement, kindness, and apathy. I remember finding a stash of old RTS tokens in some corner of our old house, undoubtedly uncovered by my mom’s continuous renovations. ![]() When our bikes were away for the winter, we trudged through the snow to the Sully Library, where I, homeschooled-kid that I was, would sit for hours and read. Rochester winters were colder and snowier then, the lead up and lag longer - practically a six-month progression of slush, then ice, then snow, then ice, then slush again. I remember a few years later, pedaling up the same hill behind her on a little bike of my own, my baby sister now taking my place on the back of the bike. Growing up, we could only afford one car, so I have very early memories of sitting in the child seat on the back of my mom’s bike, watching her standing up in the pedals to get us both up the hill over the train tracks on East Main, on our way to the Public Market. Whatever you call it, it works out to be the same thing: Do you make the majority of your trips with a car or without one? And what does that mean for how you experience your life? I’ve always lived a car-lite lifestyle, but growing up in the hood we used to just call it “broke.” I suppose in Europe they don’t call it anything, it’s just normal. ![]()
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