On (Not) Driving (in (Southern) California)

Yesterday was a beautiful day, and I spent it in 4.5 hours of meetings.

Don't get me wrong, I rather enjoyed the two meetings. Plus the department bought us lunch because it was the last meeting of the academic year! Yay.

But on days like those I'm glad for my 20-minute daily walk to campus, guaranteeing that I get at least a little bit of vitamin D and some alone time to sort through things on my mind. (I do get another 20 minutes on my way home, but the vitamin D isn't guaranteed at that point.)

When I was in grad school my walk to campus was 30 minutes, which may have been, as one prof suggested, my own way of staying sane. In Nagoya my walk was 45 minutes, which was a bit long, but an awesome excuse to walk through various neighborhoods and stop at various convenience stores for pastries, fried chicken, etc. (Otherwise it was the subway in Nagoya, which meant, still, a lot of reading and thinking.)

I don't drive. I don't own a car. I do have a license—and in my glory days I would drive from Mountain View to the East Bay, or, once or twice, drive between Riverside and San Diego. (I mention this to prove to people that I'm not totally incompetent behind the wheel.)

But I do dislike driving, and I am also deathly afraid of it—not only because my dad got hit by a car around the time I was practicing with a permit (which must've forever done something to my relationship with cars and driving) but also because more recently I ran into something I shouldn't have run into while I had a friend in the car—so, I'm not incompetent, but I do make some very consequential mistakes at times.

More recently, though, I've been appreciating the other reasons (or effects) of not driving. The health benefit of vitamin D and mild exercise of walking is one. The solo thinking time, without having earbuds stuck in my ears, is another. Not owning a car and thus not paying for insurance, gas, or maintenance is certainly nice. Not contributing to air pollution isn't so bad, either.

I also know exactly how long it takes for me to get from Point A to Point B if I'm traveling by foot. I also get to see various parts of the city if I'm walking or taking other forms of public transit. Waiting for the bus or sitting on the train might feel like time wasted, but I'm usually reading or grading or thinking, which makes it rather pleasant. (And if I'm at the station before my train arrives, I can get me a quick Smirnoff Ice (or two) without endangering anyone's life.)

Arranging my day around bus and train schedules can be a pain, but it also forces me to plan out my day and get things done—or not. And if I don't get them done, then I learn what I'm capable of accomplishing in a given amount of time, which helps me work more efficiently the next time around.

Of course, there are plenty of downsides to not driving—like missing an awesome potluck party because it was kind of last minute and also a 35-minute walk away (rather short, actually, but not when I'm carrying a freshly-made green bean casserole).

(But then I admit that not having a car gets me out of having to go to a lot of things I don't want to go to...not that I have trouble saying no to people. But still.)

If I didn't walk to work every day, I would never have discovered the morning glories growing right outside my apartment complex. In the most unlikely place. Just one small batch of it, but still glorious and beautiful. And nowadays, if I really needed to get somewhere and I just couldn't walk or bus it, I can just call Lyft and it'll solve all my problems.