“CAN’T GET ANY MORE AMERICAN THAN THAT”

Robert and Cia dumped their cars for bikes and saved more than $90,000

HAVE YOU EVER SAID, “I wish I had a nickel for every time I . . . ?” Well, imagine if you had 60 cents instead. AAA says that’s the cost of driving a vehicle per mile in America today. What would your life be like if you had that 60 cents back in your pocket for every mile you drove to work, school, or church?

Robert Johnson and his wife, Cia, do. They have no car. And no, they don’t live in the heart of an urban area with extensive public transit like New York, Denver, or Boston.

They willingly went carless six years ago in Columbia, Missouri—right in the heart of the heartland—and continue that lifestyle today in Barrington, Illinois, about twenty miles west of Lake Michigan.

“My financial reality is far different than most others’ because of it,” Robert told me. “Imagine taking every dollar that you spend on car payments, repair, maintenance, gasoline, insurance, and registration and instead saving and investing that money. You not only stay in great shape bicycling and walking, but you become wealthy very quickly.”

That “different” financial reality includes having paid $18,000 in cash for the final year of Cia’s postgraduate studies, plus having eliminated $72,000 in other accumulated student debt in just twelve months. And it will continue until late 2014, when they expect to pay off their mortgage.

Robert, thirty-two, is the director of consulting at PedNet Coalition, a pedestrian advocacy group. He splits his time between telecommuting and traveling the country to meet with clients from cities and school systems interested in more pedestrian and pedaling options for their communities. (He does rent cars that are paid for by his employer while on the road.)

Cia, twenty-eight, works as the assistant director of animal welfare at the American Veterinary Medical Association. Her commute to work entails a train ride every day and eleven miles of round-trip biking.

The Johnsons married in 2005 and knew they both enjoyed the pedaling lifestyle. But the idea of going carless wasn’t an automatic no-brainer for the like-minded newlyweds. The real aha moment came when they watched how they bulked up their budget as they drove less and less.

At the time, Robert had a $280 monthly truck payment for his Ford Ranger and paid around $60 in monthly insurance premiums. While that might be no big deal to some people, it was a lot to the young couple, who were living on his $11 per hour wage ($22,000 annually) while Cia was a full-time student.

By 2007, the couple had sold both Robert’s Ford Ranger and Cia’s Dodge Dakota, with the goal of trying out the carless lifestyle for a couple of months. They were met with laughter from friends and fear from Cia’s parents, who worried about them being three and a half hours away with no wheels while Cia’s dad lived with Parkinson’s disease. (When Cia and Robert visit their families, they go by plane, train, bus, or rental car, depending on which option is cheapest at the time.)

“People really have this sort of knee-jerk reaction, they just don’t feel like it’s possible to live in the United States in modern times without an automobile, but we’ve never looked back,” Robert says.

Their new “wheels” are now Robert’s $700 Trek 7.3 bike with a special $1,500 gearing system called a Rohloff hub and Cia’s $2,500 Brompton folding bicycle. Going without an automobile has impacted everything from how they get groceries (on foot, with backpacks) to their choice of a side business.

In 2008, Robert and Cia ran a human-powered lawn cutting business called Green Team Lawn Care on the weekends. The Johnsons used an old-fashioned reel mower instead of a gas-engine lawn mower, long-handled clippers instead of a weed whacker, and a broom instead of a noisy leaf blower to remove the clipped grass from sidewalks and driveways.

All the low-tech gear was, of course, hauled to job sites in an 8-foot-by-3-foot cargo trailer behind a bicycle!

“There were many Saturday mornings when we would be standing at the first [client’s] lawn just waiting for the sun to come up high enough so that we could get started,” Robert recalls. “We didn’t have to worry at all about waking anybody up. I don’t think even the people that lived in the home knew that we were out there most of the time. We were just able to quietly roll up on the bikes and get going.”

After clipping more than five hundred lawns at just north of $30 a property, the Johnsons took the $18,000 they earned and paid the final year of Cia’s veterinary medicine doctoral studies in cash. They have since retired their garden shears and no longer run the business.

When it came time to move from Missouri in 2010, the couple handpicked the Chicago suburb of Barrington because it was bike and pedestrian friendly. Cia could also ride her bike to the train line before hopping on to get to her office at the American Veterinary Medical Association. (Upon arriving at work, she simply closes her office door and takes a few minutes to freshen up and change clothes.)

Things have gotten a lot better financially for the Johnsons since moving to Barrington. They now pull in a combined household income of $135,000. And thanks to their thrift, they were able to put a 20 percent down payment on a $137,000 one-bedroom/one-bathroom condo four years ago. The couple even managed to grab the $8,000 tax credit that was then being offered to first-time homebuyers.

In July 2012, the Johnsons made the final student loan payment that knocked out $72,000 of Cia’s lingering educational debt. After that, the couple built a year’s worth of expenses in an emergency fund. Right now they’re targeting their mortgage, which Robert and Cia expect to pay off in December 2014, when he’s thirty-four and she’s thirty. Not bad!

For those of you who are wondering, Robert and Cia don’t have any children. But before you dismiss their story because of that, I want to introduce you to Gina Overshiner, bicycle program manager at PedNet in Columbia and one of Robert’s coworkers.

Gina is a forty-six-year-old mother of a twelve-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy. She and her husband, Tim, thirty-six, are a “low car” family because they have one vehicle that’s primarily used for emergencies and longer trips. The bulk of their daily life—going to school, going to the store, going for nonemergency doctor appointments—is lived by bike.

Gina started biking the kids around before their first birthdays. As they become toddlers, she started using a bike trailer to haul around “normal mommy minivan detritus,” including sporting goods, backpacks, snacks, and toys while staying home to care for her kids during the early baby years.

As the trio rode around, she soon realized that “for every super-busy highway, there are usually a lot of smaller neighborhood roads that run pretty much parallel and have very little traffic. Because of the lower traffic on these ‘parallel’ roads, biking can actually be safer than driving.” Gina also discovered that the roads that jam up during rush hour are almost empty during midday, “when most mommies of small children are going to play dates at the park.”

The kind of lifestyle the Johnsons and the Overshiners have adopted is not for everyone. In fact, it’s almost culturally renegade to live in America—the land that practically invented the automobile—without a car. But that doesn’t deter them.

“I really think the future is Americans owning fewer cars,” Robert told me. “It just doesn’t make sense to own a $30,000 piece of capital that you use thirty or forty-five minutes a day, something that depreciates by thousands of dollars in a year. I think more people are going to figure that out.”

For Robert, he and Cia have figured out a way to have carless living make sense. “It’s a very American thing,” he says. “It’s being self-sufficient, it’s a little bit of hard work, and it’s trying to become wealthy. And I don’t even think you can get more American than that.”

What lessons can you draw from the story of Robert and Cia?

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

• Obviously, the Johnsons sold both vehicles and are heavily invested in this lifestyle. But there are all sorts of people out there with three cars that could go to two cars, or two that could go to one. If you’re like the average American and you can find a way to replace even a part of your trips by biking and walking, you’ve just increased your income by what’s likely to be a meaningful amount. Visit the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals at APBP.org for tips on bike safety and how to get started integrating pedal power into your lifestyle.

Try a scooter or motorcycle.

• I like to think of scooters as a “step down” program from car ownership. Scooters are fuel efficient and cheap to buy. A slew of Chinese imports on the market price out below $1,000 for a 50cc model with a top speed of forty-five miles per hour. Check Craigslist for gently used scooters at half that price. If motorcycles are more your style, be sure to pay for a safety course through the Motorcycle Safety Foundation at MSF-USA.org before riding.

Use cheap interstate bus service for travel.

• Robert told me he and Cia often use bus or rail for leisure travel. For the first time in forty-five years, the bus is becoming a real option for more people. Bus lines including MegaBus.com, BoltBus.com, and Greyhound.com/GreyhoundExpress offer travel between metro areas with a limited number of fares starting at $1.
• Services like these were originally designed to attract the young and broke, but they’re now branching out and crossing economic and age lines. Women traveling alone are a particularly booming client base for some of these players. Free Wi-Fi and luxury seats are among the amenities most of these bus lines offer.
• My associate producer Joel Larsgaard, his wife, and another couple used MegaBus to go from Atlanta to New Orleans last year. They paid $46 round-trip in total for four people!

Try sharing a vehicle.

• Shared car services, where you rent a car by the hour, are gaining in popularity, particularly on college campuses. ZipCar.com is probably the leader in the industry, though Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Hertz are trying to elbow their way into the market too.
• Once you sign up with ZipCar for $50, you receive a ZipCard that allows you to access the vehicles that are parked at easy-to-reach locations. You typically pay an hourly charge of $6 to $12 to rent a car, and that price includes comprehensive insurance, gas, and roadside assistance/maintenance.
• When you’re done with the vehicle, just return it to the same location where you picked it up. It’s kind of like “public transit, private driving,” and it’s much cheaper than adding another car to the family fleet.