When my friend invited me to go to her gym a few months ago, I prepared myself for an odyssey. It was my first time trying to get to Springdale from my Hyde Park apartment, which might as well be on opposite sides of the ocean for a carless Austinite.
First, I headed to the CapMetro station across the street, waited 10 minutes, and rode my first bus for 10 minutes. Then I walked to another stop and waited 15 minutes to catch my second bus, which dropped me off 5 minutes later.
Another 5-minute walk and I was at the gym on time — only to get a text from my friend saying she couldn’t make it. Someone had broken into her car.
My motivation to exercise utterly sapped, I headed home, taking the same journey but in reverse.
By car, my round trip would have taken 22 minutes. By transit, it took 2 hours.
This about sums up my sometimes love, sometimes hate relationship with being carless in Austin. It’s doable — and free of car theft — but not always easy.
For a long time, Austin was built around cars. Efforts to make the city more transit- and pedestrian-friendly are in the works, but the vast majority of Austinites rely on driving. Just over 6% of households in Austin don’t have their own cars — and if you include suburbs like Round Rock, that number drops to 4.4%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
That still translates to tens of thousands of Austinites. How do they make it work? For tips, I reached out to people across the city who don’t own cars or make an effort not to use them. Most agree living without a car is more than possible, but it can involve major adjustments to your routine — and a deeper shift in how you think about Austin as a city.
The view from downtown
“Your experience of being car-free in Austin will be night and day different depending on where you live,” said Cutter González, a 29-year-old in Travis Heights. González gets around most of the time using an e-bike and less often by walking and riding the bus.
“If you can live inside the freeways — 183 on the north, Ben White-290 on the south, 35 on the east and MoPac on the west — if you're within that core area, it's generally pretty doable,” they said. “When you get beyond that, it gets a little hit or miss.”
From where González is at, life without a car “has been so much richer.” They say they feel more connected to their neighbors and local businesses, and they get more exercise.
“When I had a car, it didn't matter if I was going to H-E-B two blocks away — I was like, ‘Well, I’ll hop in my car because I have to get the groceries,'" they said. "And it's really not that inconvenient [to walk].”
González makes around $80,000 a year and works from home. They're also a member of Rethink35, a nonprofit opposed to the I-35 expansion in Austin. They acknowledge it’s a financial privilege to be in a walkable area with access to bike lanes and public transit.
“I live in a place where it's really pretty easy to not have a car, but I think there's a lot of us who live in places like this that are still attached to cars for no good reason other than [it’s the] default thinking,” they said.
Farther from the center, location matters even more
Being out in Austin’s suburbs doesn’t make living without a car impossible. It does mean you have to be more intentional, though.
Rachel Montemayor, 44, has lived in and around Austin for nearly 18 years. When it came time to buy a home, she and her husband decided to move to Leander specifically for CapMetro’s Leander Station, which is serviced by a commuter bus line, commuter rail and on-demand pickup services. Montemayor’s husband is visually impaired and can’t drive, so it was important for them to have other options. They do own a car but use public transit “90 to 95%" of the time, Montemayor said.
Montemayor’s daily commute is a puzzle of transit options: She uses a combination of shuttle service, rail and bus to get to work, which takes around 45 minutes one way. But she doesn’t consider it a hassle.
“Not worrying about a car is the ultimate freedom,” she said. “Of course there might be a train that's late every now and then because of something, but it's never been something unbearable. And I don't have to worry about any car maintenance or traffic or a car payment. So to me, it's worth it.”
Montemayor has advocated for public transit in Leander for years, and she's currently a part of Keep Leander Connected and the Red Line Parkway Initiative, a group that supports building a pedestrian and cyclist trail along CapMetro's rail. She and her husband are both teachers and have a household income of under $120,000 a year.
She said that choosing to move near public transit has helped them with the cost of living near Austin.
“If you don't have a car payment, it's much easier for you to afford a home,” she said. “It definitely has helped us.”
Abdulla Zahran, 24, made the choice to live a walkable distance from his job at Apple’s campus in Northwest Austin. But without a car, that decision has left him feeling isolated from the rest of the city.
“I am very pro-urbanism and cycling … but it's just not feasible here. We have to work with what we have. And having a car is just going to make life that much easier, even if it is more upkeep and maintenance.”Abdulla Zahran, Northwest Austin
“I feel like a caged bird,” he said.
It takes him at least half an hour to walk to the nearest bus stop. The closest H-E-B, a few minutes away from his apartment by car, is also a half-hour trip by foot. He used to have a bike but gave up on cycling because of his experience with poor infrastructure and hostile drivers.
Now, saving up for a car is Zahran’s “number one priority above anything else.”
“I am very pro-urbanism and cycling … but it's just not feasible here,” he said. “We have to work with what we have. And having a car is just going to make life that much easier, even if it is more upkeep and maintenance.”
Because of his location and budget while saving for a car, Zahran doesn’t really go out unless a friend picks him up. He makes around $52,000 a year.
For the committed, patience is a virtue
For Austinites interested in life without a car, investing time and some cash upfront can make the process easier.
González, the cyclist in Travis Heights, recommends getting to know your local car-free and car-light community for tips on routes. In Austin, bike lanes can suddenly disappear, and navigation apps can direct you to roads that technically work but aren’t safe, they said.
González runs an urbanist book club where people often discuss how to get around.
“Questions will come up organically: ‘Oh, I need to go to this place. What's your preferred route to get there?’ And people will have ideas,” they said. “People who have done it before will be a huge asset in figuring out a route that's safe and reliable.”
Darron Jurajda, a 48-year-old father of four in Cedar Park, said that if you’re trying to use a bike in the place of a car, look into getting a good-quality e-bike.
“Don't try to struggle — especially in Texas in the summertime — with a regular bike,” he said. “Go ahead and make the investment. If it's for transportation, you want it to be a decent bike.”
Jurajda is not car-free — his household has three cars for longer trips — but he estimates he uses a bike to travel around 50% of the time. His family has several e-bikes, regular bikes and scooters — he joked his dining room is essentially a parking lot. He often bikes to drop his kids off at school, take them to extracurricular activities, get groceries and pick up takeout.
"I live in a place where it's really pretty easy to not have a car. But I think there's a lot of us who live in places like this that are still attached to cars for no good reason other than [it’s the] default thinking."Cutter González, Travis Heights
Jurajda works in the semiconductor industry and said his household income is more than $100,000 a year.
Of course, e-bikes aren’t exactly cheap — especially with add-ons like baskets or passenger seats that can make using them as car replacements more feasible. But Austin Energy provides e-bike rebates that can shave several hundred dollars off the sticker price. Several of the people I spoke to said they were already saving money by reducing their reliance on cars.
If this research and prep sounds like a lot of work, González said it helps to compare it to the learning curve of driving.
When you first started using a car, “you had to go through coursework, you had to go through months of training behind the wheel with someone who was an expert, and you had to take a test,” González said.
Navigating public transit or learning bike paths can feel tedious at first, but “if you think of it in that context, it’s so much easier than driving,” they said.
A different way of seeing the city
Unlike in some other major cities, being without a car in Austin is more than a question of logistics or finances — or even your personal or environmental politics. It’s a decision to go against the default way of existing in this place. It changes how you live your life pretty much every day.
Time is different. Distance is different. The people you meet are different.
González told me about a recent bus ride outside of their usual route, where they realized “everyone on the bus knew each other.” As people boarded for their evening commute, they caught each other up on their lives.
“‘Oh my God, I haven’t seen you in weeks, where have you been?’ ‘Oh, I’ve been traveling,’” González said, describing an example of what they heard. “It’s actually beautiful … this whole community thing inside the bus. When you’re in your car, it’s the total opposite.”
Montemayor, the teacher with the piecemeal commute from Leander, likes to gaze outside the window while she’s riding the rail. She listed the animals she has seen on a particularly scenic section of the route: “deer, turkeys, porcupines, coyotes, everything.”
Maya Masterson, a 29-year-old living in East Austin, said she restricts her life to a pretty specific radius. She uses a non-electric bike to get around, including to her most recent job 7 miles away. Life without a car is doable but frustrating, she said, and does involve sacrifices. She gets sweaty and tired in the heat. She sometimes relies on friends for rides. She can’t rush somewhere at a moment’s notice.
Still, Masterson finds something sweet in the experience.
“I sometimes appreciate that I live in, in some ways, a slower world, where I'm like, ‘I can't just be there in 10 minutes. It's going to be 40 minutes,’” she said.
“Our world is moving so fast. Everything is [about] how to be more productive, more efficient. This is so inefficient, me biking 7 miles. But you know what? It feels good, sometimes, to be inefficient.”
