Who goes car-less in Dallas?

Dallas Morning News Transportation Blog
Rodger Jones // October 26, 2009

To be more specific: Who is car-less by choice in this town?

No doubt a minuscule number, by choice, (and I sometimes count myself in that number). And I would like to hear about these people.

Streetsblog has a link up to a site highlighting an artist's project in Los Angeles about car-less Angelinos, some -- but not all -- by choice.

There's a New York Times featureon the same subject, and a blogger in my hometown of Cleveland addresses it from the view of a young person who may want an occasional car.

A dedicated transit user, I like to tell people I'm not a car owner. A series of columns featuring my alter ego, DART man, centered on the notion that he was car-less by choice.

Truth be known, there is one car in my household -- my wife's. She takes it to work; I ride the trains to work, and usually the train and a bus home.

That means I don't fit into the Census category of zero cars available in the household (which is about 5 percent of the households in Richardson, where I live, and 10 percent in Dallas.

I'd say the vast majority of these people are elderly, disabled or poor -- not the types who fit into any kind new urbanist car-less-by-choice category. In other words, not the kind that the media get excited doing profiles about.

In writing columns and blogging about about walking and public transit, I've never come across someone who's car-less by choice. Are there any such people out there?