Car Free in Raleigh

ser·en·dip·i·ty
2. good fortune; luck

This morning I realized (too late) that my monthly La Leche League meeting was at 10:30 am. On the other side of town.

I checked gotriangle.org but it was clear that I needed to leave by 8:30 to arrive in time for the meeting, and unfortunately, it was 9:30 and I wasn’t even dressed yet. I moped around for a bit, not wanting to call either of my two friends who live nearby and bum a ride. (One decision we made early on was not to be dependent on friends with cars. While we’re happy to be invited along shopping or to other places, we have made the decision not to ask for rides.)

Well, wouldn’t you know that a few seconds later, my phone rang.

“Hey. It’s Kara. Want to ride with us to LLL this morning? I have to pick up some things at Mandy’s house and I already have a second carseat in the van I’m driving today.”

As you may imagine, I just about fell out of my chair, and quickly accepted the offer. It ended up being beneficial for both of us; Kara, being quite pregnant, was not happy to lug two boxes of LLL library books into the church hall. So, I helped her load and unload and load her car, and she gave us a lift there and back.

Then, after the meeting, she and another leader, Jessica, were debating where to eat lunch. I realized that we had plenty of food in the fridge to fix Gumbo Stew, so I offered to host at my house. It turned out to be a really nice time, much less expensive and much less of a hassle than eating in a restaurant with a handful of toddlers. We realized that we should do things this way more often. Community building is easier when you carpool and share meals in each other’s homes, it seems.

One difficult part of living without a car is the limited bus service on Sundays (and after hours any other day). For example, compare the CAT weekday routes to the Sunday route list. On a weekday, we can hop on 3 or 10 and be downtown in a few minutes. However, neither route is serviced on Sundays, and service is limited on Saturdays.

On a Sunday, we ride the extended 31 if we plan to go anywhere. Being a Catholic family, we need to get to mass each weekend. Our options on a Sunday morning are:

• Pick up the 31 outbound at the stop near our home and ride the loop all the way back around to downtown: 50 minutes.
• Walk .75 mile and pick up the 31 inbound, arriving downtown in 15 minutes.
• Walk 2 miles to the Cathedral, bypassing the bus. If we had bikes, it would be an easy bike ride most months.

Last week, our first car-free trip to mass, we opted for the second option. It was a fairly chilly late November morning, but the walk was reasonably pleasant. With more winter gear, I think we could feasibly do this most Sundays. (We prefer to be outdoors, rather than on the bus, when possible.)

(The return trip requires a two block walk to Moore Square–although we could find a closer stop, most likely–and we get dropped off at the bus stop by our home, which is about 2 blocks away.)

One benefit to being Catholic is the vast number of Sunday and Saturday masses. On a chilly day, we can attend the noon or 2:00 mass, waiting for the weather to warm up. On a hot summer day, 7:00 am is the mass to be at.

The Sunday bus ride and walk was quite pleasant, incidentally. We both noticed some historic buildings downtown that we’d never really paid attention to when traveling by car. I decided to bring some peanuts for Malachy to feed to the squirrels next week. And Mark declared it “the best Sunday” he’d had in a long time.

My neighborhood has a Walk Score of 42:

Not Walkable: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.

I agree that public transportation is a “must” for my neighborhood; we’re not close to offices or other places where most people work. On the other hand, we’re a mere 2 miles from the Capitol building downtown! If that’s not a short walk to an urban location, I don’t know what is.

From our home, on a nice day, we could easily (3o minutes or less) walk to:

1. Sacred Heart Cathedral (2.1 miles)
2. Frank’s Pizza and Italian Restaurant (1.0 miles)
3. Food Lion, a laundromat, and a Chinese restaurant (0.3 miles)
4. Three public libraries (1.0, 1.0, 1.2 miles)
5. The North Carolina Museums of Science and History (2 miles)
6. Three small building supply and hardware stores (1.5 miles or less)
7. A meat market, an Italian market, an Oriental market, an international foods market, and a health foods market (1 - 2 miles)
8. One independent movie theater, plus a chain (2.2 miles)
9. A bowling alley (0.9 miles)
10. Several bars, including a BBQ & Seafood restaurant and an Irish pub (1.0 - 2.0 miles)
11. Border’s bookstore (2.0 miles)
12. An auto repair shop (0.5 miles - Oh, wait… I don’t need to go there anymore!)
13. A bicycle & repair shop (2.1 miles)
14. A hospital (1.2 miles)
15. A barber (0.9 miles)
16. Two colleges and a university (1.0 - 2.0 miles)
17. An animal hospital (2.2 miles)
18. Ten dentists (1.5 miles or less)

…and at this point, I’m running out of ideas of shops to look for.

So, our first bus ride in Raleigh was less than stellar.

First, it involved three different bus lines: one to get from our house to downtown, one from downtown to North Raleigh, and a connector to get over to North Hills Mall.

Riding alone or with older children, three bus rides would have offered an opportunity to peruse a magazine or two. With a toddler who had missed his nap, however, it offered an opportunity to torture the passengers who had the misfortune of choosing the same bus.

Next time, I will require a true emergency to travel by bus with a sleep deprived toddler. There was nothing we were purchasing that we couldn’t have bought online; we were just impatient to have it now.

Old habits die hard.