What this is about

So, in 2023, I wanted to make a concerted effort to rewind my car-dependence – not all the way back to my carless days, but at least to a car-light lifestyle. To hold myself accountable, I’ve recorded every trip I make by any mode, with the objective of making at least 50% of my trips by any mode other than driving a car. In practice, for me, that usually means riding my bicycle; but, since the point of this is to reduce car trips, not maximize miles on the bike, I’m counting walking and transit toward that goal as well.

Now that the first quarter of 2023 is in the books, I wanted to take a first look at the data and see whether I’m meeting the mark I set out for, and what sorts of trips I’ve been able to do without the car.

Trips and miles: the basic statistics

The first thing to note in Q1 is that I comfortably met my goal of 50% of trips by non-driving modes. In fact, I was closer to about 65% non-driving in the first quarter of 2023. This has me feeling good about succeeding in my original goal, but it’s worth noting that I expect this to get considerably harder as the year goes on. January, February, and March are some of the best months to be riding a bike in southern Arizona. Once temperatures rise in the summer, there will be only a few hours of the day when riding a bike will be practical, and when the monsoon storms come in late summer the roads may be unsafe or impassable on a bike, somewhat unpredictably. So I’ve been playing on easy mode so far.

By distance

First, let’s take a look at the distribution of trips by distance.

Unsurprisingly, the trips I’ve been most successful at replacing have been the shorter ones, with the majority of trips under 8 miles being successfully replaced.

By purpose and destination

When recording the data, I recorded one or more “purposes” for the trip. For the following graph, I pulled out the first purpose recorded for each trip as the primary purpose, and grouped the trips by purpose and mode. It’s worth noting here that I work from home, which is why there’s no “commuting” or “work” purpose here.

I work out at a park less than a mile from home, and biking to these workouts has clearly helped me achieve my baseline trip goals. When I used to drive to this park, I was able to bring weights with me, but with some creativity I’ve been able to devise workouts that don’t need the weights.

Outside of this, we can also see that I’ve been most successful at replacing social and leisure activities with bike trips. Although I have a rear rack and a decent cargo bag for my bike, I’ve still been defaulting to driving for my grocery and shopping trips – definitely an area I could improve on.

It’s interesting to me to see that trips with two destinations are dominated by car trips, but once we get up to three destinations it flips back. In retrospect, I made a conscious effort to reduce car trips by doubling up on destinations whenever I could. In particular, I tried to take the shortest trips and add them as destinations into a longer trip. This partly explains the high density of two-destination trips by car. As for the three-destination trips, this is a small sample size but there is a little bit of a pattern to be seen. The bike trips with three destinations were typically situations where I went downtown and stopped at a coffee shop before going to shop at a different location. More generally, if I go downtown, I’m likely to visit several places in close proximity to one another, and for other reasons I rarely drive when I’m going downtown.

Total mileage

Finally, I’d like to take a look at my total miles by car and everything else, to get a sense of what fraction of miles traveled I’ve managed to replace.

Although I hoped to make at least 50% of my trips by car, I had no expectations that this would correspond to 50% of miles traveled by car. Of course, I’m more likely to select an alternative mode on a shorter trip. However, it turns out that I came fairly close to 50%! The cumulative miles traveled by car and by alternative modes track one another fairly well.

What Q2 holds

In the next quarter of 2022, I’ll be away from home for a while, which changes the color of this project a bit. I expect I’ll rely more heavily on walking, since for much of this time I won’t have my bike available. I’ll also probably try to make more trips via transit.

When I do return to Tucson, I’ll be coming back into the hottest part of the year. I’ll have to plan my trips more carefully, because only the early mornings will be comfortable for cycling. At the same time, I would like to get more of my errands, especially grocery shopping, done via bike, taking advantage of some of the cargo bags I have sitting around. We’ll see if my ambitions can survive the heat.