Folding the pizza: an experiment in carless thinking

How did she do it? I don't know whether she folded them or not, but a Bay Area woman last week transported three unboxed pizzas on the back of her bike, reporting that they were delivered safely and promptly eaten. Her story is one of a growing collection from people taking the Car-Free Challenge at www.transformca.org and posting feedback about staying out of the car as much as possible during June. What strikes me is how much this Car-Free Challenge forces us to think creatively.

It also forces us to acknowledge (begrudgingly or otherwise) those who walked away from their cars a long time ago, decades even. Car-free folks can be irritatingly (yet understandably) smug about having it all figured out. Jennie Schultz, for example, has been car-free for a year.

"It's fantastic," says Schultz, who uses biking, walking and public transportation to get to and from her home on the west side of Santa Rosa. "The main thing is, I don't have to sit in traffic all day."

Don't rub it in. I can't abandon my auto altogether just yet. But I can make a difference by doing even a little; any attempt to reduce mileage this month will help cut traffic, clear the air and provide the personal stories being collected by a regional group called Transform (formerly known as TALC, the Transportation and Land Use Coalition). Transform advocates for walkable, bikable communities. I'd like to live in one of those communities right now.

My city is not very bike- or walk-friendly. The only route to my son's school in north Napa is an obstacle course that includes a freeway frontage road with irregular offerings of sidewalk, a potholed gravel and hard dirt parking lot, and two major boulevard intersections; five miles of biking this alongside an eight-year-old daydreamer in heavy morning traffic is not my idea of fun. So I typically drive my son to school. But on bike-to-school day last month, we made the ride for the first time and had so much fun (endorphins rock) that now we ride our bikes whenever we can leave the house early enough. Still, I'd prefer we had a safe path across town. And Transform wants us to have that.

 "We advocate at regional, state and national levels, and right now we're trying to put a face on some of the agendas we're pushing," says Andréa Tyler, who does outreach and development for Transform. "This is really about the stories." The Car-Free Challenge includes funny blog postings, especially from a participant plotting to bike her pet chickens around in panniers. But along with the laughs are community-building and fundraising components to the challenge, outlined on the website.