carolyn kellogg

Yesterday I sold my Honda. It was a great little grad school car: didn’t break down with any costly repairs, could park anywhere, drove me all around the country last summer. But as much as I appreciated it, I never became too attached; it was my sister’s first, and I only had it for two years.

Which might be why I am now going carless.

I can ride a bike. Lexington, Kentucky, like Paris, has a low-cost bike rental program for the center of the city. Writer Christopher Rowe is its wrangler — today he’s in the Lexington Herald-Leader. I have my own bike (like this), which I’ve made sort of roadworthy. But the brakes are wobbly. We’ll see.

Luckily in LA, I can take the Metrorail. I love subways — I can read on them. Read! I can’t read on a bus or in a car, but subways and trains, I’m good. I read Cloud Atlas on a train from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC. A big chunk of Underworld while stuck on a stalled train in Connecticut. So many New Yorkers while commuting from Williamsburg to Midtown in NYC. I read Naked on the NY subway and got a little too much attention. And now I’ll get to bust out stuff to read on the LA Metro; better go to Pasadena once in a while just to have a long enough ride to really make some progress.

I was planning to sign up with Zipcar to augment my new Metro/reading habit — but when they bought rival Flexcar, they shut down all but two Los Angeles locations (inconveniently at USC and UCLA). In Pittsburgh, a city of less than 350,000, there are 34 Zipcars. Here I thought carsharing was supposed to be an alternative transportation source for environmentally-inclined urbanites; no, it’s just car rental for college students. Whatevs.

Then there’s my skateboard. Am I too old to ride a skateboard? When I fall down and go boom, will I break something? Will it please stop raining so I can bust it out and not freeze up the trucks?