Water drips from my helmet as I pedal up Rollingwood Drive. It wasn’t raining when I left my apartment near South Lamar Boulevard and Manchaca Road half an hour ago, but since then, the fog has thickened and cohered into droplets that roll down my jacket. As I glide under dripping oak trees and past million-dollar homes, I relax into the pace of my pedal stroke, enjoying the relative hush on this residential street. Now that my body has warmed up, I start to see the beauty of this morning in mid-January—the fresh air, the glistening green trees, the enveloping fog. Maybe, I think, giving up my car wasn’t such a terrible idea after all.

I did not feel this same inner peace on Jan. 2, the first day of my experiment to go without a car for a month. Rather, when I woke up to 35-degree rain, I thought: I am an idiot. I had a perfectly functioning car—a 2010 Honda Civic that got me where I needed to go and did so with relatively good gas mileage. Why give that up?

The answer was actually pretty simple. I didn’t want to be driving. I wanted to escape the stress of traffic, the environmental cost, and the financial expense. I’d moved from a place where I rarely drove to one where I clocked at least an hour behind the wheel most days. The difference in my quality of life was palpable. In 1974, Yacov Zahavi, an Israeli economist working for the World Bank, introduced the idea of a “travel-time budget,” the fraction of each day that we are willing to devote to moving around. Whether in a rural village or burgeoning metropolis, throughout human history, the daily round-trip commute of any particular person has averaged out to 1.1 hours.

Cities grew like tree rings as we changed how we got from place to place: We traveled farther but faster—on horseback, then in chariot and train and, eventually, by car—and cities grew, but this hour travel-time budget remained constant. In his book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), journalist Tom Vanderbilt writes, “Higher speeds enable life to be lived at a scale in which time is more important than distance … As societies, we have gradually accepted faster and faster speeds as a necessary part of a life of increasing distances.” The modern American city manifests this bargain of increasing distances by engineering our lives to go at 70 mph. And even though we’ve almost completely traded our feet for freeways, the one-hour rule still applies: The average round-trip commute for an American worker in 2018 was 52.2 minutes.

But transportation experts say we are at an inflection point in thinking about how we move around our cities. From driverless cars to electric scooters and bikes, new technology offers, for the first time since the Model-T, an opportunity to redefine our time-travel budgets. During my carless month, the City of Austin was finalizing a draft of the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan, a citywide multimodal transportation plan aimed at changing the ways Austinites move around the city by 2039. Today, 74 percent of Austinites drive alone to work, with just 4 percent of people relying on transit to get to their jobs. The city’s goal is to quadruple that number by 2039, with 16 percent of residents taking transit to work and 4 percent biking (compared to the 1.3 percent who biked between 2013 and 2017). To manage congestion even as the city’s population doubles over the next two decades, the plan outlines a future when only half of Austinites drive to work alone.

There is good reason to want to redefine how we move around our cities. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States—cars and trucks alone account for nearly one-fifth of our emissions. For every gallon of gas your car guzzles, 24 pounds of carbon and other greenhouse gases are emitted. Those emissions do more than harm the environment. A 2013 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found 53,000 Americans die prematurely every year because of vehicle pollution. Cars are killing us in more acute ways, too. According to the National Safety Council, car crashes are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 1 and 39. Every year in the U.S., 40,000 people die on roads and highways. Put another way: If you drive an average of 15,000 miles per year and spend a total of 50 years driving, then there is a one in 100 chance that you will die in a fatal car crash.

And yet, we drive. We are social creatures and we are mobile creatures and every day, we decide that the benefit of mobility—the freedom of the freeway that takes us to our jobs and friends and families—is worth its cost. We drive because we’ve decided that wherever we are going is worth the risk of getting there.

I wanted to see if there was another way to get where I was going.

There were a few challenges to contend with first. There is no bus line that passes Austin Monthly’s office, which is located on South Capital of Texas Highway just south of Lost Creek Boulevard. The closest Capital Metro bus stop is at Walsh Tarleton near Barton Creek Square, 2.5 miles from the office along a freeway with no sidewalk. Although Lycra-clad people cycle on the shoulder of 360, I was not interested in biking alongside cars traveling 70 mph.

So, I sign up for Lyft’s new All-Access Plan—“one of Lyft’s first steps toward making car ownership optional,” writes Aaron Fox, the general manager for Lyft Austin, in an email. For $299, members get 30 rides valued up to $15 and 5 percent off any additional rides. Thirty rides likely won’t be enough to get me around all month, but it’s a good start.

I park my car and relinquish my identity as a driver and become, instead, a rider. The first Monday in January, I ride home from work with Ted, a middle-aged man wearing Longhorn burnt orange. We talk about his daughters, both in their 20s, and the Texas State Legislature, which was about to start its 86th session. Another day, I meet Patrick, who says he logged more than 3 million miles in his former life as a long-distance trucker. Patrick does not think highly of Austin drivers. “People stop for no reason,” he says.

“No matter where in the city I start driving, I always eventually end up downtown,” says Dan from Pflugerville. “It really is the heart of the city.” A different Dan recently started his own acupuncture business and recommends an herbal tincture for my crushing cedar fever. The day after Juan Guaidó declares himself the president of Venezuela, I ride with a man who’d left his home outside Caracas with his wife and children four years ago. He loves living in Austin, but his life is uncertain—he’s still waiting for his asylum application to be processed.

Although I have given up my car, it turns out that I still mostly get around in a car. The irony does not escape me. I take Lyft to work because the bus does not pass my office, but multiple studies show that ridesharing platforms like Lyft and Uber contribute to a measurable decline in public transit ridership, thus limiting the capacity of an agency like Capital Metro to expand its bus network. Lyft’s All-Access Plan “is intended to complement public transportation,” writes Fox, but a 2019 study of 22 U.S. cities found that for every year rideshare companies operate in a city, bus ridership can be expected to decrease by 1.7 percent. Although Capital Metro’s ridership increased in 2018 after it overhauled half of its bus lines, the trend is inescapable—in city after city, ridesharing services remove people from shared public transportation and put them in mostly unshared private vehicles. Those vehicles, in turn, exacerbate congestion for bus riders and drivers alike: In 2018, a study by the San Francisco Transportation Authority found that a quarter of all traffic delays were attributable to Uber and Lyft cars.

Despite this reality, I enjoy my Lyft rides—I love meeting a new person every morning and each afternoon, catching glimpses of the many lives contained in this city. As the month progresses, I begin figuring out more modes of transportation: riding my bike or taking the bus for mid-range distances, walking to my neighborhood grocery store, carpooling with friends. But as my schedule grows busier, with more meetings around town, it becomes more difficult to arrange the Lyft-bus-bike puzzle required to get myself where I need to be. I am a punctual person, a consummate planner, and it turns out that giving up my car means giving up a whole lot of control. One day, I take a Lyft home from work, hustle my dog along on a brisk walk, and rush to catch a bus that was scheduled to stop near my apartment at 5:38 p.m. Instead, it arrives at 5:50 p.m., hits gridlocked traffic on Cesar Chavez, and I arrive to Austin City Hall at 6:30 p.m., at which point the 6 o’clock meeting I was trying to attend has adjourned. So, I walk around the block and take the bus back home.

“You always have to be early because you know you’re going to end up being late,” says Casey Barks, when I tell him and his wife, Fiona Siao, about my downtown adventure over beers the following evening. “My boss is really cool, but if he asked, why were you late to that meeting? And I said, ‘The bus didn’t come.’ That would not go over,” he says. “I have to make sure I’m on the bus before that one. We’re always early to everything.”

Barks and Siao have been carless for more than a decade, having moved to Austin from San Francisco by way of Seattle. When they moved to Texas, they considered getting a car, but they loved their carless lifestyle—and Siao, who is Taiwanese, didn’t know how to drive. In Taiwan, “when we grew up, we learned how to ride a bike, use a scooter, or take public transportation,” she says. When she moved to San Francisco in 2011, she concluded the same thing that Barks had—in a place with limited parking, terrible traffic, and reliable transit, a car would only be a liability.

Barks usually drives a Car2Go to his job as the director of communications at Fairmont Austin. Every month, he tallies up how much he and Siao spend on transportation. In December, he spent $350, but says $300 is more typical. Siao usually spends less—she usually takes a rideshare to her job at Nordstrom at Barton Creek Square and the bus home. “There are a lot of invisible costs to driving,” Siao says. “You didn’t actually spend from your wallet, but you are paying without even knowing it. I really think not driving has improved our quality of life. You can listen to music or meditate. You can close your eyes and not think about anything.”

Car ownership comes with many visible costs, too. According to AAA, in 2018 the average cost to own a new car and drive 15,000 miles a year was $8,849, or about $737 a month. That number includes the cost of fuel, maintenance, repairs, insurance, license, and registration, but not monthly car payments, which tack on another $500 a month for the average driver.

Siao says she sometimes wishes it was easier to get up to the Domain—she loves shopping at Zara. “But not having a car makes me think about what I really need and what I don’t need,” she says. “We really had to figure out what kind of lifestyle we wanted, and what is important to our life.”

In 2012, Barks and Siao had been dating for four months when they went camping together, getting to their campsite by bus. On the second day, a huge storm rolled in. “It was a Sunday, so there’s no bus coming,” Barks says. “There was this moment of, sh*t, I’ve got to find shelter.” He recalled that there were guest cottages down the road, so they took a cab, arriving just as the storm hit. When the power went out, they walked to a brewery across the street and drank beer and ate grilled oysters in candle-lit darkness. “That was the moment we fell in love,” Barks says. “If we had a car, we would have just gone back to the city,” Siao says. Eventually, the weather cleared, and they rode the bus back to the city. But the adventure had cemented something for them. “When you become dependent on a car, you become reliant on the simplicity and ease of it, to the point that it makes things boring,” Barks says. Three years later, they went back to that same brewery—this time, to get married.

On the morning of Jan. 15, I consider walking 2.3 miles to the MOD Bikes store on South First Street, but instead I download the Lime electronic scooter app, strap on my bike helmet, and brace myself for a wobbly trip. Whatever you think of e-scooters, they are undeniably altering our city streets—according to Lime, 275,000 people in Austin have ridden a Lime scooter in the past year. Aaron Naparstek, the cohost of the podcast “The War on Cars,” describes e-scooters and other personal electric vehicles as “the little furry mammalian creatures that are popping up around the dinosaurs that are cars.” Although today’s e-scooters are unlikely to survive many generations of urban natural selection, the electrification of personal vehicles like bikes and scooters represents an evolutionary change in transportation, perhaps the first credible challenge to the car’s claim on mobility.

“When I first got exposed to electric bikes, I discovered a whole new world,” says Dor Falu Korngold, the co-founder of MOD Bikes, when I arrive a quick 15 minutes later. He’s offered to loan me one of the Austin-based company’s e-bikes for the last half of my carless month. “You can’t understand exactly how functional the thing is, everything you can do with it, until you try it,” he says. Eight years ago, Korngold was working in a bicycle store in Herzliya, Israel, where he grew up, when he took apart an old beach cruiser and rebuilt it with a motor. He’d been a lifelong tinkerer, building electric go-carts and skateboards, but he soon became obsessed with electric bikes. In 2016, he met an investor and decided to turn his hobby into a business, moving to Austin to help start MOD Bikes.

Today, the company designs, manufacturers, and imports e-bikes to sell out of its South First store. Every bike—which range in price from $1,790 to $3,500—comes with free lifetime maintenance. (Austin Energy also offers up to $400 in rebates for e-bikes.) “It’s not just a bike, it’s not just for fun,” Korngold says. “It’s a personal vehicle.” Bikes can travel 30 to 60 miles on a single charge, depending on the model. Some bikes have a throttle, which powers the bike without pedaling. The City bike is foldable; the Berlin model, which I’ll be riding, looks a lot like a traditional commuter bike save for the fact that there’s a battery pack on the down tube, which powers the bike’s pedal assist. Getting around the city on a bike is “about changing something in your mind,” Korngold says. “It’s not going to be the same route you’re riding with your car. It’s going to be a different route, but it’s going to be a lot more exciting. You can discover cool places you’re never going to see in your car.”

A few minutes later, I point my MOD Bike down South Fifth, bumping up the pedal-assist from level 1 to 3. It is magic. It feels like every pedal stroke carries me twice as far as I’d go on my own. I’d biked essentially the same route on my non-electric commuter bike the night before and arrived home so wiped out that I had to eat a hunk of cheese before I could muster the energy to shower. Now, I devour hills like cotton candy. I kick the pedal assist up to level 5 and the bike literally kicks back, charging forward as I continue my same steady pedal stroke. It is exhilarating. By the time I cross Oltorf—powering across the incline of the intersection without breaking a sweat—I wonder: Why aren’t we all riding e-bikes?

My enthusiasm dampens a few days later, on a 40-degree morning when I climb on my e-bike to head downtown for a meeting. I’d charged the bike’s removable battery the evening before, locking it into place before I hit the road. Within a few minutes, as my legs fatigue and breath quickens, I realize that the pedal assist has not kicked in. I get off the bike, take the battery out, and reinstall it. No luck. I stare at the bike, stumped. I once took apart and rebuilt an entire mountain bike—I can handle basic bike repair. This bike, however, defies my best tinker abilities. By now, I’m running late to my meeting, so I climb back on the bike and power my way downtown, legs burning from the deadweight of the battery. By the time I arrive, I am 15 minutes late and somehow both drenched in sweat and freezing. Afterward, I pedal over to the MOD Bikes store and Korngold easily swaps out my bike with a new loaner and I’m on my way. Still, I’m frustrated to be so far behind on my day. I remind myself that cars break down, too, often much more spectacularly—a month earlier, smoke had begun pouring out of the hood of my car as I drove it down South Congress, so … at least the bike wasn’t smoking.

As I ride around town, I start to see how the city is stitched together: How this neighborhood becomes that neighborhood, across a road or under a freeway or around that corner. The air shifts—colors change, smells switch—and suddenly, you are in a different part of town. There is an intimacy to this way of seeing streets, a granularity to my travels. Being carless exposes me to the city in a much deeper way than I’d imagined possible. Mostly this exposure is a delight. Sometimes it is not.

Almost every time I walk to the gym along Manchaca Road, a car whizzes past and the driver honks at me. (Please, men of Austin, tell me: To what end?) One afternoon on the way home from work, my Lyft driver stares at me in the rearview mirror, darting his eyes back to the road every time I catch him doing it. I don’t feel unsafe, just uncomfortable. But it is enough to make me miss the privacy and protection of my own car. One evening as I pedal my commuter bike to a friend’s place off Barton Springs Road, a driver trying to turn right rolls down her window to yell at me because my headlight is shining in her eyes. (Well, excuse me!)

On a Sunday in late January, I decide to take the bus to my sister’s house in Northwest Austin. I drive up most weekends to see my nieces, but now three weeks have passed without a visit from Aunt Megan. The No. 3 Burnet/Manchaca bus route stops near my apartment and travels within walking distance of their home, 15 miles away, so I pack a snack and prepare for a cross-town adventure. Traffic is blessedly light on a Sunday, so before I know it, we’re crossing Lady Bird Lake, trundling through downtown and up the Drag. Usually I avoid this area in my car; now, I love watching scenes flash across a bus window: A pair of young women taking a selfie in front of the “Jeremiah the Innocent” mural on 21st Street; a group of young men in sweatpants spilling out of Kerbey Lane Cafe. By the time we pass the H-E-B on North Burnet in Allandale, every person that was on the bus when I boarded has gotten off, including the driver, who swapped out at a stop north of campus, and a new crop of riders has filtered on.

Usually, when I drive to my sister’s, I simply want to arrive. Driving becomes the in-between time I must suffer through in order to access people I love—it is the placeless means to a meaningful place. But as my month approaches its end, I realize that the only way to remain sane while biking 7.1 miles to work or taking a bus 15 miles across a city is to view the journey as its own experience, independent of the destination. Of course, this mind-set only comes with the luxury of time and flexibility—of taking the bus on a Sunday without a timecard to punch. Despite the high cost of car ownership, in a city designed to accommodate the auto, not having a car is perhaps the only thing costlier. A recent study in the Journal of Planning Education and Research found that individuals and families who own a car earn more than three times as much as those who do not. That isn’t to say that not having a car makes you poor; it simply suggests that, without reliable public transportation, car ownership remains the most efficient way to access income.

When I finally get off the bus just west of the Domain and walk to my sister’s house, I feel pleasantly untethered, unweighted by the anchor of a car—the point to which you must always return.

And return I do. On the morning of Feb. 2, I slide into the driver’s seat of my hibernating Honda Civic and turn the key in the ignition. KUT slides seamlessly on the radio, as if it had been playing all along. By the time I merge onto Mopac—heading north again for my niece’s birthday party—I have forgotten to feel weird about being behind the wheel.

A few hours later, on my way home, I decide to take 360 instead of Mopac. I stop at a red light at Westbank Drive, which is where my 7.1-mile bike commute spit me out onto the highway, 100 yards from our office. The intersection looks different from within my car—it seems so distant, as I sit with my foot on the brake, NPR on the radio, the heat purring. For a moment, I miss the feeling of gliding through this intersection on a bike, gaining speed as I pass cars queued outside Westlake High School, soaring down Rollingwood and sliding under Mopac, pedaling through the open green expanse of Zilker Park into Barton Hills and across Lamar and along Manchaca. I’m sad to leave behind the daily intimacies I found by taking the modes less traveled, my varied journeys threading together this place in a new way. Although I am relieved to be back in my car—astonished by the ease of it—I know I’ll be back on my bike and back in the bus soon enough.

After a minute, the light turns green and my foot moves instinctively to the gas pedal.