CLEVELAND, Ohio - From the Shoreway on the West Side to the Inner Belt Bridge, Cleveland, to many, is a city of highways.

Criss-crossing freeways bring suburbanites downtown and city dwellers to the burbs. Tree-lined boulevards lead families to the park and friends to the beach.

Day in and day out, steel boxes fill the roads and bridges of Cuyahoga County, taking their occupants to work, to school, to the store.

But that's not the reality for all Clevelanders.

Either by choice or by circumstance, a number of residents are living a car-free lifestyle. For some, the cost of having a car is just too high to justify or afford. To others, the personal automobile is an inefficient mode of transportation that threatens the environment.

In the Cleveland metropolitan area, 5.8 percent of people bike, walk or take public transit to work, according to census data. Likewise, 3.9 percent of Cleveland households do not own a car, while another 22.7 percent only have one car.

USA Today this year ranked Cleveland as the best U.S. city in which to be car-free. The ranking, which was presented as a top 10 list, was designed as a guide for visitors looking to forgo renting cars while traveling.

However, being car-free in Cleveland as a resident is a different experience than that of a tourist.

When it comes to the day-to-day reality of living, working and playing in Cuyahoga County, it can be a challenge to get around without a personal vehicle.

Mary Pearson, who lives in the eastern suburbs of the city, has to leave two hours before any appointment to make sure she can get there in time.

"It's a little difficult when you have to be somewhere at a certain time," Pearson said. "I need the bus."

Pearson, who has been retired for nearly three years, relies entirely on public transit to get from place to place. The cost of a car is too prohibitive, not something she can afford on her fixed income.

"Between rent and food, I don't have enough," she said. "That's why I catch the bus."

But living without a car has become increasingly hard for Pearson, who has used public transit her entire life, as the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority reduces its footprint. Buses she used to rely on for night and weekend service no longer are available.

When she was still working for a cleaning service, Pearson often got stranded overnight at a gym she cleaned because the buses stopped running after 12:30 a.m.

"I couldn't get out of there. No one could come get me. So, I was stuck," Pearson said. "I needed my job, so I slept there all night long."

While she no longer has to spend nights at the gym, Pearson still finds herself at the whim of the public transit system. She sometimes walks 30 minutes to the grocery store instead of waiting on a bus because the frequency is too low and buses can be unreliable.

Making it work

Michael Walk, an associate research scientist for the Transit Mobility Program at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, characterizes a viable public transit system as one that reaches as many parts of the city as possible, runs as many hours of the day as possible and runs as frequently as possible.

"It has to run where you need it when you need it as often as you need it," Walk said. "It can make being carless a true option...to serve people without cars."

But, even a great public transit system can't operate in a vacuum. To create a community in which a personal car isn't necessary, different transportation options need to exist in harmony.

"It's usually difficult for transit to be the only thing that a person without a car uses. There usually have to be other options in addition to transit to kind of complete the portfolio," Walk said.

At the minimum, Walk explained, there needs to be a basic pedestrian infrastructure. That means, sidewalks and well-lit, short paths to public transit. On top of that, there should be a bike infrastructure - one with dedicated bike lanes separated from traffic - as well as other mobility options, like transportation network companies (think: Lyft and Uber), taxis and car sharing services.

"At least within your city if you can walk the short trips, take transit for the longer trips and use another alternative like an Uber, a Lyft or a car share for those special needs, then usually you can do it; you can be car free," Walk said.

Jeff Sleasman, who lives and works downtown, has been car-free in Cleveland for two years. And, before that, he lived without a car in Washington, D.C. and in Barcelona.

"It's obviously much easier to get around in both without a car. Public transit is valued more and funded more," said Sleasman. "...The Cleveland area also hasn't done itself any favors by sprawling so much even as the population stagnates. The result is a dependence on cars, and that dependence makes even downtown stakeholders shy away from building for people instead of cars."

Sleasman turns to public transit first, but supplements that service with ridesharing trips, car sharing and rental cars.

"There's no real disadvantage to me...I have plenty of access to a car. Waiting a couple minutes for a Lyft is easy. People think those are expensive options, but not when you're saving over $8,500 a year by not owning a car!" said Sleasman, who chose the car-free lifestyle based on the economic advantages.

Making the choice

RTA estimates that about 35 percent to 40 percent of its riders are what it terms "choice riders" - those who could afford to take a car but choose to use public transit instead.

And it is in those riders that Steve Bitto, executive director of marketing and communications for RTA, sees an opportunity for RTA to grow its ridership.

"If we're going to increase ridership, first and foremost, we have to keep what we have," Bitto said. "If we're going to grow ridership - how do you grow ridership? - you have to get them out of cars and onto trains."

To show the value of transit, RTA has been going into companies throughout Cleveland and creating individualized ridership plans for employees, giving employees two five-day transit passes and pairing them with a bus buddy - someone to whom they can direct any questions about transit.

"We're there to reduce the anxiety of getting on a bus for the first time," Bitto said.

To target young professionals, RTA has sponsored a number of millennial-geared events, like Edgewater Live and Brite Winter, and launched social media campaigns like #IGoRTA to encourage riders to take selfies during their transit trips.

"We're trying to get them out of their car and onto the train," Bitto said.

Tom Horsman, an employee and graduate student at Cleveland State University, first gave up his car in 2010 while living in Washington, D.C. When he moved back to Cleveland in 2014, he decided to maintain the car-free lifestyle.

"It's much more of a challenge. We don't have as robust of a transit system," said Horsman, whose primary mode of transportation is his bicycle.

When he first moved back, Horsman lived in North Collinwood and struggled to get downtown in the evenings or weekends. Now that he lives and works downtown, navigating the city without a car is much easier.

"Sometimes, I will lament how much easier it would be, but all in all, I think the benefits outweigh the costs," said Horsman, who likes how active his lifestyle has become.

Riding it out

But using transit isn't getting any easier in Cleveland.

RTA in August cut service by 3 percent and raised fares to shore up a $7 million hole in its budget. And the system potentially faces even deeper cuts next year as it prepares to lose a large chunk of its sales tax funding.

Yet, while there are struggles with being car-free in Cleveland, the problems here are not isolated to Cleveland, according to RTA CEO Joe Calabrese.

Across the country - and especially the state - transit agencies face funding dilemmas very similar to RTA's, he said.

"If your goal is to be carless, you're much better off being in Cleveland than in any other city in the state," Calabrese said.

And while it may not seem easy to those who have always relied on cars, it is doable, if you make the effort.

"If you don't have a car, you just do what you need to do," said Pearl Smith of Cleveland.

Smith and her husband have one car, and she doesn't drive, instead mostly using the Blue and Green Lines to get her to work a few stops away.

Smith has used public transit her entire life, before RTA existed and when the Cleveland Transit System still operated. At times, she and her husband have been able to afford a car, and at other times they haven't.

"People have to realize the single-occupancy vehicle is not the city's only way to get around," the Transit Mobility Program's Walk said.