A little Motor City blasphemy: The less time I spend in a car, the happier I am.

Quick background: I’m a downtown resident, having moved back to Detroit 14 months ago after working for the Free Press from 2006-11. Faced with outrageous auto insurance costs plus rent and parking rates that are much higher than when my wife and I lived in downtown Detroit a few years ago, we decided in May to try life without owning a car.

The existence of the Qline and Whole Foods, neither of which was here during our first stint, makes it possible to get groceries. Zipcar and Maven, hourly rental car-sharing operations, enable us to get to appointments outside the downtown core. Uber is an option, though we rarely use it.

More:I've decided to go carless in Detroit — and it's liberating

More:Detroit's temperature breaks 99-year-old cold record

The warm-weather months were easy. We were deprived of nothing, renting a small pickup to take our bikes along on an Up North vacation. In town, it was easy to walk, bike or use a rental scooter to get a haircut, go out to dinner, whatever. Still, winter loomed as a test of our great experiment.

While this has been a mostly mild, low-snow winter so far, I can honestly say that after the Polar Vortex, I’m happier than ever about not being a car owner.

Three of my direct reports at the Free Press had cold-related car problems. Another editor emailed to tell us he'd miss a meeting because his car was stalled on Jefferson, which turned into a $2,000 repair bill. People who made it in were frazzled and frustrated.

I channeled my Nebraska boyhood, layered up and walked a few blocks at a time in subzero weather for a couple days. On the coldest day of the year, I had a dental appointment at Renaissance Center and the People Mover apparently was frozen. But, hey, the sun was out. Maybe if I’d needed to be numbed up, it wouldn’t have required novocaine.

In any case, my experience was nothing like the time, cost and frustration that my motoring colleagues experienced. When the deep freeze broke, coworkers complained about potholes on I-75, sort of an early spring blossom here in Michigan.

I don’t worry about pothole repair bills. I don’t buy gas. I don’t pay for car insurance or parking.

$750 a month in savings

In all, from June 1-Dec. 31, our transportation costs averaged $249 a month. Most of it has been Zipcar and Maven rentals, which we tend to do about six times a month for errands or to visit suburban friends. Our credit card statements show we used Uber four times.

(This doesn’t count things like renting a car in Austin, Texas, where we flew for Christmas, because that’s a cost we would have incurred even if we had our own car. It does count transportation to and from the airport, even though we would have either paid for that or for parking.)

Our savings, conservatively, are $750 a month.

For that tradeoff, my wife and I are willing to deal with the periodic inconvenience of the Qline’s unreliability.

I recognize that I’m fortunate to have the means to make this choice — that too many Detroiters can’t afford to live close enough to work and needed services to get around without relying on our time-consuming and otherwise shaky transit system.

This metro area badly needs better mass transit as an investment and a way to spread Detroit’s resurgence more widely through the city. And it needs affordable rental units near employment centers.

The societal presumption that we must have our own cars to get around is akin to being frogs in water that's heating to a boil. We don't notice how it's harming us.

Having hopped out of the pot, I can assure you that car ownership is not a ticket to liberation. I drove plenty of crappy cars in college and early adulthood — my orange Ford Maverick that I replaced with an oxidized reddish AMC Hornet sputter to mind — and know well that the burdens and costs from which I’m now freed fall most heavily on the poor, who can’t afford reliable vehicles.

Generating wealth

Detroit’s automakers understand that they must change. As much as some consumers are shifting to SUVs over sedans, others are ditching their own wheels altogether.

Carmakers are looking at spending billions to move toward a world of autonomous car sharing versus costly, street-clogging, polluting individual car ownership.

More:How General Motors is leading the race for self-driving cars

More:Walmart, Ford Motor team up to test driverless delivery technology

The auto industry of the past century generated tremendous wealth for Michigan and the nation. Our region's overdependence on it also resulted in great pain.

To envision a future of fewer cars is not to devalue the importance of the industry to our economy or to the families who count on its paychecks. Wealth does not come from clinging to the status quo. Henry Ford understood this.

Disruptive innovation can move us away from being the Motor City built for cars to being Mobility City built for people. I'm sure this isn't brain freeze.

Contact Randy Essex at REssex@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@randyessex. Read more on autos and sign up for our autos newsletter.