Car-free Australia

What if it's actually the houses?

I spent the last six months in Australia without a car, looking to do some travel, home repairs, and a little blogging about life without a car.

That's all come to an end.

The good news is that traveling by foot, bicycle, and using just public transport and rideshare is pretty comfortable in Australia.

The problem is that the Australian lifestyle requires more trips than can be done with the above.

It's fairly easy to live car-free for social engagements, but not when you add in home maintenance.

Australia's houses are big. They have also gotten bigger, with less people in them. That means bigger spaces for each of us and more time spent managing them.

The larger our spaces are, the more we need to run around finding bits with which to fill them or fix them.

It's difficult to cart materials on the bus. And if you did, you wouldn't have time to catch up with people.

Being space rich and consequently time poor pushes you to get a car. This necessitates more space (in which to park said car), as well as extra time and money for auto maintenance.

At an individual level, it's no big deal. In aggregate, this means more sprawl, longer distances, and greater reliance on cars.

My Tokyo home is at most an eighth the size of my Adelaide property. Its mental, time, and financial footprint is correspondingly smaller.

The Australian 'cost-of-living crisis' is in part a 'cost-of-living-large crisis'. It's not entirely individual choice. Minimum lot sizes, a mixed history with higher-density housing, and societal expectations means that big homes and therefore cars will be around for some time.

As an aside, I think that the debate about rental standards misses the issue that houses are too big for tenants and landlords to maintain.

Even with a car, Australian houses are borderline unmanageable.

Going back for the first time since COVID, I saw how my aging parents and relatives struggled to maintain their gigantic (by Japanese standards) suburban estates. Their time was eaten up by gardening, cleaning, repairs, and trying to get tradespeople, all the while moving slower as time passed.

To keep her garden alive, my widowed aunt needs weekly trips to the garden centre to fill up her SUV, a road-tank with an insurance premium bigger than my annual public transport spend. Whether she likes gardening doesn't matter. Dropping the ball for even a week means her manicured patch turns into a nightmare of scrub.

Her government funded care money is spent on home care rather than health care.

That, I realised, would be me in twenty years' time unless something changed.

So I sold.

I decluttered an entire house, including the house. Marie Kondo ain't got nothing on me.

Bucking convention to willingly become technically homeless still makes me nervous, although I can now cry into a modest pile of money. 

It was a quick sale. There are still plenty of buyers for the Australian dream. 

I hope they know they are also buying spiralling carrying costs and the need to run a car.

It's not that I became 'house-free' just to become 'car-free'.

I just got free.