What was it like in the 80s

My mother didn't get a driver's license until she had to start commuting to work when I turned 4. She had a job downtown, which was just three or four miles away, but her start time was 6 AM and buses along Beverly did not run frequently at that time of the day. So, my parents bought a second car.

Before then, we lived in a section of Hollywood that has stubbornly remained ungentrified. My mother walked us often. She has lived in the US for 30 years but has never, ever ridden mass transit by herself. She doesn't understand why I do it voluntarily. She has her own reasons for not venturing on her own with children on transit - money may have had something to do with it (we were poor, and taking discretionary trips with children costs money). The stigma might have also had something to do with it.

When we moved to our new house when I turned 4, we had so many more things within walking distance. A library! Laundromats! A bodega!

But still we drove. The four blocks to school. The half mile to the laundromat. The mile to the local Vons. Sometimes we stopped at the bodega two blocks away if we were trip-chaining.

It's actually an embarrassment of riches.

My sister attests that we drove because of the perceived danger of the neighborhood, but a backtracking of crime statistics for the census tracts suggests we were more likely to get hit by a car than get mugged or be a victim of a violent crime.

When I turned seven, my parents bought me and my sister our first bike. It was on sale and we saw the flyer in Toys R Us. We had to venture to the Valley to buy it because big box retail chains like Toys R Us operated only in the suburbs. I took to riding very quickly and soon got my own bike, a Huffy, from Target along with a bike lock. I rode everywhere within the census tract: the library; school; friends houses. Sometimes I just rode around the block on the sidewalk, and then the street, over and over again. A few years later, the RTD began putting bike racks on buses. I'd find change to go places (although the bus driver had to help me lift my bike onto the rack.)

I had no idea how good I had it until we moved to the Valley ourselves. It was awful. We lived off a corridor with infrequent service. The blocks were long megablocks, and there weren't that many neighborhood serving retail establishments I was willing to venture into. And about six months after we moved in, my mother totaled one of our cars. They worked in the City, and this was before the opening of the Metro Red Line and Orange Line Bikeway, so this was very difficult. (Now my mom would have had to take the train into downtown and I would've ridden my Huffy to school via the Orange Line Bikeway.)

When I researched colleges, I sought to live in a walkable college town. I wasn't keen on Mills - it was a moat surrounded by busy thoroughfares. Claremont seemed really sleepy. Northampton, MA was the perfect fit for me. I biked, walked, and rode a fare-free bus to get to big box retail. The Peter Pan Bus got me to other cities in New England and to the Amtrak station in Springfield.

Later, I moved to Washington DC after my graduation from Smith and deliberately chose to live in the District because I didn't wish to obtain a car. It was glorious.