Over the last year, I’ve been interviewing amazing writers about simple living, location independence, financial freedom, and more. Today the feature interview is with Angela and Dorea of Car-free with Kids.

Enjoy the interview peeps!

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Tammy: Angela and Dorea, going car-free was a big decision. What inspired you to take the leap and go for it?

Angela and Dorea: Way back in 2004, before we had a kid, when we were free and easy grad students, we house sat for a professor in the suburbs for a summer. That summer our little pick-up truck died. It was an adorable 1987 Mazda and had taken us on many wonderful adventures. When the truck stopped working we felt a little sad, but mostly we felt relief.

We already used our bikes and public transit when we were living closer into the city. That was trickier in the suburbs, but we did it. We were each riding about 50 minutes each way to work, and groceries were a bit of a trick, but we did it, and we figured if we could do it in Newton, it would be a piece of cake once we moved back into town. We never looked back.

It’s not all that strange here to live without a car when you don’t have kids, but once we were expecting our daughter, the questions started. “When are you going to get a car?” Our answer was “We aren’t.” We saw the doubting looks and heard the knowing assurances we’d change our minds, but we stuck it out, and now can’t imagine living any other way.

Tammy: What type of bike do you ride? Do you have special seats for the little ones?

Angela and Dorea: We ride several bikes. Dorea has an old beater road bike for commuting and Angela has a similar quality mountain bike for commuting. Angela’s bike is also set up both with a single rear mounted child seat (a bobike maxi), a trailer hitch for a trailer (an older Chariot model) that we share with a neighbor, and that got us started hauling our own groceries by bike. But for riding with kids, we have an Xtracycle with a custom two-kid seat on the back.

We can’t imagine life without it. To be honest, it gets more use for hauling (mostly groceries) than for kids (everywhere we really need to go with them is walkable). But it’s great for the kids, and a lifesaver for one parent to be able to ride with both of them.

You can find more details on our set-up here and here.

Tammy: Do you have any advice for parents who want to use a bicycle instead of a car?

Angela and Dorea: It can be easy to get sidetracked by all the fancy bikes out there, but consider starting with what you have, and seeing how far that can take you. Common gear for biking with children, like trailers, trailer bikes and bike mounted rear child seats, are easy to get for cheap or free in the secondhand market.

You might even have them in your basement already for recreational riding (or your neighbor might). As you bike more you’ll see what your needs really are, and can reassess at the next stage. Also, if biking with your kids seems daunting, we find good cargo capacity is actually more important, and that same second hand trailer can work great to haul groceries.

For us, transit is at least as important as biking, especially with the kids, and especially in winter. If you’ve heard the buses or trains are awful where you live, check out what’s really offered. Even in areas with minimal transit, what’s there is usually tailored to support commuters. Such a route, especially in combination with a bicycle commute can help a two-car family cut down to one. Even a slow or infrequent bus can be great back up for days you can’t ride.

For more advice, You can find a two part series here, as well as an article we wrote at Shareable.

Tammy: What are the 5 things you love about being car-free with kids?

Angela and Dorea:

1. Knowing all of our neighbors.
2. Never having to shovel out a car
3. Riding to a park on a nice summer day with the kids, everyone singing “Yellow Submarine.”
4. Financial freedom
5. Getting plenty of exercise without even trying

Tammy: What’s one thing you wish people understood better about the way you live?

Angela and Dorea: Occasionally, we worry that people get the wrong idea about us. Some folks think we are environmental extremists, going to absurd lengths for our car-free cause. But as working parents of a four-year-old and one-year-old, we don’t tend to take on a lot of extra tasks. It’s really all we can really do to keep our laundry moving along, the dishes washed, and food in the pantry.

We don’t do stuff that’s hard. But for us, being carfree is actually much easier than having a car. We see our lives as easy, and the lives of car-owners as impossibly difficult. We love the environmental benefits and certainly wish more people made the same choice. But if that was our primary motivation, we would have given up long ago.

Tammy: Thanks Angela and Dorea!

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For more resources on biking with kids, check out Clever Cycles.

Note: Photo via Clever Chimp

The following article is by Chris O-Byrne of Editing Your World and Tiny Simplicity.

Chris edited both of my ebooks, Simply Car-free and Minimalist Health. He is an exceptional editor and an amazing person. If you’re ever in need of an editor, Chris is your guy.

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I was living in southern Arizona near the U.S.-Mexico border, too far from civilization to even consider living without a vehicle. But as violence from drug trafficking and the subsequent overrun of human rights as perpetrated by Homeland Security pushed me to move someplace safer, I also thought about moving someplace where I could live with little to no dependence on my car. (It’s a van, actually; a big gas-gorging cargo van I named Duke and outfitted to camp in.)

Living car-free or car-lite was a dream, but nothing I seriously considered until I became more involved in the minimalist movement. Blogs such as RowdyKittens and Zen Habits got me excited again about minimizing my impact and I thought about where I could move that would fit my lifestyle. I make my living as a freelance editor, so I can live anywhere in the world I want.

Places on my list included Portland, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Denver, Las Vegas, and Flagstaff. I thought about living location-free and simply living out of my backpack for a while, but current family obligations are keeping me grounded for a while. (My first grandchild is on her way!) I narrowed my list to Portland and Albuquerque and my love of the sun brought me to Albuquerque, 500 miles from where I lived in Arizona.

The next step was to choose a place in the city that made logistical sense for getting around primarily by walking, biking, or busing. I had almost given up and was ready to look at another city when I found a house for rent on Craigslist that was in a quiet neighborhood, was two blocks from the library and a large park, was near the bus line and the bike path, yet was close to necessary shopping. Perfect! I saw the house that afternoon and signed a lease the next morning.

I’ve been here a month, now, and know I made the right choice. I only drive the van about twice a week and even those trips are very short. As I get settled in and plan my necessary driving trips even better, that will go down to only once per week. (There’s a jam session I go to that is too far to bike with a big, clunky guitar and the bus doesn’t run that way on Sundays.) I love being car-lite and the sense of freedom I feel is exhilarating. Going from car-heavy to car-lite is the first step on my way to being completely car-free.

Spread the love. If this post helped you, please retweet it and share the content with your tribe. Thanks!

Since the release of Simply Car-free, I’ve received an incredible number of emails from folks asking questions like:

How can I improve my health?
What are the best ways to lose weight?
Where can I find real food?

In response to the questions I’ve received, I decided to write my first free e-book. The book is 20 pages and I hope it will help you get active.

You only get one body and mind. If you don’t take care of both, it’s hard to create amazing art or get involved in your community. I hope this manifesto will help you improve your health and inspire you to change the world.

Download the free e-book, Minimalist Health: How to Focus on the Essentials.

Or read it on Issuu!

If this e-book helps you, please help spread the word by…

• Sharing it with your tribe on Twitter or Facebook.
• Writing about it on your blog.
• Printing out copies and leaving them in your local library or coffee shop.

Please let me know what you think. Feel free to connect with me on twitter or send me a note.

Recently, a reader emailed me and asked:

I was wondering about bike storage in/on a tiny house. I’ve thought about installing bike hooks on one side of the house and locking the bike to it, but the weather in the northwest is often hard on a bike.

I even thought about trying to make a space above the porch and under the roof, with a pulley system to get the bike up under protected cover. But I’m not sure if it will fit. Is the answer a tiny garage or storage shed to go with the tiny house? Any thoughts on that?

We’ve considered…

1. Mounting the bikes on the tiny house.
2. Building a tiny shed for the bikes.
3. Or storing the bikes in a neighbor’s garage.

Bike storage concerns aren’t a problem right now. Luckily our new apartment has bike storage in the basement. Now we don’t have to drag the bikes up and down the stairs. But I’m afraid storing the bikes in our future tiny house will be difficult.

What are your thoughts on this topic? And do you have any creative design ideas?