Planning guru Bill Fulton is back in SoCal after a brief stint in Washington DC. He's now planning director in San Diego, and he's come back to the land of the car without one in order to experiment with shared-use options. He says he's widely pitied by friends and colleagues, who wonder how he manages without a car. But he says they just don't get it because they're making a fundamental mistake: "They are equating owning a car with using a car."

And he writes (in the California Planning & Development Report -- link to article is at the bottom of this post):

"Cars? I have more cars than I know what to do with. I use cars all the time, in order to go all kinds of places, and I am never without access to a car. My overall automobile cost is probably less than half of what it was when I owned a car – because I usually pay for a car only when I am traveling in it, not when it is just parked somewhere.

"I’m well aware that I am on the leading edge of this on, at least in modern urban neighborhoods: Our complete reliance on a “monoculture” of owner-occupied automobiles is being augmented with a much more varied ecosystem that includes not just alternatives to driving, but many whole “car-sharing” thing and that the vast majority of people don’t have the same options because of where they live and work. But the fact that I am doing just fine without owning a car in a traditionally suburban place like San Diego suggests that something important is going different ways to use a car.

Read the whole essay here.