Are One-Car Families Happier?

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At age 32, I just bought my first car.

The tardiness stems from spending much of my adult life in car-phobic New York City. Recently, though, my family relocated to the Philadelphia suburbs. My husband bought his car before our move, and given the 2-car social norm, we then hunted for mine. But as we were looking, I started pondering why I was so sure we needed another car in our garage. I work from home. We live within walking distance of a supermarket and my sons’ preschools. On days I needed to go somewhere, I could take my husband to the train. And yet the fact that I couldn��t go to IKEA without planning ahead weighed on me so much that I was willing to shell out serious cash.

Multiply my thinking by millions of others and you can see why the USA boasts more registered vehicles — close to 250 million — than licensed drivers. In the popular imagination, a set of wheels is not just about getting to work or school. It’s about the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever, with no inconvenience at all.

As gas prices rise toward $4/gallon in many places, though, and given the percent of income even well-to-do Americans devote toward cars, this freedom comes at a considerable cost. Indeed, the amount we shell out for our vehicles might sometimes keep us from seizing the freedom we associate with their ownership. That doesn’t mean our car lust is wrong, but I think it’s a more complex equation than it first appears.

As a long-time city dweller, the sprawling nature of this country, where in many places — perhaps most places — cars are the only option for getting anywhere, still surprises me. Of course, sprawl doesn��t necessarily mean we need more than one vehicle per driver. Americans managed to build quite a society in the 1950s, 60s and 70s with fewer cars. As my children have been paging through 1972’s , we��ve been pondering scenes where the kids carpool to school and the family picks up Dad at his office. Forty years later, people still use these strategies when necessary. But we tend not to want to; as one woman whose rural-dwelling family was down to one car after an accident described it to me, the experience was “confining” and led to feeling “trapped.”

This fear of being trapped — of not having a car when you want or need one — is one of the psychological barriers facing families trying to make it on one car, or quasi-urban sorts who might, in lieu of ownership, try car share services like Zipcar. In the Zipcar model, for a membership fee, you get low hourly rental rates for dentist or IKEA runs (with gas and insurance included). It sounds good, but then people start daydreaming. Sure, I can take the bus most days, but what if I want to go on a last-minute road trip over Labor Day weekend, when all the rental cars are spoken for? This fear of cutting off options — say, to stay at work late someday, or (much better) leave work early and zoom off to Atlantic City — convinces many of us that we absolutely need one car per driver, a car that is solely ours.

But this freedom comes at a price. In 2009, the average American family spent $7,658 operating its 2.0 vehicles, coming out to just under 16% of take-home pay. Higher-income families spent a percentage (possibly thinking hey, if we’re working so hard, don’t we need nice cars?). By contrast, Zipcar spokeswoman Colleen McCormick reports, Zipcar members spend 6% of their budgets on transportation. That extra 10% (think $5,000 on $50,000 or $10,000 in $100,000) could finance plenty of Atlantic City trips, or it could pay for plane tickets to Europe, dinners out with friends, babysitters, or a nice, fat emergency fund. All of these could make a person feel just as free as a new car in the garage. Indeed, shelling out 10% less (after taxes) on cars could give you freedom — the freedom to take a lower paying job that you might love, for instance, or a job with fewer hours so you could actually go interesting places in your borrowed vehicle.

Even without a car-share service — which admittedly works best in urban areas — owning one car instead of two can free up financial space for other happiness-boosting things. I recently interviewed a pair of young musicians whose choice to own one car let them purchase a (pricey) Yamaha grand piano — something they never could have done if they’d followed conventional spending patterns, and which makes them wonderfully happy to play.

To be sure, none of this means that a car-lite existence is always desirable. After weighing the options, I still bought. But when it comes to freedom, cars take as much as they give. Could your family make it on just one car?