Living in Seattle without a car

[AT-AT28]

No way in hell im giving up my car, bus to the UW or not.

[JonasW]

I've done it for a few years and it's fine without a car. Grab the free bus app for your phone and go! Though I walk around mostly. If you're fit and like walking it's no biggie to get a lot of places around downtown. Getting to SeaTac is a breeze and fairly cheap via the lightrail. The walk to the terminals isn't amazing, it's a hike, but you avoid traffic and parking hassles.

[Ruth4Truth]

I lived in Seattle without a car just fine. It helps to live within walking distance of grocery and other basic conveniences. The only thing you'd need a car for is on weekends, to get out of town and enjoy scenic areas. You can get cheap rentals for that.

[Mousetron]

As others have mentioned the Light Rail goes from Downtown to the airport (about a 40 minute trip) - I think it runs every 10 minutes or so depending on the time of day.

But as to your more general point, my husband and I have found it very easy to live without a car as long as you can conveniently get to anywhere you go regularly; for everything else there's Zipcar, Car2Go and taxis/Uber/Lyft. If you live centrally and don't have kids it's very common to not have a car. Everyone I know who has a car already owned it when they moved to Seattle rather than buying one because it was too inconvenient to live carless here.

[OHW]

Again thank you all so much for the help!

Do you guys find walkscore.com to be pretty accurate for Seattle?

[Flightoficarus87]

/\ - I find walkscore in general to be fairly accurate. It's a great tool - I like the most walkable hoods myself, despite owning a car.

If you wanna go carless in Seattle, I would say to stick to the city core hoods, like Cap Hill, Lower Queen Anne, Belltown, etc. You'll have most of what you need within walking distance, with the best public transit in the area for trips to nearby areas beyond walking distance. You can rent a car for when you want to leave the city. You could probably get away without one in the outer hoods as well, albeit with less convenience than the most central areas. The burbs are another story, of course.

[Śebb]

Being car-less in Seattle is really only tolerable if you're a student at one of the schools in the city and with short-term plans. If you're in your late-twenties or beyond, not having a car will seriously hamper your social flexibility and the diversity of experiences you can have in the PNW. The 'urban' center of Seattle is actually fairly small (and, dare I say, dilapidated), and I think you'd find a lot of events, gatherings, and errands need to be done outside the core. What most people love about Seattle is the nature surrounding the city, which is NOT easily accessible unless you think a nasty hour-long bus ride in the rain is easy... if you want to be in a walkable urban environment, why choose a tiny one with terrible weather? Instead, I'd recommend NYC... or Paris.

[JBVirtuoso]

To echo what others have said, I think it really just depends on your habits. I can walk to work and to several grocery stores and restaurants, and I don't mind riding transit, so I get by just fine without a car. But I have a pretty high tolerance for walking long distances or planning around a transit schedule.

Zipcar and Car2Go are nice to have, and I use both on a regular basis. But it's really not the same as owning a car. If you don't drive frequently, car sharing is cheaper overall than ownership. But it also really changes how you choose your activities. The marginal cost of renting a car to go do something is very high. For instance, if you're going out to dinner on a Saturday night at a restaurant, you'll probably want at least a two hour reservation, which will cost at least $20. For a shopping trip at an outlet mall, you'd probably want 3 or 4 hours, so you're looking at $30-40.

If you drive more than a few times a month, this could get really expensive. Due to these costs, I often find myself sticking closer to home and choosing destinations I can access easily by transit or walking. If I owned a car, I'd end up paying more overall, but that trip to the outlet mall would cost next to nothing by itself. There's also a psychological difference in driving a Zipcar/Car2Go vehicle - there's always a clock ticking in the back of your mind. Especially with Car2Go, which charges by the minute, red lights suddenly become a lot more stressful. Every minute you spend sitting at a red light costs $0.38. That may seem insignificant, but it adds up, and I find myself thinking about it a lot as I'm driving.

Another minor factor to consider is how this affects your ability to rent a car from a place like Avis or Enterprise. If you don't have a car, you don't have insurance, so you'll have to take out their rental insurance policy. If you're under age 25, you'll also have an underage surcharge to deal with. For me, renting a car to drive to Portland for the weekend would be very expensive and definitely not worth the time savings.

[movingwiththewind]

Originally Posted by AT-AT28

No way in hell im giving up my car, bus to the UW or not.

Well, nobody asks you to give up your car, do they?

It's not what this thread is about.