The Day I Hit the Brakes

I am a 57-year-old American citizen who has not driven an automobile in more than 40 years. For a large part of my adulthood I lived in Manhattan, where it was easy to make do with the subway, the bus, and the occasional taxi, but I have also lived for years in Westport, Connecticut -- as suburban and SUV-enthralled a place as you can find -- and for nine months in Lubbock, Texas, whose motorists would sometimes slow down to ask if I needed a lift.

American cars create 45 percent of the carbon dioxide that automobiles throw into the atmosphere, and it would make me feel good to say to you that in the spring of 1969, a year before the first Earth Day, I made a principled decision to help the earth by not driving a car. But it was an accident, literally. While operating our guzzling family Impala on a learner's permit, with my father in the passenger seat, I ran a stop sign. I was talking instead of paying attention, and my car was hit on the driver's side door. The accident was more mortifying than serious, but I quickly realized how serious it might have been. A sudden phobia took tenacious hold. I became too scared to drive and never got my license.

I have made it through 40 pedestrian years with a lot of walking and bicycling. I've also needed some chauffeuring, and from time to time you'll see me in the passenger seat of my partner's car. But I've never allowed myself to choose a job I couldn't reach on foot, and whatever miles and hours I've spent traveling in anybody's car amount to a small fraction of what I've spent aboard public transportation. In recent years, embarrassment over my psychological inability to drive has been partially replaced by pride. One auto didact on the Web promises that "if you begin not driving when you are 15 and end at 65, you'll have through your riding prevented the emission of 561,000 pounds of CO2." Even with chauffeuring, I've surely saved at least half that. A quarter-million pounds of lethal gas!

Alas, my self-satisfaction does not survive deeper investigation. Two summers ago the Times of London reported a set of deflating calculations undertaken by Chris Goodall, a Green Party candidate for Parliament. "Food production is now so energy intensive," the Times noted, "that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance." For this to be true, the distances involved must be more Lubbock-like than Liverpudlian, but maybe Goodall has a point.

"Mr. Electricity" on michaelbluejay.com will give you the numbers that show flying is worse than driving, no matter how overbooked the plane. (Only a car with one person in it gets worse per-passenger mileage per gallon.) But don't try to make things better by staying home altogether. "The average home pollutes more than the average car!" warns Mr. Electricity, thanks to the fuel we burn to produce his namesake. If you truly want to be helpful, he suggests going vegan. (But does one drive -- with friends -- or walk to pick up the radicchio?)

The warring statistics and calculations can bewilder: one report makes you feel like a model citizen, the next a public enemy. But taken together, they still confirm one's worst instincts about the automobile, if only by the frequency with which they draw a comparison to driving. Last April, ICF International warned of the significant environmental damage done by the Internet's daily tsunamis of spam. Filtering out the spam higher up in the food chain, before the rest of us have to spend energy deleting it, would save "the electrical equivalent of taking 13 million cars off the road per year," notes Elinor Mills of CNET. The car is almost always the odious yardstick, and to my mind that makes sense. As the symbol and means of personal freedom, it should also be the number-one measure of personal responsibility.

When a cow burps in Vermont or a breath of luscious air-conditioning pours from the vents inside my house, I don't notice it. But when I'm doing my occasional Pontius Pilate act in the passenger seat (hey, it's not like I'm really driving), I do see the damage, or at least its smoky agent, all around me. By living life on foot and in the HOV lane, I must have done at least some good, enough to make me regard that long-ago accident of mine as a piece of luck: I actually did hit the brakes.