No need to be drastic

The Washington Post ran a front page article on a growing trend in insurance fraud: setting your car on fire. Apparently, more and more people are getting in over their heads with car payments, gas prices, and the overall burden of owning a vehicle. Some motorists are driven to the point of igniting brand new cars into blazing wreckages just to escape from repossession and bankruptcy. I learned from Lee Huang last week how much car ownership really costs, in comparison to using public transit. (For the Washington area, the APTA estimates over $10,500 a year). These charges all seem to go on in the background - a couple hundred here and there - and, like taxes, we take for granted that they just need to be paid. At least for the last few decades, this has been a non-negotiable cost in most of the United States, simply the entry price for participating in society.

The good news is that car ownership is not an all-or-nothing deal. There's no need choose between owning your own car and burning the car to the ground. We can own a fraction of a car - that is share. Instead of each member of a family owning their own car, families can try to get by with just one. In urban areas, Zipcars are becoming increasingly popular. I noticed three separate Zipcar lots wandering around Washington D.C. this weekend. Right now there are a full spectrum of ownership levels available, and as our nation's infrastructure (hopefully) evolves to allow us the opportunity to ease away from the automobile we can incrementally own a smaller fraction of a car. Political will and personal choices always move forward in tandem, step by step.