Car-less in Sudbury: one man's experiment

Steve May said he and his wife had often talked about making an attempt at living in Sudbury without a vehicle. Their discussions had centred around a vehicle's costs: insurance and filling the car with gas every morning as they commuted from their home.

But May said their decision to go car free was helped along by some bad news.

"I got a phone call at work from [my wife,]" May said, "The car is dead."

She added, "Maybe this is the time to go car free."

May, the father of three children, told CBC's Morning North that he was hesitant. But his wife talked him into the experiment, he said, on the condition he wrote a blog about it.

For forty days, the May family relied on their feet and Sudbury Transit.

"It didn't go all that badly," May said. "We had a really good time taking the bus across the city to do our chores."

"We discovered we live on a bus line where many of the things we need to access are on the bus line: church, my mother in law, the grocery store."

May said taking the bus daily—  with his three kids— was an "eye opener."

"[It was interesting] to watch them interact with people on transit," May said. "We got to meet some wonderful university students. And Laurentian is a destination we probably wouldn't have to go through, but buses in Sudbury tend to meander, especially on Sunday."

'Ran into a problem'

Although he said through his fifteen years of taking Sudbury Transit he has been impressed by transit staff, he was struck by one particular event where the system's limitations were an issue.

"We had a birthday party scheduled for one of our kids at a restaurant on the Kingsway," May said.

"It would have been a ten minute drive on a Friday night for a restaurant reservation. Even by bus, only twenty five minutes. Not unreasonable," he said.

"That's when we ran into a problem. Once we got there, the bus dropped us off on the other side of the road.  We would not know how to cross the Kingsway on Friday afternoon at rush hour," May said.

"It would have been 400 metre walk to a traffic light either way."

• Listen to Steve May's interview on Morning North