Car-Free Blogs

Dang! There are a crapload of car-free blogs out there. Hanging out with my friend Kurt the other day, who is six weeks into chronicling his just-begin year sans automobile,  got me wondering just how many car-free blogs there might be. A quick Google search on “car-free blogs” turned up 181,000 hits, including a few particularly interesting ones:

Car-Free USA blog is the first hit on the list. Self-described as “A blog promoting the joys of car free life in the USA.” The blogger behind it is Brian Smith, a communications guy at the Oakland-based environmental group EarthJustice, who I met last year at a meetup for

WorldChanging.com‘s team of Bay-Area contributors.

There’s Carfree Family, by Paul Cooley, a 41 year-old father in Santa Fe.

There are a slew of blogs about World Car-Free Day, including some of its local iterations.

There’s even a link to an index of all blogs on WordPress.com that contain the tag car-free. (This post will no doubt turn up there once I hit Publish.)

One of the best is the Year of Living Car-lessly, an experiment undertaken by Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank. After his teenage son totaled the family car, they decided to simply not replace it.

And in a bit of cruel irony, the sponsored link that turned up above that Google search was an ad for MotorAddicts.com.

Audio Moblogging for My Car-Free Friend Kurt

On Thursday, I spent a couple hours coaching my friend Kurt Hoelting, a newbie to the blogosphere, on blogging techniques and particularly on podcasting and vlogging. His blog, Inside Passages, is a chronicle of the year-long commitment he has made to avoid the internal combustion engine as much as possible.

The audio player below was posted here automatically via my Hipcast account by calling a number from my cell phone, entering my account’s PIN, and following the instructions. The sound quality is pretty low, but the ease of posting audio content remotely that the system allows is really slick. 

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