> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thompsonscolorado.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # It’s Week Without Driving. For Me, It’s Just Wednesday - URL: https://www.thompsonscolorado.com/its-week-without-driving-for-me-its-just-wednesday/ - Published: 2026-10-07T11:37:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T11:37:11.000Z - Description: A King Soopers manager was surprised I biked to my interview. Rent plus a car can eat 66% to 83% of a $20-25 an hour paycheck in Longmont. For me, going car-free was just math. - Author: Nicholas Thompson - Tags: Carfree Colorado, Car-Free Colorado, RTD, Longmont “So you rode your bike here today?” the King Soopers manager asked. Yes. I was sitting in front of him, on time, interviewing for a job. How I got there didn't seem particularly relevant to whether I could do the job. However, his body language and tone were not the same for the rest of the duration of the interview. I've been car-free for much of 2024, 2025 and 2026\. In Longmont, the rent and the paychecks are a big part of why. [Week Without Driving runs Oct. 1 through Oct. 8](https://weekwithoutdriving.org/?ref=thompsonscolorado.com) and asks people who normally rely on a car to go without it for a few days. Organizers say about one-third of people in the United States are nondrivers, including people who can't drive because of a disability, age or cost, and people who simply choose not to. The campaign isn't a pass-fail test. People who end up driving are encouraged to think about what someone without that option would have done instead. The goal is to show how much of daily life, from groceries to jobs, is built around owning a car. For many people, going without a car for a week is an experiment. And from the job interview experiences lately, it seems unfathomable to many people. A few weeks earlier, during a virtual interview for an in-person insurance job in Longmont, I mentioned that I was car-free. The manager reached for a pen and notebook and jotted something down for the first time in the whole exchange. Then there was Walgreens. "Do you plan to get one in the next three to six months?" No. Three employers. Three versions of the same concern. None asked whether I had reliable transportation and accepted my answer. The absence of a car itself seemed noteworthy. That's started to bother me. If a job requires driving, that's one thing. But if the requirement is simply getting yourself to work on time, why should an employer care whether you arrive in a Chevy, on a bicycle or aboard an RTD bus? I get to work. I buy groceries. I make appointments. I visit friends. I've gotten myself to Denver, Georgetown and into the mountains. I've figured it out. Yet I've repeatedly encountered people who seem to interpret "I don't own a car" as "I have a transportation problem." Those aren't the same sentence. I wonder how much of that reaction comes from something simpler. In Longmont, living without a car is unusual: the city's 2023 housing needs assessment found that only 2% of households had no vehicle available in 2021\. If you've structured your entire life around driving, it can be difficult to imagine how somebody else could structure theirs without it. Just because you can't envision your life without a car doesn't mean I haven't figured out mine. **I didn't set out to become the car-free Colorado guy** There wasn't some grand ideological decision behind it. After a bad accident in February 2024, I lived without a car until November of that year, when I bought a 2016 Chevy Cruze. Then came one of the more absurd chapters of my transportation history. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1e/97/1e975f01-5ab6-430e-819e-8f0ec8a3bb3a/content/images/2026/10/IMG_8494.jpeg) The inside of my 2016 Chevy Cruze is pictured after it was recovered from a tow lot in Liberty, Missouri in February 2025\. The same culprit, I assume, stole the vehicle again weeks later. The Cruze was stolen. The culprit also got the spare key. Police recovered the car, but no arrest was made and the spare key wasn't recovered. So the car was stolen again. Each theft meant another insurance claim and another $500 comprehensive deductible. I paid $1,000 in deductibles because the same car was stolen twice while whoever had taken it still had a key. By the time I was preparing to move to Colorado, I had to decide how much more money I was willing to pour into keeping a car. Insurance alone was looking like roughly $400 to $500 a month. And I'd already spent nine months without a car after the accident. So I didn't replace the Cruze. I moved to Longmont without a car and kept living that way. Eventually, that became part of Thompson's Colorado. I've taken RTD around the metro area. I've figured out how to reach hiking trails without driving. I've taken an e-bike up Guanella Pass and worked out how to get home from Georgetown. I've ridden Highway 7 into the mountains. Last week, I rode 40.89 miles from Longmont to Denver, ate nachos and decided I'd had enough exercise for one day. RTD brought me home. More than 100,000 people watched that trip on Instagram. Those are the fun parts. Nobody is going to watch a 60-second Reel of me realizing I need toothpaste. And that's where the actual test of living without a car begins. **The boring trips matter more than the adventures** Getting to Denver makes good content. Getting groceries determines whether this lifestyle actually works. When you own a car, a lot of transportation decisions barely register as decisions. Need milk? Grab the keys. Doctor's appointment? Grab the keys. Work starts in 25 minutes? Grab the keys. Need to pick something up on the other side of town? You get the idea. Without a car, every one of those trips becomes a small logistics problem. How far is it? Is there a bus? When does it come? How far is the stop from where I'm actually going? Can I bike there? Can I carry whatever I'm buying home? What does the weather look like? And, crucially in a transit system where many routes don't arrive every few minutes: what happens if I miss it? That's one of the things a map doesn't show you. A transit route can technically exist between Point A and Point B and still be a terrible way to make a particular trip. None of this means transportation is never a problem for me. Sometimes it absolutely is. Certain trips take longer. Some places are difficult to reach. Bad weather can screw up the plan. Miss an infrequent bus and a relatively simple trip can suddenly take a lot longer. The job market is part of it, too. The same city report found that 72% of Longmont's working residents hold jobs outside the city, and only 2% of resident workers commute by transit. But owning a car doesn't automatically make someone a reliable employee, and not owning one doesn't automatically make someone unreliable. The relevant question is whether I can reliably get where I need to go. I've been answering that question since 2024. **Housing is expensive. So is the thing sitting in the driveway.** There's another reason Week Without Driving is interesting right now. Cars are expensive as hell. So is housing. And most conversations about affordability treat those as separate problems. Start with rent. The city of Longmont's 2023 housing needs assessment, prepared by Root Policy Research as part of a review of the city's inclusionary housing program, put average asking rent at about $1,700 a month, and about $1,948 for newly built apartments. It also found that fewer than half of Longmont's industries paid average wages high enough to afford the median rent. In retail trade, average annual earnings were $41,398\. In accommodation and food services, they were $25,618. Rent has only climbed since. Depending on the source, Longmont renters are paying somewhere between the high $1,700s and nearly $2,000 a month: a median of $1,740 in June, according to Foreclosure.com, and an average of $1,978 in September, according to Trulia. For the math below, I'll use $1,800. In my own job search, the Longmont-area openings I've seen have most often paid $20 to $25 an hour. That's roughly $41,600 to $52,000 a year before taxes. At $1,800 a month, rent alone would eat about 42% to 52% of that. The standard affordability benchmark, which the housing report uses, is 30% of gross income. To hit it with $1,800 rent, you'd need to earn about $72,000 a year, or roughly $34.60 an hour. Now add a car. AAA's 2026 Your Driving Costs study, released last month, puts the average cost of owning and operating a new vehicle at $12,863 a year, or $1,072 a month. That includes depreciation, financing, insurance, fuel, maintenance, tires and fees. AAA cautions that a methodology change means that figure can't be compared directly with last year's $11,577\. A used car, like my old Cruze, would cost less than a new one. But the new-car number is still the benchmark. Rent plus that $1,072 is $2,872 a month. On a $20 to $25 an hour paycheck, that's roughly 66% to 83% of gross income, before groceries, utilities or anything else. Colorado's own numbers point the same way. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that Denver-area households spent an average of $17,489 on transportation in 2023-24, and 86.5% of it went to buying and maintaining private vehicles. That's roughly $15,100 a year on cars alone. That was my math, too. Replacing the Cruze wouldn't have meant simply walking onto a car lot and buying another one. I would have had to finance it. And given where my credit stood, I would have been shopping in the subprime market. That's an expensive place to borrow money. Experian's data from the second quarter of 2026 put the average interest rate on a used-car loan at 19.1% for borrowers with subprime credit. For prime borrowers, it was 8.81%. And I'm hardly alone. Subprime borrowers accounted for 15.31% of vehicle financing in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Experian, the largest fourth-quarter share since 2021. Then I'd have to insure it. My own quote was approaching $400 to $500 a month. The Colorado average for full coverage is about $2,731 a year, or $228 a month, according to Experian's May 2026 data. Bankrate puts it higher, at $3,203 a year. Insurify's Longmont average is $213 a month. My quote was roughly double that, which is what a theft history and a prior accident will do. So when I decided not to replace the Cruze, the alternative wasn't "car or no car." It was taking out a high-interest loan to buy another car, then paying hundreds of dollars every month to insure it, on top of rent and everything else. Suddenly the bicycle and the bus looked pretty good. That's the economic side of being car-free that can disappear when the conversation becomes purely about whether somebody likes cars, bikes or transit. For me, this wasn't a lifestyle brand. It was math. **Not owning a car doesn't make transportation free** I still spend money getting around. Bicycles need tires, tubes, chains, cassettes, brakes and maintenance. I learned that particularly dramatically last week when the cassette and derailleur on my bike shattered on the way home. There's transit fare. There are occasional situations where another transportation option makes more sense. And there's the cost that's hardest to put on a bank statement: Time. A 15-minute drive can become a much longer transit trip. Miss a connection and the whole trip can fall apart. Some routes stop running before I'm done for the night. Bad weather can turn an ordinary bicycle commute into a pretty miserable one. And there are things about my experience that don't translate to every nondriver. I'm physically able to ride long distances. I live in a city with bike infrastructure and transit service. My circumstances are not the same as those of someone who cannot drive because of a disability, a teenager without access to a vehicle, an older adult who has stopped driving or someone living somewhere with virtually no transit. There isn't one kind of nondriver. Some people can't drive. Some can't afford to. Some don't want to. Some households have fewer vehicles than drivers and have to negotiate who gets the car. And some people, like me, looked at the economics and decided to see what happened without one. **The bicycle changed everything** If I had to pick the single thing that makes car-free life in Longmont practical for me, it wouldn't be RTD. It wouldn't be the bike either. It's the combination. A bicycle dramatically expands how much territory I can reach around a transit stop. Transit dramatically expands how far I'm willing to take the bicycle. Walking fills in what's left. The Denver trip is a ridiculous but useful example. I didn't have to decide between biking 80 miles round trip and not going. I rode south until I'd done what I wanted to do. Then I got on transit. That's how I think about transportation now. Not: Which vehicle am I taking? More like: How am I getting there? Sometimes the answer is a bicycle. Sometimes it's a bus. Sometimes it's a train. Sometimes it's two or three of those. Sometimes the answer is: this trip is going to be such an enormous pain in the ass that I'm not doing it. That's useful information too. And after a while, you stop thinking of the alternatives as substitutes for a car. They're just transportation. There's also been one consequence I definitely wasn't planning on. I've lost about 60 pounds since spring 2025\. I didn't give up my car as a weight-loss plan, but when walking and biking aren't workouts you have to schedule and are instead how you get to the grocery store, the bus stop or work, physical activity becomes part of an ordinary day. Then there are the completely unnecessary rides I've added on top of that. Forty miles to Denver isn't exactly the minimum amount of exercise required to pick up dinner. **Somehow, my world got bigger** This is the part I didn't expect. You would think giving up a car would shrink my world. In some ways, it absolutely has. There are places that became harder to reach. Spontaneity works differently when the next bus is not sitting in your driveway. Certain jobs become harder to consider. A simple errand can require planning. But something else happened. I started looking at Colorado differently. Instead of asking how long it would take to drive somewhere, I started asking: Can I get there without a car? That question has taken me into the mountains, to trailheads, to Georgetown, down Highway 7 and to Denver. And it has become one of the recurring questions behind Thompson's Colorado. Sometimes answering it exposes a transportation problem. Sometimes it teaches me something about RTD. Sometimes it produces genuinely useful information for somebody else who doesn't drive. And sometimes it's just me pointing a bicycle toward somewhere stupidly far away to see what happens. Apparently Coloradans really enjoy watching that last one. **Seven days isn't the same as not having the option** I like the idea behind Week Without Driving. But there is one thing the challenge can't completely reproduce. If you're participating this week and a trip becomes too difficult, you know the car is still there. If buying groceries without driving is miserable, you can drive next week. If your commute requires two buses and 90 minutes, the experiment ends Oct. 8. For millions of people, it doesn't. Spend enough time without a car and you start finding the gaps pretty quickly. Maybe the bus technically goes where you need it to go, but it runs once an hour. Maybe you can bike most of the way, but the comfortable route disappears before you reach your destination. Maybe something that's a 15-minute drive takes more than an hour without one. And sometimes the obstacle isn't transportation at all. It's sitting in a job interview after you've already gotten yourself there and realizing the person across from you is concerned because you arrived on a bicycle. It's inconvenient and freeing at the same time. I've saved a lot of money, and I've also spent an absurd amount of time working out trips that would take ten minutes with a car. Some five-mile trips have made me furious. I also rode 40 miles to Denver for nachos and had a great day. When the week ends Oct. 8, a lot of people will go back to driving. I'll keep doing what I've been doing, which right now means a bus pass, a bike a Thompson's Colorado supporter pulled out of his garage after my last one died, and a bad habit of looking at places on a map and wondering whether I can get there. Fort Collins? Left Hand Canyon? Winter Park? Telluride? Durango?