Sitting (or standing) on a crowded Metro train while getting where I'm going in a reasonable time beats the ever loving hell out of sitting in traffic for two hours trying to get across town or outside the beltway.

I owned a car when I moved to DC. In my first year here, I used it maybe once per week or two weeks. The second year, I lent it to my sister-in-law for pretty much the whole year and practically never used it. The third year, I lent it to someone else for about 90% of its driving time and again almost never used it. In the fourth year, it sat unused in my $200 per month underground off-street parking space for such a long time that the battery went dead from not being started for too long...twice. After the second time that happened, I sold the car because it was stupid to pay for registration, parking and insurance on a car I almost never used. I haven't had one since, and wouldn't accept one if someone offered it to me for free, except maybe to just turn around and sell it for the cash.

When it's not convenient to take public transit in the city, Uber/Lyft is still a much cheaper and more convenient option than having a car. My average Uber/Lyft ride is usually $3-4. Even if I used Uber or Lyft round trip every day, it would only be about $180-240 a month, which is basically what it costs to park a car here.

The only use I have for a car is if I'm going to take a long driving trip out of town, and it's much cheaper to just rent one for those occasions than to register, park and insure one full-time, and that's not even to mention the cost of buying/leasing the car to begin with.

The only down side? Since I'm never driving, I can always drink whenever I'm somewhere that it's available, which does not always lead to the best feeling the next morning.

This post was edited on 6/20/17 at 7:41 pm