Arlington Car-Free Diet Skeptics Challenge Crowns a Winner

Arlington's second Car-Free Diet Skeptics Challenge came to a close today, with County Board Member Walter Tejada announcing "Car-Free Matt" as the winner of the 30-day contest to see who could make the best transition out of his car and onto his feet for his daily transportation needs.  

The Car Free Diet Skeptics Challenge isn't intended to convince everyone in Arlington to sell their cars and walk everywhere, but to demonstrate just how easy it is replace some car trips with Metro, biking and walking.   To help make that illustration, Arlington County's Car-Free Diet program selected Matt and Kyle from an applicant pool of "skeptics" who thought that life without a car would be more work than it's worth. 

Matt and Kyle competed, over the course of the last month, to reduce their use of private motorized transportation as much as possible while being as amusing and informative as they could in a variety of online formats – from their Twitter accounts, the Car-Free Diet Skeptics blog and Facebook pages.  

For example, Matt posted a video about getting acquainted with Capital Bikeshare, and Kyle could be found Twittering about the costs of making it to District Taco for dinner. The Car-Free Diet Skeptics Challenge sponsors helped these efforts along by providing Matt and Kyle with the tools that make a "car-free" daily life more easily manageable – transit maps, a Metro Smartcard, and a well-outfitted Trek commuter bike – for the duration of the contest.   Matt used these to conduct his daily life as a freelance marketer, and Kyle managed his own intra-Arlington commute to work.

Matt's closing post in his blog pointed out that in 30 days of going car-free, he'd not only dropped some weight, but also lost plenty of the stress associated with driving.  There was also the bonus of the $200 he'd saved on gas.  Kyle found that he, too, saved cash and stress while going car free.  He found that his need for trip efficiency turned him into a better planner.   Of course, it wasn't all blue skies – Matt has a newfound respect for the importance of knowing where your umbrella is, and an ankle injury had Kyle briefly sidelined (until his doctor suggested more biking than walking, that is).

In the end, Matt managed to edge out Kyle through his ability to spread the word about how easy it is to replace car trips with walking or cycling in Arlington.  Kyle, when asked how Arlington County might better convince others to make the move to go car-free, pointed out that local trail maintenance could be better and that the County could use more bike lanes.  As a relatively new cyclist, he's not entirely comfortable riding on busy streets, a sentiment that Matt echoed.  Going car-free isn't free of challenges, but as Matt and Kyle's competition illustrated, it only takes a short while and a little bit of effort to start down that path in Arlington.