I live in Minneapolis with my wife, a nurse at Hennepin County Medical Center, and my 7-year-old twins.
In June 2021, my family involuntarily became car-free when our Toyota Corolla was totaled in a multi-car crash outside Chicago. The trunk of our car was banged in, and the rear windshield shattered. I swept safety glass out of the car seats of my crying and confused 2-year-old children. I stood in a broiling breakdown lane making phone calls, and wondering what we would do next.
After months of research, we decided it was not affordable for our family to replace our car. Instead, we would try to rely on biking, walking and taking transit to meet our daily needs.
But not every trip feels safe, comfortable or accessible using those modes, especially with young kids, so HourCar and its Evie Carshare program quickly became critical ingredients in our transportation mix.
In nursing school, my wife used Evie to get from our Minneapolis home in Lyndale to Metro State University in St. Paul and to clinical preceptorship placements around the Twin Cities. When my son was referred to a specialist in Burnsville, picking him up and arriving on time sometimes required HourCar. When I’d take my kids to women’s basketball games at the University of Minnesota, if the game let out late it was handy to slip out of Williams Arena, walk a little ways, and take an Evie home.
Just a few weeks ago, I took my kids camping in Southern Minnesota using an HourCar. We built campfires, had s’mores after dinner and after breakfast, went hiking in two state parks and drove home through the changing fall colors.
Four days later, I learned HourCar would be shuttering.
For our family, facing a future without readily-accessible carshare is to face a future of constrained options: more time taken off work for appointments, more inconvenience, fewer outings with my kids. Some of the examples above will need to be replaced by expensive Lyfts. Some of the examples won’t be replaceable at all.
In short, we face reduced access to the many things that make the Twin Cities and Minnesota such a wonderful place to call home. That’s my family’s story. And we are among the thousands of people across the Twin Cities who consider HourCar a lifeline.
In this moment, I call on leaders across the metro and state to urgently pursue short- and long-term funding solutions to help restore this critical part of our region’s transportation choices.
I appreciate that there continue to be behind-the-scenes efforts to do just that, and that any financial solutions must navigate complex legal and funding considerations. With that said, HourCar/Evie users past and future need our state, regional, and local leaders and partner organizations to do everything they can to restore carshare to Minnesota.
Families like mine are counting on them.
Christopher R. Vaughan is a writer and sustainable transportation advocate who lives car-free with his family in Minneapolis. His poetry, poetry reviews and transportation-related writing have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Great River Review, Cincinnati Review, Southeast Review and Streets.MN, among other places.
The post How HourCar’s shutdown changed life for my family appeared first on MinnPost.
