When Brett Comeau moved from Los Angeles to downtown Harrisburg to start a business and close the gap in a long-distance romance, he resisted giving up his wheels to join his girlfriend in her carless existence. Give it a month, she suggested.
“Within a month, I said, ‘I don’t ever want to own a car again,’” he said now, four years later. “It’s so much easier. The stress-freeness of it. I don’t have to drive through traffic.”
As the revitalized city offers new living and entertainment options, a new breed of urban dweller is attempting—and succeeding at—the carless life. They are walking, biking, busing, train-riding and Uber-ing to their destinations.
Oh, and some are keeping their personal vehicles but only for occasional use. We’ll get to them in a minute.
Of course, cities have long been home to residents who don’t own cars. In Harrisburg in 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau tells us, 3,266 people age 16 and over didn’t have a vehicle for getting to work. They commuted by bus, foot, bicycle, taxicab and carpooling.
For most people, though, the thought of ditching the car is akin to cutting off a limb. Car ownership, we’ve grown up believing, is equivalent to freedom. But the return of upscale amenities to the city—dining, entertainment and rehabbed housing—has inspired more professionals to throw away the car keys, or at least, give the car long rests between rides. In the process, they’ve discovered a new form of freedom—an escape from the tyranny of the motorized machine.
No Place Like That
Several new, upscale apartment buildings opened last year, offering more living options in walkable downtown and Midtown Harrisburg. Of all the new (and old) buildings there, The Flats @ Strawberry Square may make the strongest case for the carless curious.
The units link directly, through an indoor walkway, to the Hilton Harrisburg, restaurants, Open Stage and Whitaker Center, in addition to the many shops and eateries in Strawberry Square itself.
“You don’t even have to go outside if you don’t want to,” said Brad Jones, president and CEO of Harristown Enterprises, which developed the building. “If you do go outside, you’re a block or two from another 35 or 40 restaurant establishments. There’s no place like that in central Pennsylvania.”
WCI Partners, busy rehabbing homes and apartments, finds that walkability attracts residents. City dwellers “generally want to live in the city to have easy access to restaurants, parks, shopping, theater, community involvement,” said Vice President, Director of Operations Lori A. Fortini.
When it comes to walkability and building community, “one feeds the other,” said Fortini, whose company recently opened the 33-unit Union Lofts building at N. 3rd and Boas streets.
“It’s a bounce back and forth,” she said. “The more you commute outside of the car, the more you are aware of your surroundings and able to connect with them. At the same time, that creates the safety to do that.”
As Comeau noted, spending goes where wallets go, and being carless, he and his girlfriend, Linda Walters, keep their wallets close to home.
“Linda and I spend about 90 percent of our money on local businesses,” he said. “We are part of this community.”
Spinning Wheels
ChuChi and Shadow inspired Scott Foulkrod to adopt a daily walking life.
The Harrisburg University professor had no one who could take the two small dogs for walks every few hours. So, he moved into a luxury apartment rehabbed by Vartan Group on Pine Street, just blocks from his workplace.
Always an outdoorsy type, Foulkrod “fell into the routine pretty quickly” of walking back and forth between home and work a couple of times a day. He also walks to downtown events and restaurants.
“It’s a simple way to live,” he said.
It’s a living arrangement that could change with a move to the country someday, but, for the time being, “It seemed like a no-brainer.”
Foulkrod didn’t entirely abandon the car—“a car I really like, a nice car.” His Audi TT convertible stays garaged for much of the time but comes out for grocery runs and getaways.
Like Foulkrod, Ian Kanski has a car but, most days, keeps it parked in a nearby lot since moving to Harristown’s Fifteen at Twenty-Two, or F@TT, apartments on S. 3rd Street in September. The apartment is across the street from his business, Integrated Agriculture Systems, the folks behind the hydroponic and aquaponic systems increasingly seen in schools.
“I couldn’t resist the opportunity to live right next to where we were putting our office,” he said. “It’s great for me to walk to meetings downtown.”
The car is handy for out-of-town meetings and driving to his company’s Susquehanna Township facility, but often, he takes the train to meetings in Philadelphia and New York. Even travel to Costa Rica, where his wife is from, is simplified by proximity to Harrisburg Transportation Center’s Amtrak station, for rides directly to Newark Airport.
“I get my baggage, walk over to the train station, and get to another country without getting into a car,” he said.
Asked if he doesn’t miss having a firewall between work and home, Kanski laughed. He gets that question a lot, it seems.
“Being in a startup, it’s hard to separate those two things, anyway,” he said. “In the startup world, work follows you anywhere. That’s inevitable.”
I’m Done
The freedom of carlessness, it seems, comes from making the car work around your life—not the other way around. Comeau said that he’s no longer “tempted to go somewhere for no reason.”
The hardest part of the adjustment, he said, was learning to plan ahead, but routine makes the lifestyle run smoothly. Groceries come from walks to the Broad Street Market or are delivered by Giant Food’s Peapod service. If he and Walters rent a car for some purpose, for a weekend every two or three months, they think of everything they need that a car facilitates and “cram everything in.”
About six months ago, to adopt a cat named Kinsey, Comeau and Walters rented a car, picked her up, bought all the food, took her home to their WCI apartment on Walnut Street, and, while she was adjusting, drove around for things that included a Troeg’s Brewery tour in Hershey.
“By Monday, when we dropped the car off, I said, ‘I’m exhausted. I’m done,’” he said.
Walters, the girlfriend who converted Comeau to carlessness, has always lived and worked along bus routes. The natural-born organizer knows all the routes and uses Capital Area Transit (CAT) updates to follow the progress of her buses. If a bus is late, she calls Uber to get her to work, “because Uber is pretty quick,” Comeau said.
“When she’s on the bus, she listens to podcasts, she listens to notes, she listens to books on tape, as opposed to having to drive and get all stressed out by traffic,” he said. “She just zones out and gets to do her thing, and she really enjoys that.”
Comeau and Walters hope that Zipcar comes soon to Harrisburg to replace their occasional car rental needs. Zipcar media relations did not return an email asking if Harrisburg is in their sights.
Great, Walkable
Like Walters, some who go carless find a transportation assist from the bus system. According to Jones, CAT and Harristown “have a long working relationship.”
“Service to various parts of the region are pretty good in this area, especially if you’re in the center,” he said. “You could literally go to 50 different locations by bus—Hershey, Hummelstown, Carlisle, Mechanicsburg, Holy Spirit. The new Pinnacle hospital now has a service. You can cover a lot of ground by bus.”
Many of CAT’s 10,000 daily riders don’t have cars, said CAT spokesman Bob Philbin. “Anyone living in Harrisburg can move from point A to point B within the city within about 30 minutes,” he said.
New routes include a loop from Shipoke to the Capitol and 2nd Street, and, at lunchtime, it expands to the Broad Street Market “so we can move that lunch crowd around the city apart from downtown,” he said.
Recently adopted bus tracker software lets riders check the CAT website to see their buses en route, with a separate link for mobile phones. CAT’s Twitter feed notifies users of delays. There’s no app due to the challenges of aligning ever-evolving bus routes with Google maps, Philbin said.
“We’re constantly evaluating routes in and out of Harrisburg and around Harrisburg,” he said. “The system was built with Harrisburg at its core.”
Harrisburg is not only a walkable city but a bikeable one. Therefore, some residents have replaced the auto through a combination of bike and bus. In fact, riders bringing bicycles to rack on buses have risen 10 percent to 15 percent, year over year, to reach the current level of about 15,000 annually, Philbin said.
So far, at least, Kanski, whose new home is above El Sol restaurant, hasn’t had to hop the bus much. He walks almost everywhere he needs to go.
“There’s good, diverse cuisine,” Kanski said. “There’s great arts and culture happening in Harrisburg as a whole. Everything is pretty close. It’s a great, walkable city.”
Disclosure: Alex Hartzler, a WCI Partners principal, is publisher of TheBurg.
Author: M. Diane McCormick
