I’ve lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlanta without using a car, and for much of that time without owning one.  I didn’t get from one extreme to the other in ten easy steps. It took a long time and a strong willingness to challenge my own convictions.

The consequences of giving up one’s car are numerous and, depending on your perspective, many of these may be beneficial. I’ll allow mention of the strictly practical economic consequences; if you can take care of your transportation needs without a car, you can save a lot of money on gas, insurance, upkeep and payments. Potential indirect economic consequences include finding things of value to you that you may have missed in a faster moving car, acquiring basic and potentially salable mechanical skills, and improved physical health.

Early on, I found myself living in Atlanta and commuting 40 miles to work in a small cow town called Loganville. I estimate it took about 5 or 6 years to become virtually car independent from my start as a bike commuter in college to having no car in San Francisco.

If using less of your car in favor of a bicycle is a goal, whatever your reasons, then I can offer some practical tips from the perspective of someone who went from what seemed like total car dependance to total independence in about 6 years.

An important thing at every stage in the transition from card dependance into independence is mental strategy. Fortunately, this strategy never changes, even if your opinion on what degree of independence you are happiest with does. The strategy is simple, use a disciplined and powerful sense of imagination. Take something you imagine more or less requires you to have a car and imagine that you do not have a car, even if you do. Keep pretending your car is broken or does not exist until you act as though this is true, or at least partially true. If the pretense is impossible to maintain in the face of something that you believe is impossible to do, such as pedal 90 miles round trip every day to get to work, imagine the number as something smaller until the pretense seems maintainable. Where ever that number lies is a comfort zone. Try to get everything you need to get to within it. If moving or changing jobs is not an option, then find a place to park your car away from work, and begin driving to that distance and biking the rest of the way to and from work. Grocery store and strip mall parking lots are ideal places to leave your car.

The practice of riding your bike to and from work just from this distance will begin to reveal a long list of practical concerns that will make it possible to continue increasing your comfort zone.

Here is my advice on the ones I encountered.

Clothing

When I started, I wore cotton clothes. My comfort zone was about 10-20 miles. Once I changed jobs to a location that was 5 miles from where I lived in Atlanta, I had very little that I needed to get to that was outside of my comfort zone. In Atlanta heat, cotton will kill you. I converted to lycra material and difference in comfort and pleasure was of kind. With cotton clothes, I would become drenched with my own sweat until arriving at my destination, then I would have to cool down and change. The cool down would have to be long enough that I didn’t sweat through my change of clothes. This would often take 30-40 minutes in Georgia heat. One trick I found was to gulp down a huge glass of ice cold water or fruit smoothy. This shortened cool down time significantly with no discomfort. A blender full of iced fruit smoothie could neutralize the worst of heat as soon as it was down.

The types of fabric designed to keep you dry will take away the feeling of peddling in a wet blanket of your own sweat, which in addition to being uncomfortable also causes chafing from the salt in your sweat. You still sweat as much as with cotton, but you stay dry. There are very practical reasons for wearing spandex. Bulky clothing adds significant wind resistance, making you more susceptible to fatigue at shorter ranges

The most important piece of equipment to adopt if your goal is to increase your tolerable comfort zone is the padded biking shorts. The chamois will keep you from chafing and keep you comfortable in the saddle for as long as you can stand to pedal. If discomfort on a bike is a barrier to distance, this and getting your posture and seat position right will go a long way to resolving most of those issues. Tutorials to get a proper fitting on a bike are everywhere online, but people who work in bike shops are generally happy to show you in person if you ask. A proper position on the bike will alleviate virtually all knee, back or ankle pains. An improper one prolonged for long enough will guarantee pain in one or more of these areas.

I tend to wear spandex especially in heat, cold and wind. Baggy mountain biking shorts are more practical for going into and out of places like the grocery store for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they have pockets to keep your keys, money and ID on person.

For longer rides on windy or wet days, I try to keep the baggy shorts in the drawer. Spandex and wick away shirts on wet days are actually quite manageable and if the rain lets up, one is relatively dry within a few minutes.

Gear

The big essential is a helmet. The most likely thing it will do for you is to prevent your near misses from becoming full blown tragedies, like the time you took a tumble and somehow did not get a concussion in spite of banging your head off something hard at speed.

Clips and shoes are another piece of valuable equipment. These cost some money, but the clips are bought once and the cheapest shoes are comparable in price to cheap regular shoes and tend to last for a long time. These will make your ride safer, you will have fewer near miss stories with secured feet that do not slip off from a rough bounce  in wet conditions.

Fenders are good for keeping dry in wet conditions. They do actually keep you dry in the rain, but until you get comfortable in wet conditions you won’t notice the help. They are also good for keeping the water from streaming off the front tire into the chain and front derailler, preserving its lifespan. Rain and grit tends to add months of wear to breaks and chains with just a few hours of exposure that is if left unmitigated or attended. I’d suggest you get yourself acclimated to pedaling in wet conditions first, then adopt the fenders even though it will chew up some equipment. If you do it that way, you may start to find you like pedaling in the rain, gutter water and all.

I really have no objective thoughts on the style of bike that is best. It depends on what you do. I tend to look for multi-purpose functionality. Road bikes are too focused on performance to get much utility, for example they tend not to have drop-outs for racks and fenders. The ones that do are my favorite, but they are rare. Mountain bikes are too heavy for road commuting any significant distance. The cyclocross is a good bike for commuting so long as you go with road tires. I am not a fan of hybrids or so called ‘commuter’ bikes, the straight handlebars are not favorable to any kind of distance ride. Older road style bikes tend to have things like dropouts for racks, but they are also a little more idiosyncratic and often require a significant investment after procuring to get into good, rideable condition. These are the bikes that may have sat around, un-ridden for a decade and look OK, but whose components tend to be dry rotted or seized up.

Really old bikes may have broken components that can even be replaced by a shop, which usually makes the bike theoretical for all practical purposes.

Carriage

One issue is the carrying capacity of a bike. If one is used to traveling by car, you may be used to a very large carrying capacity. The trunk, seats, floor all serve as potential luggage space. $300 of groceries might way upwards of 50 pounds and take up an entire trunk. There is simply no way one could transport that on a bike.

You can manage to carry quite a big. I am a big proponent of panniers, or side bags. As soon as I get a bike, I get a rack for the back, one that supports itself off of the rear hub, and attach water proof panniers. The top of the rack will allign with filled panniers to create a very stable, broad surface to stack extra bags or boxes that can be secured with bungee cords.

The addition of a small backpack or messenger bag adds even more dimension. When commuting to work, I can fit a small lap top, change of clothes, shoes, food, and some tools with spare inner tubes in the panniers, leaving me unencumbered by a bag. The weight of a bag is uncomfortable for rides any longer than about 8 miles, and they also leave a giant wet spot on your back that you may find unpleasant.

To get to the store and back with $100 worth of groceries is quite feasible with two panniers and a well packed back pack. You can maximize space by eschewing grocery bags, the added volume of 10 grocery bags in a filled to capacity pannier is substantial and completely non-functional.

If you are concerned about hygiene, panniers are also a great place to store deodorant, alcohol wipes (which kill odor producing bacteria), and other affectations.

For regular commutes, obvious strategies for minimizing pannier weight present themselves immediately - like storing work shoes, spare changes of clothes and a large towel with soap in some office nook or cranny. Many corporate office buildings have shower facilities that no one or few people use, ask a maintenance or grounds person about the situation at hand. I’ve had to take plenty of birdbaths in shower-less buildings.

Tools

I always keep some tools in my panniers. Allen wrenches, spare tubes, and tire changing tools are a must. I also keep extra spokes and a spoke wrench, but that is because I tend to tear my wheels up and break spokes all the time. They are small and easy to tape inside a seat post or some other out of the way place. The tools add noticeable weight, but are worth it. One barrier to increasing a comfort zone is a fear of breaking down. The more mechanical issues you can handle without getting to the shop, the farther you can comfortably go. L:earning to patch and fix a tire is essential.

I was riding a century once and broke my front derailler about 20 miles in. The metal snapped and would not push the chain out to my big ring, which meant I would have a very low max speed on flats and down hills before I was spun out. Every pedal stroke I took made a horrible grinding sound as the chain scraped against one of the broken pieces, that kind of situation can quickly cascade into bigger breakdowns than losing half your gears, like losing all of them to a snapped chain.

I could have turned around, but I knew what to look for; plastic zip ties. They are about the most useful thing for make shift repairs or securing things to your bike that are around. I get lax about keeping a small supply on hand when I ride because I always see them on the side of the road. They fall off of utility trucks or from other people who carry them. I knew that if I looked for one, then I could tie off the offending piece of the derailler and save my chain. Within a mile, I found several lying in the dirt. I tied up and finished the ride, albeit without my monster gears.

I’ve had other occasions where there nothing to do but walk a non-functional bike 8 or 9 miles home, mostly due to rear derailler breakdowns and unfixable flats. The only fix for some situations is to try not to have a hard time of it and enjoy the walk. That’s all you can do if you don’t have a car.