Manuel Egea has been taking classes at ASU since the summer of 2005. He has yet to see Glendale, Tucson, the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas. On most days, he's just worried about getting from his Tempe apartment to campus.
Egea, a graduate student from Spain, cannot afford a car, so he relies on a bike to get around, and that makes him an anomaly in a place as spread out and car-dependent as the Valley of the Sun.
Phoenix, with its endlessly expanding suburbs covering 500 square miles, is the epitome of the American car culture. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Phoenix-Mesa census area has 1.67 vehicles per household, close to the average for the United States as a whole. The average time spent commuting to work is 26.1 minutes, slightly above the national average.
The Valley has no major public transportation system to speak of, other than the Valley Metro bus service, which only a small fraction of the population ever uses. Cabs? There are hardly any outside of the airports. Bikes? Think mainly Tempe.
Alight rail project is under construction and is expected to be completed in December of 2008. But the initial route will cover only 20 miles through the cities of Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa.
With that kind of transportation picture, it's only the rare sturdy soul who tries to survive in the Valley without a car. But we did find a few, most of whom live car-less out of necessity -- and one rare soul who claims there's more to life than a red Mustang.
These are their stories.
Valley Metro - No Way!
Russell Hulse picks up a packet of Cheetos, gum and a gallon of water at a QuikTrip near the 101 and Broadway in Tempe. He heads back to his girlfriend's house a stone's throw away in his 1991 champagne Acura Integra. The ASU mathematics junior has just parked the car when he notices the police car with the lights flashing. The officer tells him he failed to use his blinker while backing out of the QuikTrip and that he was driving too fast.
The officer administers a breathalyzer test and the couple of beers Hulse has had earlier that evening show up at a .04-blood alcohol concentration level, about half the legal limit of .08. But Hulse is only 20, and driving a motor vehicle under the age of 21 with any trace of alcohol in your system is against Arizona law.
He gets the ticket and an automatic two-year suspension of his driver's license. That was in November 2004, and Hulse still can't drive.
"It hurt real bad," says Hulse, now 21. He's sitting inside Einstein Bros. Bagels at ASU on a balmy Wednesday afternoon. "It just sucks to be stuck in Phoenix without a car. Anywhere but here."
Hulse lives only about a mile from campus, so he rides his red-and-black Schwinn beach cruiser to and from classes.
Getting all the way to north Scottsdale to Charleston's Restaurant, where he works as a server three times a week, is much harder. Some of his friends who live in Tempe and work at the same restaurant end up giving him a ride on most days.
"But there are days when I make phone calls from morning till afternoon trying to get someone to pick me up, and it doesn't work out," Hulse says. "So I have to call my manager and tell him I won't be able to make it."
He tried taking a bus last winter to attend a class at Mesa Community College but gave it up quickly. He says that half the time the bus was late by 20 to 30 minutes or it just wouldn't show up, and he'd end up waiting an hour for the next one. "So either I'd be really late or too early for class because I'd take the 9:15 bus instead of 10:15 to be on the safer side," he says.
Many commuters, including Hulse, say the Valley's bus service is inadequate. Buses run every 15 minutes during peak hours and every 20 to 30 minutes during off-peak hours. Morning routes generally start between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., but late-night travel is tough since most buses make their last trip between 9 p.m. and 10.
Not that he would use the bus, but the dating scene for Hulse is not going very well either. "It's such a bummer. I try to joke about it, telling the girls you'll have to drive around -- something to break the ice, to let them know I don't have a license," he says.
He wishes there were more options to get around town. "The light rail is hardly going to connect people," he says. "They would need to expand farther than 20 miles for that to happen."
Hulse plans to drive his friends around the day he gets his license back, in April 2007. "This is a lesson learned for life, man," he says. "And to think it was all for water and some flamin' hot Cheetos!"
Money, money, money
For 26-year-old Alisha Allston, it's not a license that's the problem, it's the car.
She simply can't afford one. Her parents won't give her the money to buy one "because they think I should be supporting myself at this age."
Shakespeare is the last thing this English Literature senior has on her mind on a recent Thursday afternoon as she gets ready to take Route No. 30 on the Valley Metro to the ASU campus.
It's noon and she has to catch the bus at 12:30 p.m. to reach the University Testing Services office, where she works as an office assistant, by 1 p.m. The job pays for most of her tuition and living expenses.
The bus stop is a brisk 10-minute walk from her apartment and she needs to get going. But somewhere amidst the dozens of unpacked cartons, sci-fi books and "Farscape" DVDs, an opened jar of peanut butter and a few stuffed toys in the two-bedroom apartment she shares with her boyfriend, she's misplaced two things she "simply cannot leave home without," her wallet and sunglasses. If she misses her bus, she'll have to wait 30 minutes for the next one.
She manages to find the elusive goods, tucks them safely inside her green backpack, jogs down three floors of stairs, walks past the purple pansies near the entrance of her sprawling apartment complex and crosses an industrial and dusty part of town to reach the shiny green benches at the bus stop just in time.
"When I or these buses aren't running late, I quite enjoy the ride," she says.
Allston's grateful it's one of those days when things fall into place. She wishes she still had her 10-speed black Raleigh bike to ride to campus, but it is temporarily out of service.
"I was at my friend Sarah Macias's place on Wednesday night after school, and we were just sitting in the living room, hanging out, when we heard a loud soda can pop-like explosion from behind," she says. "We turned around and figured it could only have been the tire on my bike that was also in the living room. Sure enough, it had blown a flat."
She got the tire fixed - walking it to a bicycle repair shop in Tempe - but then got the wheel back only as far as her apartment. Her bike - sans one wheel - is still at Sarah's.
But riding a bike has its own hazards, Allston says. A few months ago, she was hit by a guy in a truck while on her way to campus. "I was totally shaken up, although I didn't get hurt too badly."
She hates riding the bike in bad weather; when the rain hits her glasses, she's "effectively blind."
She also claims there are some rather unpleasant cart drivers on campus who think it's fun to splash people on bikes.
Allston would buy a car if she could, but the cost of gas, car insurance and other maintenance expenses are just too high for the $200 she has left over after rent and utilities.
"I did own a 1987 white Pontiac Grand Am about five years ago, but it was wrecked by my younger brother," she says. That was followed by a 1991 Ford Explorer, which she used to drive to an arboretum at Flagstaff, where she volunteered. But her brother, who worked as a used car salesman at the time, convinced their parents to trade the Explorer in for a pickup truck "with terrible brakes." Barely a week after the trade-in, she was involved in a collision. "That was the end of me having a car," she says.
Allston says people who have cars just don't realize how difficult it is to live without one. Take grocery shopping, for example. "I end up buying basics like milk on campus, which turns out to be so much more expensive," she says.
Trike? Trikke?
Brett Breitwieser, 58, likes to roam about town on his own terms. He stands on his trikke, places his left foot on one pedal, his right on the other, gets his balance, then curves his body sideways -- first left, then right. In that one gentle motion, the three-wheeled scooter glides forward on the concrete road outside his north Phoenix residence on a recent breezy Friday.
His 6-foot, 1-inch, 240-pound frame looks unwieldy on the delicate scooter, but he peddles deftly. "Jennifer Aniston owns one too," Breitwieser says, not noticing a child who throws a curious glance at him from the otherwise empty street.
"I'm probably one of five people I know who rides one of these in this city," he adds. But he doesn't see why more people shouldn't switch to this environmentally friendly, human-powered vehicle, which he refers to as his "dry land skis."
Breitwieser, a devout Buddhist, refuses to drive a car. "I've always had trouble with them, whenever I've owned one," he says.
An Internet Tech Support Specialist, he works from home for Surfnet, a telecommunication services provider, helping clients over the phone or via e-mail.
He has three trikkes, the most expensive one was $450. Breitwieser says the polyurethane wheels of the one he's riding this morning are good for smooth tracks. But he also needs one with rubber tires to go across dirt tracks.
And do people notice him? "Oh yeaaaaah," he drawls. "What is that freak riding?! How much is it for? Where do you buy one?"
Some people are amused, Breitwieser says. "They see this funny old guy with a grey beard riding a scooter. What's to hate?"
Even his sister, Becky O'Loughlin, thinks he's a nutcase, he says. "But she's seen me my whole life. I'm a walker, and she supports that."
Born in Ohio, Breitwieser's childhood love for nature meant walking across the woods to school, which later progressed to a hitchhike all the way to San Francisco with 50 cents in his pocket.
"My mother used to say she'd either find me in the library or in the woods," he says.
Breitwieser wishes more people would get out of their cars, an opinion he shares on trikke group lists and websites, including www.carfree.com.
"People out there are crazy, driving fast on the Phoenix freeways. It's utter madness, people honking at each other," he says. "Driving a car means you are susceptible to road kill, plus look at how much you're polluting the environment."
Three years ago, Breitwieser, whose wife died of cancer when his daughter, Alia, was 3 years old, moved from Santa Cruz, Calif., to his sister's and brother-in-law's Phoenix home.
He hadn't owned a vehicle in nearly 12 years, but his sister told him he would have to buy a car to live in Phoenix. He reluctantly agreed and bought a Toyota pickup truck, taking out a $5,000 loan from his father that he's still paying off. "I drove the truck for three months and was like 'Are you kidding me?' he says. The car always needed maintenance and was chewing up a lot of money, so he got rid of it.
After taking a business call that last about 10 minutes, he decides it's time for a break. "Cars end up owning you," he says, firmly placing a brown cowboy hat on his head and setting out for El Paso Bar.B.Que for a "big Texas-style lunch."
"Phoenix is schizophrenic. It's a classic suburban sprawl, and yet most people don't realize it has the best canal system," he says, as he walks past an old picket fence.
Breitwieser used to take his recumbent trike -- which, unlike the trikke, has a reclining seat -- to Tempe or to the Biltmore to check out its "fancy Southwestern and Asian restaurants." It was a 30-minute to 45-minute pedal along the canal route.
But now he has narrowed his sphere. "Everything I need is right around here. There's a Target, a Denny's, a Chinese buffet run by my friend Francisco," he says with a smile, revealing a hint of gaps in his teeth. He goes to a nearby Trader Joe's for groceries nearly every day; he likes his food fresh.
His daughter, Alia, a Chinese Literature major at Reed College in Portland, Ore., thinks of her dad as "quite the character." But she's taken to his lifestyle, especially his love for walking. "Driving has thus far seemed more a hassle to me than it's worth, although I must admit, at times having a car is necessary," she writes in an email from China, where she's currently on an exchange program.
Alia says she can't stand the climate and lack of trees in Phoenix after growing up in California. But when she visits, she enjoys walking with her dad. "I've managed to enjoy a few summer thunderstorms and blooming plants and the (very) occasional cool breezes that manage to make their way up the canal from God knows where in the middle of July," she writes.
At the restaurant, Breitwieser swirls tortilla chips into a warm spinach, artichoke, green chili and parmesan dip as he waits for the beef ribs. He almost died of congestive heart failure in 1992. He had gone up to 280 pounds but is now at 240. That's one of the reasons he likes his new lifestyle. "I need to lose another 30 pounds and walking or the trikke are great exercise," he says.
At the end of the meal, he says, "See, I feel like I've earned my calories."
The one hurdle, if at all, is finding a life partner. "Who would cope with me? Tell someone to walk? In Phoenix? I'm out there on my trikke in 110 to 115 degrees. Who'd put up with me is my question!"
Conquering the road
There's plenty of construction going on at the southwest corner of Rural and Apache on a busy Wednesday morning in Tempe.
If he'd had to navigate past the big yellow trucks, orange cones and construction workers just a few months ago, Viktor Donevski, 25, would have found it daunting. Now, the visiting Macedonian journalist has become accustomed to taking his bike pretty much anywhere.
"I used to get scared of the traffic and even physically uncomfortable on the bike seat in the beginning," he says, as he rides past 3 Margaritas restaurant on his blue Falcon Sunlite bike. He's on his way to an Osco Drug Store to pick up some travel essentials for a spring break trip to Hawaii with some other European students. He's glad he doesn't have to carry heavy-duty items such as milk or potatoes, "which can be a challenge."
For this U.S. Department of State scholar and television news anchor in Macedonia, being confined to areas where he can easily bike makes him feel constricted in ways he's never experienced before.
With high insurance costs and gas prices hovering at $3 a gallon when he came here in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Donevski decided to try living without a car.
Back home, he always preferred reporting to anchoring "because I don't like to stay in a studio all day. I have more opportunities to travel as a reporter," he says. "I used my car (Opel Astra) for everything in my country. I have been driving it to work, outside, everywhere for the last six or seven years. So it's been really difficult when I come here."
For the first two weeks, his entire body was sore from riding a bike again after many years.
Then there was the Phoenix weather to cope with. "Terrible hot!" he says. "I thought I was in hell, and for the first three nights I couldn't sleep, even with air-conditioning."
As he meanders through each of the 10 aisles at Osco, picking up band-aids, a small bottle of moisturizer and store-brand cotton swabs, Donevski says he's happy about one thing, especially since he's heading to the beach: "I've lost 15 pounds ever since I came here -- from 180 to 165," he says, smiling for the first time this morning. "All this biking and walking is of some use!"
Just how confident he is on a bike becomes evident when, on the way back to campus, he passes the construction site using the left-hand lane. "I do it all the time," he says, dismissively. "No one catches you."
As he heads to the Stauffer Building for a lecture, he mentions that his first name is spelled with a "K," not "C."
"It's different in Europe," he says, "just like my life there."
Longing for transportation
Spanish journalist Egea gave up his Peugeot 106 for the life of a student at ASU.
He sold the car two years ago for $500 so he could come to the United States and pursue a master's degree in Spanish Literature.
A reporter for a Spanish news agency, Egea wanted to continue his journalistic work in the United States as well, and at first, that looked feasible. He landed internships at the Dallas Morning News in Texas and at La Voz, a Spanish-language newspaper in Phoenix. But then he realized there was a problem: no car.
"Can you imagine trying to reach the La Voz office 45 minutes away from campus, then moving around Phoenix as a journalist without a car, trying to do reporting and interviews and then going back to the newsroom to write the stories, over and above coming back and teaching my two Spanish classes, plus taking my own classes and then studying for them?" he says in a rush.
If he only had a car, he says, "I would be able to accept internships. I would meet people in journalism."
Egea says there's no comparison between public transportation in Phoenix and in Spain. "There we have buses every two to three minutes. Boom! Boom! Not like here, where you have to wait so long."
According to ASU's Office of Institutional Analysis, there were 3,055 international students at ASU in the fall of 2005. Some manage to buy second-hand cars, but many, like Donevski and Egea, rely on bikes, the Neighborhood Flash or friends with cars.
Egea's mode of transportation usually involves his red-and-blue Roadmaster mountain bike, which he uses to get to and from classes.
His gelled hair shows a few white strands of hair, a sign that he turns 30 in June. "I've had a car in Europe since I was 21 and now, nearly nine years later, to become a student again and use a bike and the lifestyle associated with that, I hate it," he says.
Egea has managed to do some traveling even though he remains car-less. He's been to Mexico three times and went to Michigan last November through a travel grant. He also plays soccer and found himself on a bus to Los Angeles with the ASU soccer team.
"But I haven't even been to Glendale yet," he says, "or Tucson or Grand Canyon or Vegas."
He's thinking about moving to the East Coast, to a city like New York or Boston, where he could live more easily without a car.
"I want to be able to use a tube, a bus, a truck, anything!" he says.
Reach the reporter at sonu.munshi@asu.edu.
