I accomplished something pretty exciting this weekend...I bought a car! I've been car-less for the past 2 years and I will admit that I have very rarely missed having a car. I live about 500 metres away from the NS station in my town and though most Dutch people think it sucks, I've found public transportation in Holland to be generally reliable. The way the town is set up where I live, it's actually easier and quicker to do errands such as grocery shopping with the bike. Everything is so close by that it actually took me about a year before I even bought myself a bike. At first I just walked everywhere, and it was actually very do-able.
There were some other barriers that kept me from running out and buying a car. I find driving in the Netherlands to be scarier than driving in Canada. This is of course ridiculous, because I am used to driving through blizzards, on super busy 4 lane highways, through downtown Toronto etc, etc....but somehow the narrow streets here with cyclists flying by are scarier for me. I also wasn't used to driving a car with a manual transmission. I didn't learn to do that until I met my boyfriend, who such a car. I found it super scary to learn, which I know is also silly, but am proud of myself for pushing myself to do it.
However, when it came time to buy my very own car, I decided it should be an automatic. Why? Because I am lazy, and I don't want to be stressing out about shifting gears on the way to work in the morning! In researching cars, I became aware of the existence of "wegenbelasting" (road tax). The more fuel efficient a car is, the lower the road tax. I initially thought the Toyota Aygo would be a good option....they make a car with a quasi-automatic transmission which is "wegenbelasting vrij" (no road tax), but I eventually decided against it. Instead I will be buying something which has a pretty low monthly road tax payment, but feels a little more solid. And of course, is AUTOMATIC!
I'm excited to start driving on Dutch roads in my very own car!
Congrats on the new car! I remember the initial few months when we did not have a car in the Netherlands, and surprisingly did not miss it enough - thanks to the public transport and the bike culture, as well as because of another option of Greenwheels - it is a kind of car sharing pool in the Netherlands, and proved very useful for out of city journeys.
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