What would it take for me to give up the car?

Apparently, Canadians are reluctant to give up driving. This does not come as a surprise. But for someone who considers herself an environmentalist, I have to say that I drive, and much more that I'd like to admit.

So what would it take for me to give it up?

First, I have to figure out when, where and why I drive. Most of my driving is as a mom's taxi service, or spent running errands.
My oldest son is now independent enough to take transit to get to his programs, so this helps reduce driving, but the younger one is still too young to do this on his own, so I need to drive him, or have all of us pile onto transit.
Why don't I do this? Occasionally I do, but usually I opt to drive. It is faster. It is cheaper than transit tickets for 2 or 3 of us (we have a Honda Insight which does 4.6 litres/100km). And it is more flexible--while the kids are in programs, I use it to run errands, usually grocery shopping and library runs.

Once ever two weeks we travel out of town for music lessons with a fantastic teacher. We have decided to stop this next year and try harder to find a compatible local teacher.

There are also inter-city trips for tournaments and meets, at times when inter-city transit doesn't work. Carpooling sometimes works, but there is no one close to us to share the daily trips.

Grocery shopping is a whole other source of inefficiency. In order to shop for local organic produce, we often make 2-3 trips a week to various stores. The travel is still less than getting produce from Mexico, Argentina, South Africa or New Zealand, but it still isn't ideal. The most reliable source is a farm that is far from local transit lines. We grow some of our own, but we have a small lot, so we still depend on others for most of our food.

We also like to do wilderness trips. True, we could rent a vehicle for those trips, and in the past when we have been car-less, we have done just that. But since we have a car, we use it for these trips.
So many people drive up to cottage country each weekend, surely we can find a way to make this more efficient. The traffic on the 400/11 should alone be incentive.

My DH cycles to work most days, and takes transit or the car on the others. We own one car, and belong to a car share which we don't tend to use very often. Since our city isn't large, transit can take an hour or more to travel 10 km. It's great for catching up on reading, but not so much if you are running late for a meeting.

My mom never drove when I was a kid, and we relied on transit for all but emergencies, in which case we took taxis. I remember having lots of free time as a kid too, so it couldn't have been as much of a time drain as it would seem on the surface. Of course, then there were strip plazas and smaller neighbourhood stores and amenities, instead of the box-store and mega-centre culture that has recently taken over. Perhaps part of the solution is to create self-sufficient neighbourhoods once again.

So, cheaper and more reliable transit, better inter-city service, better neighbourhood planning, and a calmer, less rushed mindset are what it would take for me to completely abandon the car. It's really, not much considering the environmental costs.

How about you? Could you, would you give up your car?