One of the reasons that my husband and I will never have any money is that we make living in a cycling/walking friendly area a priority. Actually, it's not the reason we will never have any money; it's just the reason that we live in an old house that isn't really big enough for us. But neither of us is willing to commute by car, which limits his job options and pretty much keeps him in the public sector instead of out there making a kajillion dollars and buying me $5,000 bikes. My office is probably going to move in the next four years, and that means I will be looking for a new job or going into private practice. I am just not willing, as long as I have any choice at all, to get in a car and drive every day.

I get a lot of "you guys are so lucky!" from coworkers and relatives, but that irritates me a little. We bought our house when prices were really cheap in this area, but the neighborhood was also a little crappy. We were just very committed to living here. Many of my coworkers used to live in this area, but as they made more money and started families, they moved to the nicer suburbs, and now they spend two hours every day in their cars. Choices.

When I was a kid my parents chose to move to the country, to an area where it was seven miles to the grocery store (but my mother usually drove fifty miles to buy her groceries at the Air Force commissary instead, because it was cheaper) and forty miles to my dad's job. The reason I never rode a bike as a kid is that we weren't allowed to ride on the roads because of all the drunk farm kids and the huge semis on our roads. If my parents couldn't drive us somewhere, we were stuck at home.

When I grew up and moved to the city (first Los Angeles, then Davis and eventually to Sacramento), I learned very quickly what I wanted out of my adult life: I wanted to be able to walk to the grocery store and to restaurants and theaters, and most of all to my job. I have commuted on foot or by bike since 1992 and I don't intend for that to change. When we were buying a house, we didn't look at a single house that was not walking or biking distance to my job and to the area where my husband is likely to work for most of his career.

We occasionally talk about moving out of state, but this is always the priority: we have to be able to do almost everything we need to do by walking or by biking. Period. Life is too short to spend it stuck in traffic.