Cars: To buy or not to buy..

We got carried away when we arrived and bought one of those Jeep Wranglers that were really cool about twenty years ago. The first pictures are from when we were happy saps with our new car and with its roof off in the summer. The next photo is of the car being towed away after it basically fell apart on the side of the road on Vancouver Island a few months later. It was fun while it lasted. Which was about four months.

If you live in downtown Vancouver you don’t really need a car. The city is small enough that you can walk to most places and its pretty bike friendly too (not to mention rollarblades but I won’t judge…). Public transport is quite good, the buses are pretty frequent and full of interesting characters and the skytrain (a flamboyant name for a 1980s monorail) takes you out east if you are so inclined. I’ve been on it once and that was plenty for me.

But given that you will be a bit of a tourist for the first while you will probably want to be going places and seeing things and a car is pretty handy for the odd epic adventure. So here are some options to consider

Zip Car and Co-Op Cars
There are two interesting services to make note of over here that act as decent substitutes to owing a car.
1. Co-op cars
2. Zip cars.

I don’t know much about the former but I was a Zip Car member for a while. Basically you pay about $50 to join which means you have access to Zip Cars in your neighbourhood (or anywhere in the world for that matter). You go online, put in your location and the length of time you need a car and the kind of car you want, and it calculates your options. The average cost of a car is about $12 per hour (approx) depending on whether you want a trusty Nissan or a funky Mini or a family car of sorts. It’s pretty handy if you need a car for a couple of hours on weeknights, but beware that we ended up cancelling our memberships because it became so popular that it was pretty hard to get a car if you didn’t book it well in advance (we tended to wake up on a Saturday and decide we wanted a car in an hour which proved to be wishful thinking)

Renting
You can rent cars all over downtown, they do good weekend packages and some even do monthly packages (or at least they did when the car industry was taking a battering)

Buying
Cars are easy to buy here and they are pretty affordable. You can buy a car in the morning, drive to the insurance company get it insured and have it home by lunchtime. The ICBC (Insurance Corporation of British Columbia) is a good thing, because unlike Ireland where all insurance companies are independent meaning you get a variety of quotes per dealer, the inusrance system is centralised over here, so your quote will be the same no matter what dealer you go to. Its nice that the system is so transparent.

If you want to take advantage of the no claims bonus, you will need to get your insurance company to fax the relevant documents to your insurance dealer here. Otherwise you pay a tonne extra.

Insurance is pretty pricey though so that can make owning a car difficult, even if the car itself doesn’t cost much. Check out Craigslist to get an idea of prices.


Parking
Parking is damn expensive in this city. And they tow you and ticket you the way the Irish clamp you. If parking isn't included in your monthly rent, a space can cost anywhere from about $50 to $150 a month. So just keep that one in mind.

Borrow mine.
Audrey the Audi sits outside our house looking for love and attention, and somebody to clean all the segul shit off her windows.