Changing diapers for two beautiful babies several times per night is one of my new joyful challenges these days. But being a father of newborn twins is also forcing me to revisit many of my views and habits with regard to alternative transportation. Completely avoiding driving with two newborns would involve substantial sacrifices. Transit doesn’t directly serve my low-density residential Greenview neighborhood very frequently, so I usually rely on a bicycle to get around town and connect me to Redwood Transit Service to get to Eureka.

Unfortunately, bikes don’t fly with newborns. State law requires all children below the age of 18 to wear helmets on bikes. Infants cannot control the movement of their head very well, so strapping on a helmet would not be good for their neck. They would have a hard time with the vibration in the trailer anyway. So I’m guessing we’ll have to wait until they’re a year or 15 months old before towing them around in the bike trailer. Maybe someday someone will design and market some sort of suspended full body cocoon that is properly certified so parents can transport their little ones in a safe and comfortable way on a bike trailer.

Because she had to go through the whole pregnancy and labor thing, my wife had to curtail her biking way before the twins’ coming. She lost some of her sense of balance in the later stages of pregnancy, and eventually got prescribed mandatory bed rest to prevent pre-term labor. She is still recovering from the whole labor experience now, so the farthest we can walk together is a few blocks. And since the kids need to eat every two hours, they can’t stray far from mommy. That means we pretty much have to drive to take them places right now.

An additional challenge is the land use decisions our region, and many others, have made with regard to siting health care facilities. Mad River Community Hospital is far from downtown. St. Joe’s is also off the beaten track in Eureka, far from the Redwood Transit bus route that runs from Arcata to Eureka. As we got closer to delivery time, I was dismayed to learn there is not a single pediatrician’s office in Arcata. This arrangement has led us to drive all over the northern part of the Humboldt Bay Area to get prenatal health care and care for our kids.

Talking to some of my neighbors with older kids, I realize that parental driving doesn’t necessarily diminish as they get older. Schools are becoming decentralized, with declining enrollment forcing public schools to consolidate. Many parents choose charter schools for their kids. This means schools are less neighborhood based. Children have to travel further making it less likely that their parents will be comfortable letting them walk or bike there. As more parents drive their kids, the streets near the school become a melee of traffic that can make it scary for parents of kids who do live close enough by to walk. As extra-curricular activities for kids get decentralized, the same thing can happen all over again. My neighbor has to drive his daughter to McKinleyville to play soccer, even though part of the league plays at a field a few blocks from his house.

So parenting can mean driving seems more necessary. But there is a dichotomy for me. I would drive my kids anywhere if necessary, but my kids will inherit the world which all this driving is impacting. So as all this driving associated with parenting spirals out of control, my desire to reduce automobile dependency in our community and get our family to drive less only gets stronger. I want my kids to live in a world where they can move about safely on their own at a young age, where expensive gasoline hasn’t paralyzed our economy, where the air is still clean and where climate change effects aren’t too disastrous. I want to be able to look them in the eye when they grow up to see the good and the bad we have made as a society, and tell them we tried to make it the best we could.

Chris Rall is executive director of Green Wheels (green-wheels.org), sits on the Arcata Transportation Safety Committee and is the proud papa of two beautiful babies.