Is it possible, even in a transit-dense urban area, to survive without a car? I posed this question to the girls in between bloody Marys at Sunday brunch last week. Alison, who doesn’t own a car, insisted that it was definitely possible. The rest of us were more than skeptical, recalling the number of times we had to shuttle Alison to the grocery store, garden center, and suburbs in general. But she insisted that her life was much easier without the hassles of car ownership. Does car-free equal carefree?

I thought back on my own car-owning history and tried to be unbiased in my analysis of the situation. Living in the District and hunting for unassigned parking spaces was frequently a nightmare, especially on busy Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Then, of course, there are the drivers’ license and registration renewal days (and I do mean days) spent sitting at the D.M.V. Nobody can argue with that. It’s a time issue. Not to mention the cost of insurance, parking and registration fees, upkeep, and gas (luckily my jalopy is all paid off)—a financial issue. But I weighed all this against the freedom I have to zip out to the suburbs for dinner with my parents or to drive across the Bay Bridge for a beach weekend without any advance planning. I couldn’t come up with an easy answer, so I hit the girls up for their opinions.

Stacey loved having the prestige of car ownership and frequently traded in (and up) for newer, sleeker, better-looking models. She also lives further out in the suburbs where owning a car is more of a necessity because she can’t walk to most places. Erika was practical about both sides of the argument, saying that she could go for weeks at a time without using her car but loved knowing she had it just in case she needed to hit Ikea or Costco on the weekends. And as mentioned, Alison, who lives in Arlington, had been happily car-free for nearly 4 years and had never looked back. She had a bike and memberships with both Flexcar and Zipcar, the two carsharing companies in the region, so she never had issues of being stranded (not to mention three very good friends who did have cars and were willing to ferry her places when necessary). All of us are lucky enough to work at places where our employers pay for us to get to work on transit, so that was an added free bonus. But that didn’t bring me any closer to the answer. When all was said and done, could I survive without a car or would I shrivel up and die, stranded in the urban desert?

The last test was to add up the cost of car ownership versus the cost of being vehicle-free. A quick rundown of costs for me (including a year of insurance, D.C. registration, parking permit, inspection, and a 4-year license) was around $1,350, excluding gas and wear and tear (not to mention tickets and other miscellaneous fees). If I were a Virginia resident, I’d have to contend with that pesky personal property tax everyone’s always up in arms about. Compare that with Alison’s annual fees of about $100 in bicycle maintenance and about $600 a year in carsharing fees. Not to mention the bribe dinners for her chauffer friends. That puts car ownership at nearly twice the cost of non-ownership (imagine the shopping sprees and extra pairs of shoes one could afford to buy simply by giving up a car!), but there is a certain price that one can’t put on the freedom of having a car at your disposal. Is it too much like a Mastercard commercial to say, “Owning a car: priceless,” or is it too high a price to pay?

Extra pairs of Manolos aside, the conclusion that I reached during this highly controlled experiment is that the “necessity” of owning a car is purely subjective. For those like Alison, being a responsible citizen and forgoing car ownership is more appealing, in addition to the savings where her Christian Dior pocketbook is concerned. For me and many others, the freedom of having a car is unsurpassed by our need for swanky shoes. The bottom line is that those who own cars can choose to act responsibly, taking transit whenever possible and using them for only long-distance trips. Car-free may not exactly equal carefree, but ownership doesn’t always have its privileges, either.