Brad Dunn's essay on his slow journey to his current happy car free life, in part 1 Brad buys his first car and learns the delights of Scooters...

I grew up in Sorrento, Western Australia. At the time, it was a suburb of sand and large scale developments. My neighbour Daniel and I could often be found next door in a large construction site, throwing yellow boondies at one another in a child-like war.

My parents drove me around, to roller-hockey, basketball, the Deli my father owned, and my friend Neil's  house in Greenwood. I understood from a very early age that my world heavily relied on my mother's 86 Toyota Corona, which I would evidently, at the age of eighteen, smash into a construction worker whilst running a red light in East Perth.

The beauty of cars, it seems, is they only kill about 40,000 Americans a year. If that many people died from a terrorist attack, people would lose their minds.

The fear of dying in a car accident isn’t why I abandoned them. In fact, at first, I embraced the dangers of the road lovingly.

My mother's 86 Corona sat out the front of my apartment in Kensington, with its bonnet lid bent like a steel tissue, dripping oil on the road. I was in a firm bind. I was working in I.T. and a requirement of the job was that I could travel to customers to re-install printers.

My father drove me around to some car yards in Victoria Park until we found something suitable. It was a navy blue, 96 Honda Civic hatch back, that looked fairly well maintained apart from some less-than-legal window tinting. We negotiated with the shady looking Greek salesman, who as it turned out, didn’t rip me off. Three days later I had my first bank loan, $18,000. I was 20 years old.

At the time I earned $52,000 a year. If you included the money I paid in fuel, fixing my brakes, and the insurance, which was expensive because of my age, that little blue car consumed about half my income. But hey, at least I had my freedom.

Although it seems quite high now, I chose the price of my car by investigating the car repayments and incomes of my co-workers. As it turns out, my car, and subsequent car loan, was probably the most frugal by comparison.

After a few years of driving around, gaining no traction financially, wondering why I was selling my awesome petrol-powered remote control car, because I had no money to take girls on dates, I decided enough was enough, and I would rid myself of my car forever.

My friend Warwick moved to London, and told me I could use his Vespa scooter while he was gone. I bought it for $3,000, and five weeks later, I sold it and bought my first Korean motorcycle.

As you can imagine, my mother was horrified. I had no car, just my 250cc motorcycle, and the thoughts of rain and Perth’s dangerous roads were always on my mother's mind. Another thing she probably thought about was the time she also ran a red light and hit a motorcyclist. My sisters and I, who were in the back of the car eating Hungry Jacks, were very alarmed. The motorcyclist was fine, but understandably, pretty annoyed. I was nearly six years old.

My father called me a temporary Australian every chance he could, to which I replied with adorable comments about death toll rates and the dangers of cars, and how I was no safer in a car than I was on my motorcycle. Either way, I loved that motorcycle immensely, and still think fondly of those days. It reinvented the way I interacted with the road, and, the way I thought about travel.

On New Year's Eve, some horrible person stole it from the front of my house, and to make matters worse the Insurance Company put me through a rough-housing so appalling, I’ve never been able to trust the industry ever since. When I spoke of how awfully the insurance company treated me to the man at the motorcycle shop who sold me the bike, he laughed, and told me they did the very same thing to him several months before when one of their bikes was stolen. “They didn’t know my wife worked for their company, either.” he said. The motorcycle shop was the largest dealer for the insurance company in the state at the time. “Apparently,” he said, “that’s just how they operate.”

I had a choice to make. I needed to work, and without transport I’d lose my job. So, I bought a faster motorcycle, something that did a fearful speed in third gear. It terrified me, but, like my first motorcycle, it had a mysterious power and I loved it like a Cuban woman. It was a life changing machine, and spiritually, it moved me.

Something I took into consideration when I bought the two motorcycles was how cheap they were to run. It cost me seven dollars in fuel each week. The idea of saving money was intoxicating, and ignoring the fact the insurance cost me three times as much as my car, negating any saving I might have actually made, the concept of paying less for transport was a beautiful one, and one I realised would come to play a large part in my life moving forward.