PITTSBURGH — At 67, Stuart Strickland is on his fifth unicycle. Two of them he wore out entirely. And the other three — a 20-inch, 24-inch, and 29-inch — are parked in his McCandless, Pennsylvania, home, still ready for action.

They join a motorcycle, a Scoobi scooter, three bicycles and a good pair of walking shoes as his primary modes of transportation. For longer distances, he takes public transit. On some occasions, he drives a 2011 Nissan Versa.

Since the oil price shock of the first Gulf War, Strickland has weaned himself and his family off gasoline to a greater extent than one might expect for a suburban household. He credits the move for being able to pay off his mortgage eight years early and becoming debt free in his 50s. He still logs every time he fills up his car, just as he used to do when the gas price shocks from the 1973 oil embargo and, later, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, changed how a generation viewed their relationship to cars.

Strickland isn’t a casual “car-lite” commuter. He’s methodical about making it work and vocal about his successes.

“My life's goal is to make it possible for people to get around using anything but a car,” his Facebook description reads.

For years, he’s told his story on his blog, called Anything But the Car, on social media, at Pittsburgh Regional Transit meetings, at Bike PGH events, and anywhere the situation presents itself.

When gas prices hit $4 in 2008, Strickland told his car mechanic that a bike was the obvious alternative.

When a conversation about how to lug four people and tons of hockey equipment to an ice rink in the suburbs came up in December 2010, Strickland warned: “Pick your hobbies and their locations wisely.”

“Over the last 40 years, though, we've seen many occasions where fuel prices spike, retreat, then settle at a much higher plateau than before,” he wrote in 2010. “After each spike, we get used to the new plateau and life continues unchanged. There is nothing to suggest this will not happen again.”

Strickland’s prediction has already come true since his writing. Last week, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in Pittsburgh exceeded $4, according to AAA. Gas prices at the pump are determined in large part by the price of oil, which is traded globally and spent the week hovering around $100 per barrel.

On Feb. 27, the day before the U.S. and Israel began the war on Iran, oil was around $74 per barrel.

The process of ‘shedding cars’

A year ago, Pittsburgh drivers were paying around $3.50 per gallon to fill up. That 50 cent difference between then and now amounts to about $300 in additional gasoline costs for a typical household in this area, which, according to Census data compiled by the Chicago nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology, owns 1.78 cars and drives them 15,603 miles a year.

The organization’s Housing and Transportation Index estimates that it costs more than $10,000 a year to maintain and use a car in this region. Gas costs are a minority fraction of that number, around 20%.

Spikes in oil prices can produce two types of shocks: one to the wallet and one to the brain.

Some people may reevaluate their transportation options by paying attention to the price of gas at the pump. And some smaller subset of those people, like Strickland, may decide to rearrange their lives around avoiding cars as much as possible.

Strickland grew up “in the sticks” outside of Buffalo. His father often drove his motorcycle to work. The children drove it as well, from a young age.

When Strickland had just gotten his driver’s permit, the license plate number on the family car determined what days of the week he was eligible to buy gas at the gas station. Even and odd license plates split the week during the worst of the rationing after the 1973 oil price shock.

“You had to think about driving a car. That was the environment I came into (as a driver),” he said.

He bought his first car in college in 1979 — another price shock era — and, living at home, fuel costs became his primary expense, especially as he was driving 100 miles to see the woman he would later marry.

By the time Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Strickland, his wife, their newborn and an elderly aunt were living in New Stanton, four cars between three drivers. Strickland was doing a daily 50-mile roundtrip to Monroeville. His wife was putting about 90 miles on her car every day driving to Kennedy Township.

As the Middle East erupted in war, the price of oil spiked and gasoline prices rose, then plateaued at just above $1 per gallon for several years, before rising again.

That’s when Strickland said he began the process of “shedding cars.”

‘Much less maddening’ commute

The vehicle that left the household first was the aunt’s old Pontiac. The “behemoth van” went next.

Stickland noted that each time he got rid of a car, he had extra money in his pocket — $100 a month for each car shed, to be exact. When he enrolled in graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, he got a free bus pass and used it six times a day, to commute between home, work, and school.

When the couple moved to McCandless in 1991, they made sure to get a house near a bus stop. And for two decades, Strickland could leave his home and walk a few minutes to the Perry Highway bus. They had one car between them, driving, on average, about 15,000 miles a year.

The thing that gives Strickland street cred is that he lives in the suburbs, said Chris Sandvig, a long-time Pittsburgh transit advocate.

“He used to bike in from the North Hills everyday — that is nuts!” he said.

Sandvig, himself a frequent bike commuter and a commissioner at the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, has known Stickland for about a decade. They discovered that Strickland used to work for Sandvig’s father at Westinghouse because, despite the suburban sprawl, Pittsburgh is still a small town.

“I bet he has the same damn log book my dad did,” Sandvig said when told that Strickland continues to record his fuel purchases.

Sandvig grew up in Murrysville. He was and is an infrastructure nerd and is fascinated by all the things that go.

Though he’s spent years working in the pits at the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix because he’s that much of a car fan, Sandvig said he’s felt most free when he didn’t own a car, during most of his 40s.

“My commute is much less maddening when I am not behind the wheel,” he said. “I can take a nap on the bus. I can talk with my neighbor. I don’t think a lot of people appreciate that it’s not just to save money. There’s a social side to it.”

‘Anything but the car’

While there have been some studies showing an increase in transit ridership after oil price shocks, it’s more complicated than that.

Public transit isn’t available everywhere. Even in Pittsburgh, which has a better and older transit culture than similar cities, Sandvig said, service cuts have come in waves over the past two decades.

During major budget crises for transit, large employers go to Harrisburg with numbers in hand. Last year, Giant Eagle, Allegheny Health Network and Duolingo sent executives to testify before the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

Of the 450 employees at Duolingo’s East Liberty headquarters, most don’t drive to work, the company’s head of social impact, Kendra Ross, testified. They walk, bike and take public transit, she said. The company credits good PRT service in the east end with its ability to recruit talent to Pittsburgh, while maintaining offices in much more connected cities like San Francisco, New York and London.

Strickland has testified countless times about the impact of transit cuts on the region, and on his own life.

By 2011, the Perry Highway bus route that attracted the Stricklands to their location was eliminated. Now, it’s a four mile ride on a Scoobi scooter for Strickland to get to the park and ride where he catches the 8 Perrysville bus or the O1 express bus.

His advocacy of “anything but the car” has attracted fans and followers.

Former Post-Gazette cartoonist Rob Rogers once memorialized Strickland’s run in with the late Darlene Harris in 2017, when the City Councilwoman was caught on video telling a cyclist to “stay in the damn bike lane.”

Strickland, whose opening salvo was, “What is your problem?” caught the exchange with the body camera he had taken to wearing for just such occasions.

‘I’m petrified of driving’

Melissa Murphey found Strickland in the comment section of some online bike post and started to follow his detailed accounts of what buses he took and where he bicycled.

Murphey, a lab technologist at Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side, has been car-free her entire life. She never learned to drive.

“I’m petrified of driving,” she said. “I’m less afraid of driving my bike on the streets.”

She lives in Spring Hill and rides her bike for the less-than-mile commute to work everyday. When the streets are piled with snow, she walks. She’s surmised that it saves her about $12,000 a year — money she can use to travel to Europe.

Groceries and errands might require more stops, but it’s an exchange she said she’s happy to make. Friends and family sometimes offer rides. Cabs fill in late at night.

Murphey, 57, can visit her 89-year-old mother in Brighton Heights by bike, but she worries about what will happen when she gets older and can no longer ride.

“I don’t want to turn into a shut-in,” Murphey said. “I do not want to give up my independence.”

For all the credibility that Strickland’s suburban commute adds to his message, he too is thinking about how he’ll age in place in a house no longer easily accessible by public transit.

While it might be more practical for a retired couple reliant on public transportation to move into a more urban area with more of it, Strickland says it’s not really an option. Their house is paid off and selling it wouldn’t yield enough to cover Pittsburgh rent for very long.

“Aging boomers are stuck in houses they paid for (even after) they can’t drive. They’re stuck without transit,” he said.

Strickland likes the idea of driverless cars being deployed to ferry those stranded populations to park and rides and more transit-friendly areas.

For now, his Scoobi scooter does the job just fine — provided he carries an old android phone with him to unlock it using an app, no longer available for download.

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