Post-Car Adventuring is about getting outside of your city by a more enjoyable and social means than driving. It is a better way to travel and explore your region.

As a practice and means of travel, Post-Car Adventuring began in 2008 with the idea to synthesize the principles of bicycle camping and hiking—sometimes even just plain old walking—with the use of transit (buses, trains, ferries) to make travel without a car an easier experience. We seek to inspire and foster a culture of travel via foot, bicycle and public transportation that enables persons already using these modes of transportation in their cities and towns to extend their application beyond their normal bounds.

Post-Car Adventuring is aimed at would-be weekend car campers, newbie bike tourists, experienced bike tourists, day hikers, backpackers, anyone who wants to discover a new mode of travel and adventure. At an even larger level, the project’s intended audience is the large group of urbanites who rarely need and use a personal automobile in the city but continue to own a car because they perceive it it as a necessity for rural and wilderness trips. In this way, Post-Car Adventuring is one more component of the livable streets movement in American cities. 

In 2010 we published Post-Car Adventuring: The San Francisco Bay Area [link to store], a guidebook that shares ours and others’ experiences and passion for this freer and more spontaneous kind of travel. The trips detailed and described here and in our book provide inspiration, ideas, and information for car-free trips to (mostly natural) areas commonly thought be to inaccessible without a personal automobile. We are interested not only in redefining and rethinking traditional outdoor guidebooks and recreation, but also in testing and developing new strategies and rhetoric for environmental reform and action.

Post-Car Adventuring is not about ideological, environmental asceticism or toeing the line of anti-car militancy. Instead, our goal is a more environmentally and socially-responsible practice, in-line with what the environmental philosopher Kate Soper terms a ‘hedonistic environmentalism,’ where human happiness and comfort are key ingredients of environmental ethics and action. Post-Car Adventuring is about gaining things rather than giving them up.

We are interested not only in redefining and rethinking traditional outdoor guidebooks and recreation, but also in testing and developing new strategies and rhetoric for environmental reform and action. 

View our San Francisco Bay Area Trips →
Coming Soon! Hartford, Connecticut → and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania →

Read about the people behind Post-Car Adventuring →