Living without a car on the Wasatch Front means making choices.

Walk or ride? Bike if it's not snowing? Take a chance on the bus being on time, or catch an earlier one? And do I really need a whole cantaloupe at the grocery, or might I be better off lugging home a little carton of cut fruit?

The Tribune asked me to go without my Subaru for a week to help demonstrate just one of the hardships Utahns may face, willingly or by necessity, when personal budgets are tight. It seemed a simple enough assignment. I live and work in Salt Lake City with ready access to public transportation and an established habit of leaving the car home two or three workdays each week.

What I found during my experiment in the last week of January , though, was that it's everything but the commute -- the activities outside of work, the life stuff -- that makes getting around without wheels such a checklist of pros and cons.

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Monday » I leave home in east Liberty Park and walk several blocks to a bus stop across from a supermarket. Usually I could catch the bus within a half-block of home, but the 209 is on detour during 900 East road construction. A wet snow makes for slow going and an involuntary performance of the splits. The bus is on time. I pay the $2.25 fare, good for two hours, and the driver offers me a newspaper, which I decline because I plan to transfer to TRAX shortly.

Timing is crucial. If I get it right, transferring makes for a speedier commute. Today I get it wrong. I've turned a 40-minute, walk-and-ride 3.6 miles to work into a 50-minute bummer.

Coming home I catch the bus and stay on it. I try to read but get slight motion sickness -- something I wouldn't experience on the train. Once home, I rush to get ready for a trip to the gym, a couple of miles south in Sugar House. Soon the bus stops running every 15 minutes and goes hourly. I walk to the bus (my ticket still valid), ride to just south of 2100 South, walk a half-mile in the dark and mostly in a bike lane, constantly looking over my shoulder at the cars bearing down on me. One of the difficulties of riding the bus is what's there when you get off: no sidewalks or, just as often, walks made impassable by snow mounds.

At the gym I hit the treadmill, but then there's no time to add a routine swim if I'm going to catch the bus, so it's a quick shower and a hurried jog back to the stop.

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Tuesday » Again the driver offers me a newspaper, so I take it and ride all the way to work. Coming home in the evening I opt for TRAX and get a pleasant surprise from the automated ticket vendor on the platform. I feed it $2.25, but it spits back the quarter and prints my ticket anyway. Bonus!

Someone on the train smells overwhelmingly boozy, which really is about as bad as it gets on these trains. I've had riders in bigger cities grope me while pretending to sleep, or yell 15-minute stories about their actions on behalf of leprous children. Utahns usually stink courteously. I exhale and read a book.

There is no bus at the stop on 900 East when I leave the train, so I walk home, barely a mile. That proves wise, because the bus never passes me. It's cold outside.

My girlfriend, Cathy, decides to drive to the gym. The only ground rule for this experiment is that Cathy is free to drive whenever she wants, but not in any way that benefits me. I'm not up for another rush for the bus ride home, though, so I put on some long underwear and run the dog to and around Liberty Park instead.

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Wednesday » Finding blueberries in the freezer -- a staple for oatmeal in our home -- I holler to Cathy in the shower.

"Where did you get these blueberries?"

"I don't know," she says. "The store."

"Which store?"

"Smith's, maybe," she says. "I didn't drive there! You can eat them."

Today I'll be working into the evening, attending a University of Utah forum that is, coincidentally, titled "Commuting Without a Car." Starting my workday late affords me the luxury of hitting the gym first, and I walk through a few miles of light snowfall to get there.

After the gym, I go to the market near the bus stop. I've brought some bags from home -- something I usually forget when I take the car -- and gather up only the minimum of supplies. I do need both dog food and cat food, though, and buy 3.5-pound bags at an inflated price instead of the usual 18-pounders.

I leave for the bus stop the moment the bus is scheduled. It's three minutes late, and I make it. Off the bus at 1300 South, I walk a few minutes home, shelve the groceries and head back toward the stop, watching a bus pass before I get there. That leaves me to walk a mile or so to TRAX and ride on my transfer ticket. I get off at the Salt Lake Central Station for a nearby meeting and afterward walk a few minutes to the office.

In the evening, I ride TRAX through the free-fare zone to the library for the forum.

Curiously, none of the panelists talks about the subject scrawled across the dry-erase board behind them, "Commuting Without a Car." The subtitle for the program refers to "transportation planning," and the officials dwell mostly on traffic congestion. The closest they come to the topic is when Roger Borgenicht, an activist for alternative transportation, describes commuting about half the time without a car -- an impressive ratio. Representatives from the Utah Department of Transportation and the Wasatch Front Regional Council instead focus on a future of electric cars.

But Mike Allegra of the Utah Transit Authority tells the audience of a future when everyone living along the Wasatch Front will be within a mile of a major transit station.

I'm expecting to meet a friend in town from Wyoming, and I've left him a phone message suggesting a restaurant in my neighborhood. Instead, he messages back that he's set on a State Street eatery. I call Cathy, who tells me she doesn't want to walk there. She can drive, but I'll walk -- it's only about a half-mile from the library. After dinner, I mooch a ride from my friend, following Cathy home as she drives our car. It's nice to see that the taillights are still functioning.

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Thursday » I leave home for the bus stop, and 51 minutes later am at my desk. The afternoon provides the supreme challenge of my week. I must meet a couple for an interview in northeast Sandy, nearly a mile from any bus route. I feed the TRAX machine a $5 bill -- the very same machine that had refunded my quarter -- and now it gives back just $2, a karmic net profit of 50 cents for UTA. I travel to Midvale Center for the simplest leg of my journey. Forty-five minutes later I'm waiting for the 213 bus in a parking lot. The bus drops me a mile from my destination, and when I'm almost there, I realize I need to cross the raceway that is 1300 East, and with no traffic signal nearby. I wait minutes, then run.

The return trip proves more of a race. Again, there's 1300 East, and I had hoped to catch the 213 heading north all the way home, but I've missed the last one for the night. I can see that, if I were to travel this way all the time, I would have to memorize the bus schedules and cut things short so I could follow them. Tonight, though, it's time to jog. I'll have to catch the southbound back to TRAX. I see the bus coming, and I sprint the last two blocks, aided by the bus's wait for a red light. The bus gets me back to the TRAX station just as the northbound train arrives. Again I have to run. Although winded, I'm glad to be aboard and headed to Gallivan Center.

Now I hook up with another friend, this one in town from Ireland and meeting a group for a beer. For the second night in a row, I scrounge a ride home.

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Friday » This day is simple. No place to be except the office and maybe the gym, and the weather is lovely, the streets dry. I ride my mountain bike to work in 28 minutes, and later combine a free-fare-zone TRAX ride and bike home in 27 minutes. In the evening, I bus and walk to and from the gym without event. I double up the trip's purpose by crossing the street to the state liquor store for a bottle of wine.

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Saturday » The movies. I know I should leave earlier to get to the Broadway Cinema in time for "The Wrestler," but I'm napping. Cathy isn't sure she wants to go at all if it means taking the bus. I persuade her to do it, and we set out to catch the bus that should get us to within a block of the theater three minutes before the previews. Instead, the bus is late and we arrive nine minutes after go time to find long lines. We're inside 23 minutes late. On the way home, TRAX, then a mile walk.

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Sunday » I will not ski today. No point in foiling the experiment on Day 7 by driving up a canyon for cross-country skiing, and I don't feel like messing with the bus schedule and meeting a second bus to one of the resorts. I relax, then bike to a Super Bowl party beyond the other side of Liberty Park, then bike home.

And here's a mild surprise. When all of this is over, I tally up the week's events and the cash outlay, only to realize that ditching the car costs me more than driving the car. Riding the bike as I do most days in the warmer months is essentially free, sure, but I purposely live close to most of the places I routinely travel, and that makes gas cheaper than bus fares. It would be true even if I bought a monthly pass, and it will be true if gas again lunges past $4 a gallon.

The cost-benefit analysis isn't that simple, of course. Walking is a pleasure, and riding transit is a community fellowship (no one ever rolled down a car window to offer me a newspaper). Just owning, insuring, oiling and parking the car costs far more than I ever could pay on public transportation. But then, too, we ski. We hike. We camp in the mountains and the desert. And sometimes I have to go to Sandy for work. As long as we live in Utah -- or at least until the trains really get within a mile of every home -- we need a car.

Seems like we probably don't need two, though.

bloomis@sltrib.com