Life with no car is no problem for New Hampshire family

Durham, N.H., family is spending May without the car

Brent Bell rides home with his son Holden, 3, in a child carrier as his wife, Beth Potier, pedals solo. (PHOTOS BY LISA POOLE FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

Main Street in Durham, N.H., is clogged.

Cars idle in all directions. A string of stoplights results in a creeping backup. Motorists waiting with blinking left turn signals seem doomed.

A few hundred yards away from the jumble, a husband and wife load their 3-year-old son into a bike trailer. Securing their helmets and positioning their feet on pedals, they then cycle off toward the congested roadway.

Eight minutes, a mile-and-a-half, and several dips and valleys later, they coast into their Durham driveway.

Finally, after bikes are stowed and helmets unfastened, visiting motorists pull up. They departed from the same location at the same time and drove the same route - but it took an extra seven minutes.

"It used to be you were better off driving," said Beth Potier, a staff member at the University of New Hampshire who has hung up her car keys and left her Saab station wagon to collect cobwebs in the garage for four weeks. "No more."

Just imagine: An entire month without a car. Twenty-two work days to take the bus instead of suffering through gridlock or a road-raging commute. Five Saturdays and four Sundays to reach for a bike helmet instead of car keys.

It's certainly a challenge, but Potier and her husband, Brent Bell - and their son Holden, too - have taken it on. To reduce their impact on the environment, stay fit, and encourage others to consider biking as a commuting option, they have pledged to go car-free for all 31 days of May (which is coincidentally National Bike Month.)

But the avid and longtime bicyclists concede it's not the sacrifice it seems: Both work at UNH, just under 2 miles away, and they regularly bike to work. They also get by with just one family vehicle.

"We already try to limit our car use," said the 43-year-old Bell, an assistant professor with UNH's outdoor education department. "This just turns up the commitment."

Still, the experiment does leave them landlocked, and they've had to make compromises.

Take grocery shopping: Instead of driving to Shaw's Supermarket 9 miles away in Dover or Hannaford Supermarket 13 miles away in Portsmouth, they stick to the Durham Marketplace, just around the corner, and limit themselves to one or two bags to fit everything into a bike trailer.

And there have been days when they've longed for the comfort of what Bell calls their "motorized umbrella."

On May 1, for example, Bell arrived sweaty and red-faced to his 8 a.m. doctor's appointment in Somersworth (roughly 20 miles round-trip). And on a rain-drenched morning, Potier loaded a drowsy and PJ-clad Holden into a trailer and pedaled through the chill and damp to campus to bring her husband a forgotten item.

Despite some of these more trying instances, they've resisted the urge of the gas-sucking machine - it's staying docked in the garage unless there's a medical emergency.

Friends and neighbors are impressed by their drive, or lack thereof. "It's brave," said Per Berglund, a UNH professor of physics. Also a resident of Durham, he tries to bike into the office as often as he can.

"If they can do it cold turkey, we can all do our parts," he noted.

But while the family might be extreme in their hobby, some analysts say more people are becoming avid about two-tired transportation.

But bicycles can't compete with their motorized brethren. More than one-quarter of all car trips in America are shorter than a mile, and half of all workers commute 5 or fewer miles, according to the community group Seacoast Area Bicycle Routes.

Bell and Potier lament that America isn't a thriving bicycling society like Europe. Bike racks are hard to find, motorists aren't well educated on interacting with bicyclists, and cars don't foster community.

For example, on his bike, Bell will stop to talk with neighbors - whereas in his station wagon, he'd just wave and drive on.

Above all, the couple hope to pass that appreciation onto their son.

In many ways, they already have: The 3-year-old loves to ride in the back of the tandem; he becomes similarly wide-eyed when he rides buses and trains, and he has his own miniature fleet of locomotives.