"YOU'VE done what?" It will never work." "How on earth will you manage?" That was the general tenor of remarks from friends a couple of years ago when we decided we were getting rid of the family car and throwing ourselves on the mercy of public transport.

Still, every so often, one of them will ask "are you going to get a car?" (Which really means: "Surely you can't go on like this?") The reply that we are entirely happy with our decision is greeted with wide eyed mystification.

A car is probably the most desirable of consumer commodities. There's nothing like your first set of car keys to make you feel like a proper grown up, that you've really arrived. And a car is a convenient way to get around - or at least it was when there were fewer of them about.

A car is the epitome of personal freedom, or so we are led to believe by clever advertising campaigns and Hollywood images of riding the freeway, loud music blaring, warm wind whipping through hair. But anybody who has actually been to Hollywood knows just how often those freeways snarl up. The truth is that owning a motor vehicle brings not freedom, but responsibilities and quite a few day to day inconveniences.

Personally, residing in Clontarf in Dublin. I can live without the freedom of driving around town searching for a vacant parking meter, or the freedom to lose an hour a day stuck in traffic, or the freedom to put on weight because I never walk anywhere, even to the corner shop. Neither do I miss going to a function after work and not being able to enjoy a drink, or realising just how irritating a squiffy husband can be when I'm driving home and therefore stone cold sober, or indeed of him realising how irritating I am when the roles are reversed.

And I can certainly live without having to pay out hundreds of pounds every month for transport. Because it was the financial motive that really prompted our decision. We sat down one night and worked out exactly what our car was costing us, not just for the car loan and running costs but all the extras too.

The Automobile Association calculates that when you build in costs like tax, insurance, depreciation, petrol, oil, servicing and repairs, the average 1.6 litre family car, doing an average 10,000 miles a year. costs 62p per mile to run - mounting up to around £500 a month. We figured the return we were getting for that sort of outlay a means of getting around simply didn't justify that kind of expenditure.

SO HOW do we manage? Our two children are delivered to school and dropped home by Quinnsworth and Supervalu both deliver shopping free of charge. We are lucky to live just a 20 minute bus journey from the centre of Dublin and even luckier to have, three minutes from our front door, a bus service which is reliable and staffed by courteous and obliging drivers. A short walk away there's a DART station. And whenever we're going somewhere that isn't on our DART or bus route, or if we're going somewhere nice and want to be dropped at the door, or if we're just in the mood we take a taxi.

Taxis for most people are a bit of a luxury but for us, a necessary part of our routine. The average fare from town is about a fiver, a bit more or less depending on the time of day or number of us in the car, so we could take four taxis a day before it would cost as much as running a car.

I suppose if we needed to get around a lot of places in a short time we could hire a car, though it's not a situation that has yet arisen. We have, however, hired cars for holidays.

Speaking of holidays, we're off to Cuba in April, will take a family holiday in the summer and hopefully get away again in October. Three holidays in one year would not be possible if we were running a car. Neither would we be able to get babysitters so often, go to the theatre or cinema or restaurants so regularly in short, give ourselves, or our children, quite so many of the good things in life.

So our decision was based on filthy lucre, not principle, although now that we no longer choke up the atmosphere ourselves we are more inclined to agree with experts like Royal Geographical Society researchers who recently argued that cars should be banned on moral grounds because of the harm they inflict on society: the city congestion which costs people time and money; the noise and unpleasant fumes; the damage to the environment by car manufacture, fuel provision and road building; and, not least, the deaths and injuries caused by car accidents.

In 1993 there were 125,000 deaths in Europe from car accidents and 2.3 million injuries.

The RGS realises that the immediate banning of cars is not feasible but recommends that cars should be phased out over 30 years, approximately the same time scale in which they have come to dominate society. However even a phasing out seems unlikely, given the attachment people have to their motors and, of course, successive governments' lamentable lack of commitment to public transport.

ABYSMAL public transport means that, for most people, giving up the car is simply not an opt ion. They have no other convenient and reliable way of getting where they want to go. But resistance to renouncing the car is deeper than this. Many people who could manage on public transport would rather have their legs chopped off. Because a car is much more than a means of getting around; it is the most concrete and most visible of status symbols.

The bemusement that greets us when we tell somebody we don't have a car is based on a simple societal rule: if you can afford one, you get one. Not having one puts us, in marketing terms, alongside pensioners and the unemployed.

Car ownership is the simplest way to tell the haves from the have nots. It also deepens the divide between them. So long as the influential middle classes have the independent means to get around, governments happily ignore their public transport obligations. This leaves the poorer sectors of society stranded and those who can afford a motor ever less inclined to do without one. It's a vicious circle.

With proper public transport in place, more people might well decide that car ownership is not the boon it is touted to, be.

Certainly, when I look around at neighbours and friends, I see so many people like us (middle class thirtysomethings with young children) living such constrained lives, with both partners working flat out to keep a roof over their heads and a car outside their front doors. Their nights out are few, their treats simple; if they're lucky they scrape together an annual two week escape. They watch years slip by as they struggle on.

We consider ourselves lucky to have had the public transport options to escape this fate and recognise that only an enormous policy shift would extend that option to everybody. That's not to say that everybody would avail of such an option but without a change of policy, few could even consider it.

So the human and environmental costs of motoring will continue to mount. And our opting for a car free life will continue to cause puzzled surprise.