A Modo love story

I joined Modo in spring 2003. At the time, my main transportation was transit. I biked sometimes & walked a lot too. I thought it might be handy to have a car sometimes, but had no desire to drop tens of thousands of dollars to buy a good one, or deal with a cheap but unreliable beater. Modo was a great solution!

Suddenly having access to a whole fleet of cars was pretty exciting, as I’d never owned one. I’d never had my own vehicle waiting for me in my driveway 24/7, so the concept of making a booking online, then walking a few blocks to pick up a car wasn’t a big deal for me. 17 years ago I wasn’t thinking about reducing my carbon footprint as much as I do now, so I probably drove a bit more than I really needed to because it was such a novelty. Still, I rarely used the cars more than once a week.

Getting Hitched With Modo

In the fall of 2003, Oliver & I got married. We used a Modo car (our favourite one at the time: a little blue Volkswagen Beetle) to travel up to Squamish, where we hiked up to the Third Peak of the Stawamus Chief. It was just the two of us, a couple of friends who doubled as witnesses & photographers, plus a friend’s dad who officiated, all of us travelling there in the Modo Beetle. We had a very simple ceremony, then a picnic on the warm granite of Third Peak, & hiked back down to head back to Vancouver. The next day we took the same little Volkswagen Beetle on our honeymoon to Galiano & Saturna Islands, windows all decorated with washable glass markers.

Moving House With Modo

Eventually we decided to buy a place to live & of course, when we moved from our housing coop into the condo in 2006, we used Modo trucks & vans to pick up the tools & supplies to redo the flooring the bedrooms. Then we used Modo vehicles to move our belongings in many batches to the new place.

When we bought our house a couple of years later, we had accumulated a bit more stuff & decided a moving truck on one day was the way to go. We were still using Modo for Costco trips, many, many trips to various home improvement stores, picking up large quantities of compost from the city yard to start our new garden. Having all ypes of different vehicles at our disposal has always been a huge benefit of Modo. When we need to move some trees or pick up lumber, if we don’t do it by bike (serioiusly, I’ve hauled lumber on my cargo bike) we can use a Modo pickup truck or a van.

Having Babies With Modo

Classic story, right? Marriage, then picket fence, then babies! But how do you get to the hospital when you’re in labour if you don’t own a car? I’ve heard that taxi drivers don’t always want to bring a woman in labour to the hospital–liability issues, I guess?–& transit or biking was out of the question.

A Modo vehicle brought us to BC Women’s hospital early one August morning of 2010 when I was in labour with my son. Almost exactly three years later, we booked a car to get me to Women’s for my daughter on a September afternoon after 35 hours of on-again-off-again labour. Both children had their very first car ride home from the hospital in Modo cars.

By the way, using a Modo car is a great way to avoid the very expensive cost of parking at the hospital. Modo cars are all eligible to park in permit zones around the city, which includes the streets all around the hospital.

Visiting Family with Modo

These days, since we have cargo bikes that are more than capable of handling Costco runs, we don’t drive Modo vehicles that often. We’re lucky to have my sisters & parents living here in the Lower Mainland, so that’s what most of our Modo bookings are: to drive to Coquitlam or the North Shore visit them. Oliver’s family is a little farther away, in the Okanagan, but we’ve occasionally taken Modo vehicles to drive there too.

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