Nigel Planer is an actor, novelist and playwright. He was Neil in BBC TV's The Young Ones and Amos Hart ("Mr Cellophane") in the original West End cast version of Chicago. He played the wizard in the West End musical Wicked and has narrated the audiobook editions of many Discworld novels. He talks here about why he has chosen to go car-free.

Nigel has one adult son called Stanley, and a nine year old called Harvey. He lives in an apartment on the South Bank in central London. Nigel has twice lived without a car, but thinks that this time, he will stay car-free. He tried living without a car in the 1990s, but found that, even as a keen cyclist, family commitments made it difficult. He says "Its better not to use a car in central London," since it is usually quicker to get around on tubes, buses, the river bus and taxis. He sometimes borrows a car from a friend, or hires one.

When he takes his son Harvey to school he uses a combination of bus, train, walking and taxi, which he finds quicker and less stressful than driving. Nigel divorced his second wife, and his car, in 2001. The settlement for his ex-wife didn't leave enough to pay the solicitor's costs, so Nigel offered him his Suzuki Vitara instead. He accepted. Nigel says that watching that car go down the road was cathartic and wonderful, and he wondered why he had ever bothered to have one (a car, that is).

Nigel worked out how much money he would save: the costs of buying the car, parking it, petrol, tax, repairs, maintenance - it came to thousands of pounds a year. He figured out how many cabs he could take with the money he'd saved, and now finds that he rarely spends more on cabs than he did on a car. Normally, he is quids in. When appearing in Wicked, Nigel quite often took a cab from home to the theatre in Victoria. It cost around £8: cheaper than driving and parking, always assuming you could get a car parking space.

"Cars are like drugs - when you take them, you feel better, but the problems don't go away,"  says Nigel. Not only that, at 6'3" tall, Nigel finds that cars lack leg-room and foot-room. He suspects "an osteopathic conspiracy." Nigel says that cars also affect your psyche - it takes a long time to get the car out of your head. People will make assumptions about you - you have a car, a partner, a property, like to drink etc. "Not owning a car is a challenge to these assumptions."  

According to Nigel, "When you don't own a car you are more engaged with life and what's going on around you: you have a richer life, you are in contact with those around you including your family - your kids aren't just looking at the back of your head." Not owning a car means that you cease to be hermetically sealed. You talk to more people. Nigel is pleased to see that young people working in theatre now seem less likely to own a car. Although a committed urbanite, Nigel would like to have more trees around him, and quite fancies living somewhere greener and more suburban. But he would need to own a car, which he resists. He hates the idea of living somewhere where you have to get in the car to buy a pint of milk.

The worst thing about now owning a car is not having the time to listen to music or the radio or listen to tapes to learn lines - when you are at home, or on public transport, you have to be considerate to what others want And social visits, like going to see his dad, can sometimes be more difficult. Living close by the former Eurostar terminal at Waterloo was a real bonus for Nigel when he took his extended family on the train for a holiday in the South of France. Later, he took the train to Venice, where he "found himself in heaven and had to think why." And then he realised. No cars. 

Nigel Planer is one of the car-free choosers who tell their stories in a chapter about people who live without owning a car in the forthcoming book, The Four Wheel Detox.