Car-Free and Carefree - A Visit to Bald Head Island

Old Baldy Lighthouse, a stone lighthouse on Bald Head Island dating to 1817, stands against a blue sky with wisps of clouds in the background and trees, shrubs, and a grassy field in the foreground.
(Photo by David Broad on Wikimedia Commons.)

Note: We visited Bald Head just a few days before Potential Tropical Cyclone Number Eight made landfall. The island received approximately 20 inches of rain between September 15–16, 2024, and many of the places we visited were flooded. The Village of Bald Head Island has declared a State of Emergency.

“No Cars, No Cares.”

This phrase is one of the first things visitors see on the official website of Bald Head Island, a barrier island on the southeastern coast of North Carolina. While on a recent vacation to Oak Island, my husband and I visited Bald Head and experienced what it means to live almost as close to car-free as it’s possible to do today.

In harmony with nature

The Village of Bald Head Island describes its philosophy as working with nature rather than against it.

Bald Head Island is a unique barrier island community where we strive to live in harmony with nature. This fragile barrier island contains four ecosystems comprised of beachfront, dune ridge, maritime forest, and the marsh. As a community, we strive to live in harmony with each other and our island visitors, respecting the land and our way of life.

One of the most obvious ways the island lives out this worldview is its prohibition against cars and gas-powered golf carts. There is no bridge to the mainland, so anyone wishing to travel to and from the island must take a passenger ferry or a private boat. While there is a barge that transports vehicles and heavy equipment, only construction, maintenance, and utility vehicles are allowed for services such as trash and recycling pickup.

Without cars, visitors and residents rely on three modes of transportation on Bald Head: electric golf carts, bicycles, and walking. While the golf carts provide an efficient alternative — and indeed, we passed few houses without at least one cart parked outside — we chose to rent bikes from a local shop upon our arrival.

The car-free life

As we rode around the island, we couldn’t help but compare the car-free lifestyle of its residents to our car-dependent lifestyle at home. North Carolina has very few options for public transportation and many places are still not walkable, especially in rural areas. This makes life more difficult without a car. Yet not only has Bald Head Island flourished in the absence of motor vehicles, the prohibition is actually a selling point for visitors, including us.

Bald Head Island marina on a cloudy day with Old Baldy Lighthouse in the background and a few vessels in dock in the foreground.
(Photo by KudzuVine on Wikimedia Commons.)

The island is mostly flat and the roads are paved and provide a smooth ride, but they’re also narrower than those of the mainland. They weave around natural features rather than plowing straight through them, attempting to work with the land rather than against it. Bald Head Island Village was designated a Tree City USA in 2013 by the Arbor Day Foundation, and it’s not hard to see why as the roads are lined by canopies of trees such as live oaks, yaupon hollies, wax myrtles, and sabal minor palms; shrubs such as American beautyberry and dwarf palmetto; and other foliage. They provide shade that protects and cools off travelers in addition to their crucial role as habitat for songbirds and numerous other wildlife species sharing their island home with humans.

As we rode, we noticed not only the lower temperatures under the canopies but also the novelty of traveling along a paved road without fear of being hit by a car. We don’t live in a walkable town, so we only ride our bikes in our neighborhood and in parks and on trails to which we have to drive. If we tried to ride them outside of these areas, we would face such problems as a lack of bike lanes; high traffic levels; and a great deal of pollution from the exhaust expelled by gasoline-powered engines that still fuel the majority of vehicles on our roads.

On Bald Head, these issues were either less pressing or nonexistent. We did have to pull our bikes over to the side of the road several times to allow a golf cart to pass, but this was much less nerve-wracking than avoiding a car would have been and didn’t present any difficulties. Our trip was after Labor Day, so there was relatively little traffic of any kind, allowing us plenty of space and quiet as we rode and talked. We could exercise and breathe easily without inhaling fumes. And there were wooden bike racks scattered throughout the island to make parking easier, although we did sometimes have trouble fitting our rentals’ fat tires into the slots.

A world without cars

This trip was very short, not even a day long, and yet it proved how easy it can be to get along without cars much of the time. We did occasionally see a maintenance or garbage truck, and on the way to the island we saw a barge carrying several such vehicles away. But we saw electric golf carts more than anything, both driving and parked at various houses we passed. The island was largely quiet and peaceful, an atmosphere that would have been broken by the intrusion of cars. And although the ferries to and from Bald Head still use diesel, as do many of the yachts and other smaller craft owned by the residents of the island, the air still seemed cleaner than on the mainland.

All in all, with the exception of emergency, utility, and maintenance vehicles, our trip made me wonder how much we really need cars when the world can be so walkable (or at most, drivable by smaller electric vehicles). Of course, conditions on the island are very different from those in much of the rest of the world. For example, most places are not flat; distances are much larger; weather would be a much bigger problem for travelers; and it would take much longer to get from one place to another. There are many reasons why cars were invented, after all. And yet, as I look back on our visit to Bald Head, I can’t help but wonder …

How many of our technologies are necessary and how many are just convenient? And what are other ways in which we can live and work with the planet instead of against it?


Originally published in The New Outdoors on Medium on September 25, 2024