Janis LaDouceur, owner and principal at LaDouceur Architecture and Design, grew up and spent her young adulthood in car-centric Los Angeles. “I owned a car there because that’s just what you do in L.A.,” she recalls. “I didn’t know anything else.” But geography apparently isn’t destiny, at least not in LaDouceur’s case.

She relocated to The North in the late 1980s and began a two-decade process of disengaging from the car culture she lived and breathed for so long. Today, LaDouceur and her husband, Sean Burns, live an almost totally car-free lifestyle. The North Loop residents rely on bikes and transit for most trips, and tap HourCar, Car2Go or rental services for heavy shopping and out-of-town journeys.
 
LaDouceur’s car-free story doesn’t begin with Burns, but it wouldn’t be the same without him. “It’s fair to say that I wouldn’t be where I am today without Sean encouraging and supporting me, and allowing me to make the [car-free] transition at my own pace,” she says.
 
Becoming assertive on two wheels
 
Burns, a Fargo native, moved to Washington D.C. shortly after graduating from college. Though his ex-wife had a car, he never did  —  “parking in D.C. is unbelievably difficult and expensive,” he says. He initially used the Metro to get to work, but the city’s surprisingly robust bike infrastructure and tight-knit cycling community made bike commuting doable. He credits D.C.’s famously aggressive drivers and thick traffic for his skill and assertiveness on two wheels.
 
The move to Minneapolis brought some challenges. In the mid-90s, Minneapolis-St. Paul wasn’t yet a cycling Mecca. Burns’ commute from South Minneapolis to the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus included few if any bike lanes or paths.
 
The “best” part, he recalls, was the “de facto bike lane,” really just a wide shoulder, on the Central Avenue bridge. But Burns took the plunge anyway, switching to a year-round carless commute in March 1996. The 16-mile round-trip ride (or run, on ambitious days) was “a great daily workout,” he says.
 
Things have steadily gotten easier. Maybe too easy: A new position at the U of M relocated Burns to the East Bank campus, closer to his home base. The commute shortened again when he and LaDouceur married, and he moved into her North Loop condo. “I’m only riding two and a half miles one way now,” he says. “On cold days, that barely gets you warm.”
 
Enjoying the pedal-powered lifestyle
 
LaDouceur’s car-free transformation had a few glitches, even through since leaving L.A. she’s lived in dense, walkable neighborhoods close to her workplace: downtown Milwaukee, downtown Chicago, the North Loop in downtown Minneapolis. Car ownership isn’t necessary in these places.
 
In Chicago, she could walk to work; in Minneapolis, her office is diagonally across the street from her condo. “Having a short commute is awesome,” she says, “But the downside is that I can never take a snow day, because all my clients know that I can get to the office in any weather.”
 
But LaDouceur’s West Coast habits died hard. And the architecture business, she says, though less buttoned-up and status-conscious than in the past, still favors those who project success — with such amenities as a car.
 
“Bikes really used to be a bit déclassé,” she says with a laugh. “How cool a car you had denoted your success.” LaDouceur deferred to traditionalists early in her career, driving to meetings or hitching rides with colleagues.
 
Now that she’s well established in the architectural field, image matters less. “It’s okay if I’m perceived as a little bit eccentric,” she laughs. Her favorite work-related bike activity: racing her former business partner to meetings and job sites. He’d drive, she’d ride — and she’d often beat him, clicking her bike lock into place as he rolled up.
 
Racing her partner taught LaDouceur that driving really wasn’t any faster than biking, at least for trips around town. So her pedal-powered lifestyle became more ambitious.
 
She got into bike racing in the late 90s. She still participates in winter events like the Stupor Bowl, an urban winter race held on Super Bowl weekend, and Snowball’s Chance in Hell, a casual ice-riding competition held on frozen lakes around the Twin Cities. She started doing grocery runs by bike, carrying everything in an oversized backpack.
 
She also modified a standard car bike rack to fold up in her backpack, so she can bike to the closest HourCar hub on “rare occasions when we need a car for heavy hauling.”
 
Designing for transit
 
HourCar is just one of the tools driving the couple’s car-free lifestyle. LaDouceur credits the region’s still-growing bikeway and bike lane system with revolutionizing car-free transportation here. “I can go north, south, east, west or diagonal by separated trail within blocks,” she marvels. And she’s appreciative of the city’s fastidious maintenance habits. “[The trails are plowed] by 6 a.m., and are often clearer than the streets.”
 
LaDouceur’s colleagues and clients are taking notice. “More and more professionals commute by bicycle year round. It’s become a sort of badge of honor,” she says.
 
For Burns, the completion of the Mississippi River bike trail in Minneapolis has been key. He rides the trail most of the way to work, enjoying sweeping water views while his colleagues sit in traffic on I-35 or University Avenue. “In the past five to seven years,” he says, “things have totally changed. We’re light-years ahead of where D.C. was when I was living there.”
 
Though she hasn’t designed any bikeways, LaDouceur devotes professional time and energy to building a better alternative transit system — and making car-free living easier for people across the Twin Cities. LaDouceur designed three Blue Line light-rail-stations: Government Plaza, Franklin and Bloomington Central. She credits the experience with reinforcing her commitment to car-free living.
 
“It’s tremendously gratifying to be able to design something that’s available to the entire public,” says LaDouceur, “whether Metro Transit’s trains and buses are their primary modes of transit, or they’re just heading downtown for a game.”
 
A thriftier, more reliable ride
 
“For us, being car-free isn’t about saving money,” says Burns. “We’d be doing this anyway, regardless of the cost. It’s the right thing to do.”
 
But he and LaDouceur definitely save a boatload compared to car-dependent households. Factoring the cost of parking, insurance, gas and upkeep, LaDouceur estimates that she spent $200 per month on her old BMW, which is now mothballed in her condo’s parking spot.
 
“We spend money on our bikes, too,” she says, noting that the couple has more than a dozen bikes (in various states of repair) between them. “Nothing like the car, though, and for a much better cause.”
 
A more useful cause, too. In winter, when many casual riders hang up their wheels, Burns goes out of his way to help car-dependent neighbors during his commute. “Sean loves a good snow storm,” says LaDouceur. “He pedals up to stuck cars, jumps off the bike to push them out and resumes his ride.”
 
There’s no way to replicate that feeling of accomplishment behind the wheel of a car — especially if the car is stuck in knee-deep snow.
 
“Riding a bike has never been a chore, and discovering more ways to enjoy it has been a lifetime endeavor,” says LaDouceur. Still, her husband adds with a laugh, “She’s an L.A. woman to the core.”
 
Brian Martucci is The Line’s Innovation and Jobs News Editor.