People moving from cities with real transit ask this hoping the answer is no. Across most of Austin the honest answer is yes, and the useful part of the conversation is where the exceptions are and what they cost.
Why Austin is a driving city
It grew up, and mostly outward, in the era of the car. Development is spread across a wide metro area, employment is not concentrated in a single downtown core, and the density that makes transit work only exists in patches.
The transit system serves some corridors reasonably well. What it does not do is what a subway does in New York or Chicago, which is let you live an entire life without thinking about a car. Frequency, coverage, and the distance between where people live and where they need to be all work against that.
The geography does not help either. The river has a limited number of crossings, and the network funnels a great deal of movement onto a small number of corridors. See Austin commute times.
Where going without one is realistic
A short list, and each with caveats.
Downtown Austin. The strongest case. Groceries, restaurants, and in many cases work are all within walking distance, and this is the one part of the city where a car is genuinely optional. The trade is condo living and a high price per square foot. See buying a downtown Austin condo.
Mueller. Planned around walkability, with retail and grocery inside the neighborhood. A one-car household works comfortably here and no car is possible depending on where you work.
Parts of East Austin and South Austin close to the centre. Genuinely walkable pockets with real amenities nearby. Cycling works well on some of these routes.
Parts of Central Austin near the university. Dense enough, with the caveat that it is a student-oriented area with everything that implies.
Outside those, plan on driving.
The honest caveats
Even in the best of these, going car-free means accepting things people underestimate.
The heat. Walking is pleasant for a good part of the year and genuinely unpleasant for a stretch of the summer. A fifteen-minute walk in August is a different proposition from the same walk in March, and it changes behaviour more than people expect.
Rain. It arrives hard and fast here rather than as drizzle.
Getting out of the city. The lakes, the hill country, and the state parks are a large part of why people live here, and essentially all of them require a car.
Groceries and everything bulky. Solvable with delivery, at a cost.
Everyone else's assumptions. Social life, work events, and school runs are organised around people having cars.
One car instead of none
This is where most people who want to reduce car dependence actually land, and it is a realistic goal in a much wider set of neighborhoods than going without entirely.
It works when one person walks, cycles, or takes transit to work while the other drives, or when one household member works from home most days. The saving is real: a second car costs meaningfully once you count depreciation, insurance, fuel, and maintenance.
Worth doing the arithmetic against housing cost. Living somewhere that supports one car generally costs more per square foot, and the annual cost of a second car offsets part of that difference. Sometimes it offsets most of it.
Buying on this assumption
If reducing car dependence is a real priority, treat it as a search constraint from the beginning rather than a nice outcome, because it narrows the list considerably and it does not narrow it in the direction of larger houses.
Two tests before committing. Walk the route from the house to the nearest grocery, at an actual time of day you would do it, in the season you are in. And if transit is part of the plan, look at the specific routes you would use and their real frequency rather than at the existence of a network.
See where to live if you work downtown, which covers the same geography from the commute side.
What we do about it
If living without a car matters to you, we will be straight about how few places here support it and show you the ones that do. It is better to hear that in the first conversation than to buy somewhere on the strength of a walkability score and discover the reality in the second month.