Title: When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency

Author: Anna Zivarts

Completed: July 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: I met Anna a couple of years ago when our kids did gymnastics together. Out of the 100+ families at the gym in a very walkable part of Seattle, Anna was the only other parent I saw who arrived without a car. After parking our bikes next to each other several weeks in a row, we started talking (first about the lack of a bike rack).

Although our kids have both stopped doing gymnastics, our families have remained friends and I was very excited to read this book when it came out. Some parts seemed obvious to me as a bike commuter while others points were news to me. My biggest surprise was the percentage of people in the US who can’t or don’t drive. I’m now thinking of all the families in Renton Schools where I work who don’t drive and how invisible they are at school drop-off. Perhaps we should get the District Admin to take the Week Without Driving challenge.

Highlights:

• In Seattle, the route 7 bus that I took to and from work was always packed. I’d have to negotiate room for my toddler and his stroller to squeeze in with the other moms, many of them immigrants from East Africa, with seniors pushing grocery carts returning from shopping trips in the International District, with young men getting off at Lowe’s to look for work as day laborers, with blind and deafblind workers on the way home from their shifts at the Lighthouse, with groups of high school students in the afternoons. Sitting on the 7, I started to think about what it would take to build a coalition with everyone on that bus, where we could fight for more reliable transit, for smoother sidewalks and nicer bus stops, for affordable housing close to where we needed to go.
• ONE-THIRD OF PEOPLE LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES don’t have a driver’s license.1 This includes people like me who cannot drive because of a disability. It also includes young people, immigrants, people with suspended licenses, and people who have aged out of driving. Additionally, there are many people with licenses who can’t afford to own a car or pay for insurance, parking, or gas. But because of who the majority of nondrivers are—disabled and poor people, unhoused or recently incarcerated individuals, undocumented immigrants, kids, young people, seniors aging out of driving—we are largely invisible,
• Seven percent of American households do not own a car, and an additional 17 percent of households have a “vehicle deficit,” meaning they have more adults than vehicles.
• If you ask someone from the United States what image comes to mind when they think about disability, it’s probably a disabled parking spot sign. These signs with a stick figure in a wheelchair are probably the most, if not the only, visible manifestation of disability in many public spaces. But the reality is that many disabled people can’t drive or can’t afford cars. People with disabilities are four times less likely to drive than nondisabled people, and two to three times more likely to live in a zero-vehicle household.
• Many people who are disabled must remain in poverty in order to qualify for needed health care or home care support, support services that wouldn’t be covered even with “good” health care coverage from an employer. Tamara Jackson, a policy analyst for the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities and co-chair of the Wisconsin Non-Driver Advisory Committee, explains: “The reality is that you have a system where pre-poverty is a prerequisite.” A 2020 report on employment and disability from the National Council on Disability describes this “poverty trap,” explaining that many disabled people “agonize over the choice between maintaining the health care that they need to live and work, or a job that they are qualified for and desire, given the asset limitations imposed by means-tested programs that are attached to health care.”
• When our communities are designed to work best for, and only for, car-based mobility, the cost of not driving is unemployment and foregoing basic needs. So, people will choose to buy and maintain a vehicle, despite it being a significant financial burden and stressor.
• I also depend more on my block community than perhaps many of my neighbors who can drive. I don’t have the ability to jump in a car and go visit a friend across town in an easy fifteen minutes or head out of town to the woods or the mountains on the weekend. My block is really the heart of my social and recreational world and where I spend most of my time, and I believe that’s something to aspire to.
• WHAT NONDRIVERS NEED—what we all need—is a transformation of the way we organize mobility, housing, and public space so that we have options for getting around that do not rely on driving a car. We need safe, connected places to walk, roll, and ride; transit that is as reliable as driving; and land use and remote access opportunities that reduce how much we have to travel.
• For many years, transit riders who lack the resources or ability to drive were referred to as “captive” riders (now we use the slightly better, though still condescending, term “transit dependent.”) As outlined in Nicholas Bloom’s 2023 book, The Great American Transit Disaster,22 decades of racialized underinvestment and neglect have resulted in a second-class system that is, in most American cities, viewed as a social service for those unfortunate enough to lack access to a car. The view that transit is for those who don’t have other choices, and therefore those of us who ride transit will take whatever we can get, still lurks deep within many conversations around transit funding and service. It’s time to call out the racist, ableist, and classist undertones of this assumption and invest in transit so that it becomes the reliable, comfortable choice to get us where we need to go.
• As employers began to rehire after the initial pandemic layoffs, in many cases making telework an option for the first time, disabled workers had new job opportunities. In research published in late 2022, Ari Ne’eman, a doctoral student in public health at Harvard, found that from the last quarter of 2021 through the second half of 2022, employment gains by disabled people outpaced employment gains for nondisabled people by 14 percent.
• From his experience in Bellingham, Comeau believes much of the most difficult work is in convincing the public that reducing congestion shouldn’t be the overarching priority of local government. He insists we need leaders who are willing to be straightforward with how our communities must change:   We’re gonna densify. There’s going to be more people living here in the future, and we need you all to get ready. That includes more traffic in certain places, and you’re going to have to get used to it. We’re not going to widen our streets just because it’s not as easy to drive anymore. We want it to be easy to walk. We want it to be easy to bike or get on a bus or cross the street to a bus stop. Nobody enjoys traffic congestion, myself included. But that’s literally the trade-off for focusing on density and people-oriented infrastructure. You cannot continue to make it easy to drive or park a car if you’re trying to plan for people.
• Imagine a highway department staffed entirely of people who do not drive. Maybe they ride as passengers in cars sometimes, or drive when out of town on vacation, in other countries where more people drive, where driving is easier, more comfortable, and more convenient. Our perspective of what a transportation system should look like would be heavily influenced by what people walking, rolling, and taking transit need. Would we be able to know what would work best for drivers at a highway interchange? Probably not, and yet the inverse of this is the reality for most of the people in charge of our transportation system, to the point where it’s still revolutionary to suggest that engineers or planners get out of their cars and try walking or biking a road project to experience how it works for people outside of cars.
• An easy step for employers is to stop requiring driver’s licenses for jobs where driving isn’t an essential function. This one seems pretty simple, but I find driver’s license requirements all the time on new transportation planning, admin, and engineering postings. Someone explained once that a driver’s license requirement was a default setting on their internal HR system for job posts, and so until those HR settings are turned off, it will be the default on every new posting.
• Remember the school drop-off paradox. When you choose to drive, you make it more dangerous and less comfortable for other kids to access school or activities without a car. Consider how parents and caregivers who can’t drive get to the activities you take your child to. Is there a nearby transit stop? Is there a well-lit sidewalk? Is there bike parking?