Sept. 5, 2024
More than a quarter of the people that planners in the U.S. design for do not drive cars.
Anna Letitia Zivarts is one of them. Her Island Press book, When Driving is Not an Option, published earlier this year, aims to rethink the way we plan cities.
While many planners are working toward reducing car dependency and boosting multimodal mobility, Zivarts believes it will take a seismic and largely political shift to retrofit cities in a way that values those who walk, roll, bike, and use transit to get around.
"The big theme of book is there are a lot of nondrivers — way more of us than people realize," she said in an interview with Planning, noting that nondrivers are often ignored, stigmatized, or treated like second-class citizens. "If we recognized that disability, income, age, and other factors mean that at least 25 percent of people in the U.S. are nondrivers, we could create much more inclusive communities."
Zivarts — who was born with nystagmus, a genetic condition that means her eyes are always shaking, affecting her vision and preventing her from driving — is the program director of the Disability Mobility Initiative at Disability Rights Washington. A community organizer by profession, she redoubled her efforts to fight for better pedestrian mobility when she learned her son has the same low vision condition she has.
She says she gets a lot of pushback when talking about the number of nondrivers — adding that some studies, including from Washington and Wisconsin, place the number closer to 30 percent. But she believes planners, policymakers, and others need to start seeing and engaging with nondrivers, understanding the needs of this significant chunk of the population, and including nondrivers in transportation planning decisions. They also need to make roads safer for everybody, and she lays out changes planners can make in her book.
Include nondrivers in the conversation
People of color, those with low incomes, immigrants, and people with disabilities tend to have lower rates of car ownership. They also have less housing, mobility, and job options. Fewer than 25 percent of working-age adults who are disabled work full- or part-time, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 66 percent of non-disabled adults. In many cases, it is not the underlying disability that stifles employment, but rather the lack of transportation access to fulfilling work opportunities and financial independence.
Anna Letitia Zivarts and her son, who have the same vision condition, rely on public transportation for mobility.
Tanisha Sepúlveda rolls in her wheelchair along the street near her home because the sidewalk is inaccessible.
In 2023, 7,318 people were killed by vehicles, a 14 percent increase over 2019, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). It also reported 1,149 bicyclists were killed on U.S. roadways in 2023, up four percent from 2022.
Safety is a major concern. Zivarts — an avid cyclist — says she's seen a disproportionate number of deaths and injuries among those who bike, walk, and roll. City, county, and state departments of transportation need to plan for safe multimodal mobility from the start, she says, not leave it as an afterthought. That means funding mobility appropriately. Transit, sidewalks, pathways, and connectivity should be weighted equally with multibillion-dollar bridge and highway projects, she argues.
There have been small successes. In 2022, the Washington State legislature passed a $17 billion transportation package that included $5.2 billion for transit, bike, and pedestrian projects. It was the first time multimodal investments were larger than highway capacity expansion funding.
What can planners do?
Improving transit can help nondrivers and everybody else, says Zivarts. In her book, she recounts dozens of anecdotes of people enduring long, frustrating transit trips or not being able to access it at all.
One of those people is Tanisha Sepúlveda, a program coordinator at Empower Movement WA, a collective that advocates for disability justice, transportation equity, and community access. A power wheelchair user who lives in Seattle, she often relies on bus and light rail. The sidewalks near her apartment and the closest bus stop have sections heaved up by tree roots, filled with loose gravel, and lacking curb ramp. So, she rolls in the street.
"I'll have people yell at me and tell me to get out of the road, sometimes with profanity," Sepúlveda says in the book. "I understand it does not look safe to them, and it is not safe, but it is even less safe for me to be on the sidewalks."
Zivarts' book offers a useful tool. The OpenSidewalks project at the University of Washington's Taskar Center for Accessible Technology uses open data sources, verified by on-the-ground community audits, to map sidewalk networks. It goes beyond a typical Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) assessment, empowering planners and others with information about sidewalk slope, minimal effective width, and lighting.
Straightforward Planning Tools to Serve Nondrivers
Make nondrivers visible. Place nondrivers on mobility advisory boards, make sure surveys include them, hire nondrivers for transit and transportation planning positions.
Reduce traffic speeds. Planners know it's not just lowering speed limits. Road diets, bulb outs, traffic circles, and raised sidewalks can slow traffic and make it pedestrian-friendly.
Allow for longer crossing times at crosswalks. Know that 30 seconds to cross is not enough time for a person using an assistive mobility device or younger or older citizens.
Take public ownership of sidewalk repair and maintenance. If a nondriver must walk six blocks to a transit stop, clear it of barriers and make it accessible to all. Treat sidewalks as any other infrastructure — plan, fund, and maintain them.
Make transit at least as reliable as driving. Approach transit as an equal part of the mobility ecosystem, making it safer and more connective for citizens.
Construction projects can temporarily block access for people who use wheelchairs, pedestrians, and other nondrivers.
Zivarts details how in 2020, disability advocates convinced Wisconsin's Department of Transportation (WisDOT) to form a nondriver advisory committee. "When you overlay where the transit is, where the routes are, and where the stops are with where people who are nondrivers actually live, those two things don't overlap," committee co-chair Tamara Jackson says in the book. "This forces transportation planners to consider whether people are unable to use transit because 'it doesn't go where they need to go, or they can't get to it.'"
This overlay information can help planners focus dollars on filling in the gaps or rerouting transit to better serve everyone in the community, including the 31 percent who don't drive, according to WisDOT's analysis.
Zivarts says a simple way to value the experience of nondrivers is to put yourself in someone else's shoes, like a person trying to cross an eight-lane arterial, while negotiating mud puddles and overgrown bushes along the edge of a road with no sidewalks. Or, try pledging to ditch your car and rely only on public transit for a few days.
Zivarts challenged planners and elected officials to do just that during the Week Without Driving challenge in the greater Seattle area. Many never had to depend on public transportation for every work, recreational, medical, shopping, or social trip. This showed them firsthand the gaps in the system.
Her work — and words — have clearly made an impact. Roger Millar, FAICP, the secretary of transportation for the Washington Department of Transportation, invited Zivarts to speak at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. He told Zivarts that his counterparts in other states were texting him during her presentation, checking in with staff and asking them to investigate the number of nondrivers in their states.
In Zivarts' 176-page book, she points out that many states have concurrency requirements that require developers to build more car capacity. But she thinks multimodal capacity, with an emphasis on transit and pedestrian mobility, would be a better, more inclusive approach. Strong pedestrian and transit networks can support denser, transit oriented development that can include housing that is attainable, she writes.
"Make no mistake, I want an outcome of slower traffic. I want it to become less desirable, less convenient to drive places," Zivarts says. When that happens, she adds, two good things will occur: a critical mass will demand great transit and pedestrian mobility and there will be enough users to create demand for that premium transit.
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