Anna Zivarts is the voice of non-drivers. Through her advocacy with Disability Rights Washington and recently released book, When Driving is Not an Option, she has helped define and organize the 35% of all Americans who do not drive. She took the train to Portland on Saturday to speak and connect with a few dozen of them at an event that aimed to build interest in the upcoming Week Without Driving, a national campaign now in its fifth year that raises awareness about those who live without cars — and why better public transit is vital to their quality of life.
Zivarts, whose visual impairment prevents her from driving a car, shared her story along with several dozen others who stepped up to the mic at a gymnasium inside Charles Jordan Community Center in North Portland. Collecting those stories and getting them heard by policymakers and elected officials is Zivarts’ stock-in-trade. Beyond sharing stories, Saturday’s event was about networking and building community. Attendees were encouraged to socialize and a free lunch helped seal the deal.
While hearing stories about transit struggles was validating for many in the crowd, the folks they were meant for weren’t in attendance. Board members and local elected officials had promised to attend, and their presence got top billing on event flyers, but only one showed up (TriMet Board Member JT Flowers) and he got word right before the event began that his wife went into labor, so he left to be with her. The absence of decision makers underscored the importance of the work Zivarts and Portland groups like Bus Riders Unite, Sunrise PDX, Verde, The Street Trust, and many others are doing to give transit riders a stronger voice on important issues like bus service plans and perennial budget cuts.
Osman Abdelrahman moved to Portland one year ago. As a blind man, he wanted to live in a place with good public transportation. “So I looked up online and found a good address,” Abdelrahman shared with the crowd. “Theoretically the commute time should have been 36 minutes [on the bus]; but when I got there, I realized the hard way that there is an inaccessible road between me and the nearest bus station, so I couldn’t use that one in order to get to work.” Instead of the 36 minutes he planned for, one dangerous road turned Abdelrahman’s commute time into one hour.
Northeast Portland resident Karen Wells used her opportunity to speak to sing the praises of her favorite bus line and encourage others to help her save it. “I’m a loyal fan of the 17,” she said, “And TriMet has been threatening to pull the section of it I use for the last three years.” Wells urged everyone in the audience to join her in texting and emailing TriMet to tell them to keep it running.
Sky McLeod, who’s also blind, grew up in Los Angeles where she said, “There’s no public transit whatsoever. I mean, barely.” She appreciates TriMet in Portland, but also wanted us to know their system has a long ways to go before it’s efficient and a viable option to the efficiency of driving. “I tried to meet up with a bunch of blind friends, and we all lived either in North Portland or Southeast — and so we could either meet downtown, or half of us would be able to hang out and the other half couldn’t,” McLeod shared. If the groups of friends took the bus it would take over an hour. The same trip by car is just 10 minutes.
For Zivarts, these stories are all too common. She personally experienced the power of great public transit when she moved away from rural Washington and lived in New York City for a few years. “I had this huge freedom because there was a subway and it ran 24 hours a day. I didn’t have to think about being able to go somewhere,” she recalled.
Through events like the one Saturday and the upcoming Week Without Driving — which runs from September 29th to October 5th and will have over 500 hosting organizations in all 50 states this year — Zivarts is turning up the volume of voices too often left out of transit policy and funding conversations.
If Zivarts’ latest campaign is successful, transit riders like the ones who showed up Saturday, won’t have to speak and hope they are heard — they’ll be right at the table with an equal voice. That’s because Zivarts passed a law in Washington last year that gives transit agencies permission to appoint transit riders onto their boards as voting members, instead of those spots being filled by elected officials who often have zero experience using transit. “They don’t understand transit,” Zivarts shared with me in an interview Saturday. “They want to cut taxes and defund transit, and that’s not great for folks who rely on transit. So we want to the voices of people who are using those systems in the room.”
In the Portland region, TriMet’s board members are still appointed by the governor. And on a statewide level, lawmakers are headed back to Salem this week to try and pass a payroll tax increase that will help stabilize public transit budgets across Oregon.
“I hope the elected leaders and transit board members who aren’t here in the audience today, can listen and hear your stories,” Zivarts shared with the crowd. “Because I think it does start with those stories and by sharing sharing your experiences of trying to get around your community without having access to a car.”
“Non drivers exist,” Zivarts continued. “And it’s way more people than you recognize because it tends to be folks who are low-income and disabled and live in really rural areas, or who are seniors, or youth and children — and we just don’t think of those people as having the same valid mobility needs as you know somebody else who has a car and the income to pay for that. We just need to remember that if transit service is cut, the impact that’s going to have on people who really don’t have other options.”
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Zivarts gives a great presentation, with very conscious audience involvement.
There’s still time to get elected and appointed officials involved in WWD.
WWJD? Sandals, most likely.
I am so glad to read that this is being emphasized. People who don’t drive are an ignored demographic, and the number of people who don’t drive is unimaginable for most Americans. I would love to see the results of an impromptu quiz about this of elected officials and decision makers. Clearly, a few council members that the only constituents worth listening to are all drivers.
I always distinguish between those “who don’t drive”, more or less out of choice, and those “who can’t drive”, usually out of disability, age, just never learned (as in my case), and those “who aren’t allowed to drive”, from DUIs, court-orders, medication, old age, and so on. And of course there is a vast assortment of those “who shouldn’t drive but still do”, usually drunk, stoned, coal-burners, reckless, under-26, car thieves, and all-of-the-above.
Interesting. I often don’t distinguish between these groups because, practically, none of them should be driving or coerced to drive. It is better for everyone if they have the same level of access to transportation as any other group.
“Board members and local elected officials had promised to attend, and their presence got top billing on event flyers, but only one showed up (TriMet Board Member JT Flowers) and he had to leave for a family emergency before the event began. The absence of decision makers underscored the importance of the work Zivarts and Portland groups like Bus Riders Unite, Sunrise PDX, Verde, The Street Trust, and many others are doing to give transit riders a stronger voice on important issues like bus service plans and perennial budget cuts.”
What it underscores is the contempt that elected and appointed officials have for public transportation. One would think that with so many organizations speaking and so many elected officials saying they are just like the masses that the system would actually work, but the results speak for themselves.
Sure, it’s fun and games riding to a Thorn’s game on the MAX or riding into downtown on your favorite bus line in the late morning because you want to, but what about the rest of the populace who need it and are tired of sacrificing their time and sanity when they have no other choice of transportation?
I was having mental health issues after coming back from overseas and after difficulty coping with the other drivers I listened to my partner and decided to forgo driving. I lasted a year of 4-5 hour roundrip (if everything went to schedule and we all know it doesn’t) commutes crammed in with frequently standing room only to start out followed by unpleasant encounters later in the morning trip and pretty much constant coming home. Not really helping my mental health and subsequent symptoms, but what else could I do? What else can anyone at the symposium do? If one can’t drive and can’t afford someone to do if for them, what else is there? A decent percentage of the employees and all of the CWT’s (Compensated Work Therapy) used public transportation or bicycled and it was not pleasant for anyone.
So kudos to Zivarts for bringing attention to the problem and for JM for covering it and spreading the word.
Yeah, something I like about week without driving is it forces even regular riders and sympathetic supports to face the edge trips where they would typically not ride transit. It’s one thing to ride the bus to work if it’s an easy skip across the Hawthorne Bridge on the 14, it’s another thing to confront how to make an appointment in a suburban strip mall a 30 minute walk from an infrequent bus line.
I had relatively high hopes for some of the new councilors who made transit a priority, but the ongoing crisis of TriMet service cuts is souring me on that quite a bit. I know the city and TriMet have a complex and sometimes fraught relationship, but I feel like it needs to be a five alarm fire at the city that service cuts are on the way. Our system already doesn’t serve the needs of people who use it, much less those who don’t. How is it going to with less service?
You mention your unpleasant experience with other passengers – I think that is a big factor here. There seems to be this hyper fixation on bad behavior on transit within the discourse. Like if TriMet could just hire a bunch of cops to shoot all the homeless people somehow regular people would hopping on transit in droves, but I don’t think that’s true. For what it’s worth, I think they’ve made real progress in making the system more comfortable for riders by dealing with that bad behavior in a myriad of ways.
As long as transit is inconvenient people who have the option to probably won’t use it. I love riding the bus but will often choose my bike due to the time difference of a 20 minute bike ride vs. 1 hour bus ride. Even in enlightened Portland, we still treat transit as a service to used as the last option in much of the city. If we treated (aka funded) it as something that should be fast and useful (like highways) more regular folks would opt to use it. The ‘eyes on the street’ effect of being on a bus full of regular folks is real. Big difference when an unstable person does get on to feel like there’s a dozen other people who have your back.
This is totally true – you really have to put a lot of time, thought, and effort into figuring out a life where you can reliably and conveniently use transit to get to work/school, home, groceries, and appointments. Get a partner or other household members and it’s near impossible to figure out a situation where nobody has to drive.
I think that a real commitment to fiscally responsible improvements like bus lanes, transit signal priority, improved stop spacing would go a long way toward making transit more convenient for existing users and more attractive for potential riders. At the same time, there needs to be real pressure to build more transit-oriented development. It’s insane how much of the catchment area around MAX stations is parking.
Your comment lacks the crucial fact that even the municipality of Portland, let alone the suburbs which this blog almost completely ignores despite them containing the bulk of employers in the region, has a density of 4500 people per square mile.
Can you point to an urban area with a similar population density that has widely used public transit?
For context Seattle has over 8,000 people per square mile and its transit usage is higher.
I’m putting together a plan to get my workplace involved in the week without driving. I’ll be offering to help people figure out transit or bike routes, and do some tune-ups on old bikes they might have. Many will still have no other option to drive, but I think that framing it as a week to be mindful of what life is like on the other side of the windshield will be a good exercise. Many of the families of students we serve get around using transit, walking, or some combo of micro-mobility.
I’m hoping I can inspire some coworkers to join the adult bike bus I have planned for the spring 🙂
“adult bike bus” As someone new to the space and city… I’d love to hear more.
@JM great write-up!
Welcome!
A bike bus amounts to a published route with times so that people on bikes can ride together to their destinations. It started as a way to get kids safely to school. Now it is being extended to other groups of people for other destinations. For example…
I’ve been doing a once a week car free commute to Seattle for work for the past month or so, and while it’s been workable there are huge issues too. Last night, my FlixBus was delayed by an hour, meaning I missed both of the express buses to Issaquah (where I’m staying) I had planned to catch. The next one was at 8:15 or so, which was already way later than I was hoping for without dinner and with an early day. But then that bus never came, so I didn’t get into Issaquah til after 10:30.
If the bus I needed to catch ran even half hourly instead of hourly (or worse) at the times I need it, I would have saved something like 45 minutes to an hour or more yesterday. There’s not a highway project in the world that could deliver that much value for a user, but instead of making our transit system more usable, it’s doom and gloom and cuts while highway funding is on much more stable ground.
I don’t really think that my example is worth much in the grand scheme of things, but there are definitely appreciable numbers of people traveling between Seattle and Portland for work at least weekly, and the lack of reliable transit service makes it hard to bank on unless you have some reason to do it. For me, the reason is one part frugality (I could maybe get a car for this, but I’d really rather not), one part curiosity (I like weird commutes in like an academic way), and one part wonkery (I love public transit).
As much as I want high speed rail, and newfangled urban rail systems, what I really need is a reliable way to get around on transit that isn’t prone to cascading delays that make a 4 hour trip into an 8 hour trip. Across the board we should start with faster buses more often, and then we can work out how to do the big stuff
The answer is … Germany! Or France. Or maybe even the UK, though their train system has degraded quite a bit. Maybe also Spain and even Italy, to some extent.
I’m not trying to sound flippant – just pointing out that there are examples in the world of the transit system you crave. In the US we lack the political will to make it happen, in the face of the ENORMOUS power of the driving lobby. But maybe you will help change that.
What about Japan? Or Singapore? The world is a big place outside the small “continent” (if it’s still considered one) of Western Europe. Why is it always the same tired euro countries people want to look towards? Nothing has changed in Portland using those as role models. Maybe it’s time to look at other places that work even better than those examples?
The reason people do this is because Portland attracts largely white people from suburban areas in the US who are provincial and often subtly racist and the people who were already here are similar in that regard.
Asia isn’t on their radar like it is in California and Washington state.
I’m not moving across the world for any reason, much less to a country where I have no real social or personal ties. If I wanted to move to a different country with better non car transportation options, I’d go to Mexico or Canada. But I also won’t be doing that for a variety of obvious reasons (money, work, visas, etc.).
And I’ve been to Germany, France, the UK, and Italy. I think they all have good intercity transportation options relative to the US, but I dunno, I think acting like somehow the US is incapable of running a competent bus and train network is a bit ridiculous. Especially when we actually do have good options in the Northeast! Like the northeast corridor may not be as comprehensive or as fast as a new high speed line, but it’s just about as good (if not better) than legacy main lines in the UK.
I find the attitude of “just move to Western Europe” to be absurd on its face, and I’d much rather spend my time, effort, and energy making the place I already am better rather than fantasizing about moving abroad.
Again, are there urban areas in those countries that have population densities like Portland, at 4500 people per square mile? Why this fact gets lopped off the discussion here is strage given the intelligence level of commenters.
This fact needs to be acknowledged and planned around–the only thing that makes sense is the nodal density model that the city already adopted. However during the Portlandia era, building the actual density was discouraged through a myriad of policy decisions by leaders who I would term “progressive.”
Kind of says it all about how much local electeds prioritize public transit.