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

By Anna Zivarts and Dani Simons

One third of people living in the United States do not have a driver license. Because the majority of involuntary nondrivers are disabled, lower income, unhoused, formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, kids, young people, and the elderly, they are largely invisible. The consequence of this invisibility is a mobility system designed almost exclusively for drivers. This system has human-health, environmental, and quality-of-life costs for everyone, not just for those excluded from it.  If we’re serious about addressing climate change and inequality, we must address our transportation system.

In When Driving is Not an Option disability advocate Anna Letitia Zivarts shines a light on the number of people in the US who cannot drive and explains how improving our transportation system with nondrivers in mind will create a better quality of life for everyone.

Drawing from interviews with involuntary nondrivers from around the US and from her own experience, Zivarts explains how nondrivers get around and the changes necessary to make our communities more accessible. These changes include improving sidewalk connectivity; providing reliable and affordable transit and paratransit; creating more options for biking, scooting, and wheeling; building more affordable and accessible housing; and the understanding the unrecognized burden of asking and paying for rides.

Zivarts shows that it is critical to include people who can’t drive in transportation planning decisions. She outlines steps that organizations can take to include and promote leadership of those who are most impacted—and too often excluded—by transportation systems designed by and run by people who can drive. The book ends with a checklist of actions that you, as an individual living in a car-dependent society, can take in your own life to help all of us move beyond automobility.

When the needs of involuntary nondrivers are viewed as essential to how we design our transportation systems and our communities, not only will we be able to more easily get where we need to go, but the changes will lead to healthier, climate-friendly communities for everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: May 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781642833164

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When Driving Is Not an Option

STEERING AWAY FROM CAR DEPENDENCY

Anna Letitia Zivarts

Washington

Covelo

© 2024 Anna Letitia Zivarts

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948308

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keywords: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), automobile insurance, autonomous vehicle (AV), car dependency, choice nondrivers, delivery service, disability, disabled person, housing affordability, immigration status, involuntary nondrivers, micromobility, mobility, paratransit, parking reform, public transit, remote access, rideshare, sidewalk, transit access, walkability, wheelchair user

ISBN-13: 978-1-64283-316-4 (electronic)

Contents

Foreword by Dani Simons

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Despite What You Think, Not Everyone Drives

Chapter 1. Nondrivers Are Everywhere

Chapter 2. What Nondrivers Need

Chapter 3. Nondrivers Need What Everyone Needs: Here’s How We Get It

Chapter 4. Valuing the Expertise of Nondrivers

Conclusion

Epilogue. What You Can Do Right Now

Notes

About the Author

Foreword

Dani Simons, VP Public Affairs and Communications for the Americas, Alstom

For the vast majority of my career, I have been trying to convince Americans to drive less. I have done this because it is a critical part of slowing and reversing the damage we have done to our planet. In theory, it should also help people improve their personal health and the health of their communities. It should make travel less expensive, helping people to keep more of their income for their families instead of putting it in the pockets of oil executives. I say in theory and should because these benefits are still largely theoretical in most of the United States. In order to achieve them we need to change the way we design our policies and our streets, the way we plan and price transit systems, our development incentives, and our zoning codes.

Before the pandemic three in four commuters in the US drove alone. The average length of a commute was thirteen miles, a distance not easily covered by walking or biking. According to Governing magazine, taking transit for these trips took, on average, 1.5–1.9 times longer than driving alone.¹

I have come to believe (despite much of what we see each day on social media) that most Americans are inherently rational—at least when it comes to their transportation decisions.

You cannot at any meaningful scale convince people to do things that go so far against their own self-interest, such as biking with their kids to school without safe infrastructure or waiting for a bus that only comes twice an hour in near-freezing temperatures on the side of the road with no bus shelter.

Yet as Anna’s book points out, there are many in this country, nearly one-third of our population, who have no other options.

We are failing people who cannot and do not drive, diminishing their quality of life and hindering their social and economic opportunities. These failures hold back our local and regional economies. As a result, we’re not able to make the strides necessary to fight the climate crisis, improve public health, and create a more just and equitable nation for all.

I was part of a team at the US Department of Transportation in the Biden-Harris administration that won the passage of a once-in-a-generation investment in American infrastructure. The bipartisan infrastructure law, or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) as it is formally known, is an opportunity for us to change transportation. It, along with the COVID-19 funding that came before it, represents the largest investment that the US has ever made in transit or in passenger rail. It has a first-of-its kind program dedicated to improving roadway safety with $1 billion a year for five years.

My colleagues across USDOT also helped to craft policies meant to encourage states to use more of their highway funding to repair existing roads and in doing so create more complete streets and improve roadway safety instead of just expanding facilities.

The federal government has a vital role in making these kinds of transformations. But the projects that are funded are inherently local. That’s a good thing, but it also means that all of us need to be vigilant, be engaged, and make ourselves heard as we work plan by plan, project by project, to change the way we do transportation. As Anna points out, we will only be able to truly transform transportation if we listen to the needs of people who do not have the option to drive.

We must shift from a worldview where the system is centered on people who drive to one that is centered on people who need to get somewhere and who deserve a variety of options. We need to shift to a worldview that meets our collective need for a planet where our children can breathe the air and live free from the increasingly frightening rumblings of climate change, for a nation where all residents can participate in society and the economy and where we’re not spending extra hours a day waiting on a bus or walking and biking miles out of our way to keep ourselves safe.

Anna’s book is a wake-up call and a roadmap to some of the policies and practices we should all be advocating for so this burden does not fall just on those who cannot drive but can be shouldered by all who want a more sustainable, healthy, and just nation.

Preface

It probably wasn’t much past five o’clock, but it was dark and drizzling, as it does most of the winter in the Pacific Northwest, and so it might as well have been midnight. My friend Lara picked me up at my parents’ house in the woods, driving an old faded, mint-green pickup truck that belonged to her mom. Both Lara and her mom were six feet tall, and because I was shorter, Lara always felt a little older to me, even though we were in the same grade. She spent a lot of time working on tall ships and prided herself on being just as strong as the guys. I envied her independence and wanted to be as tough and self-reliant as I imagined she was. So that night when she offered to teach me how to drive, even though I should have refused, I was pretty excited.

I was sixteen and I knew at that point I wasn’t going to be able to get a driver’s license. When all my friends were getting their permits, my parents took me to the DMV to see if I could pass the vision test. I remember standing at the counter, placing my head up to the chunky black vision testing apparatus. At the far end of the dark tunnel flickered a small yellow shape. Was it a letter? Was it a number? I couldn’t tell. We left, me in tears.

I was born with a neurological condition called nystagmus that makes my eyes wiggle and bounce. When I’m awake, they’re always wiggling and bouncing a little bit, and it becomes more pronounced when I’m tired or stressed. Researchers don’t yet understand what causes nystagmus. Sometimes it’s hereditary and linked to albinism, and so researchers have wondered if it’s a response the brain develops to a weakness in the anatomy of the eye.

Some people get nystagmus later in life as a result of a brain injury. For them, it’s much more disruptive. They perceive the world wiggling and shaking, as their eyes do, and that can result in migraines and dizziness. My brain, having had nystagmus since infancy, has figured out ways to cope. The world doesn’t bounce around for me, but I don’t see better than 20/80 on a vision chart. This means I can’t see faces across a room or read text on a projector screen, blackboard, or a wall-mounted restaurant menu. When someone says hi to me, unless they’re right next to me, I won’t be able to recognize who they are, and trying to find people in a crowd is awful. But because when you look at me, you wouldn’t at first guess that I have nystagmus, or even know what it is, acquaintances often think I’m just rude or ignoring them when I fail to wave back or say hello.

As a child born almost a decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), I grew up with a deep sense of shame around my vision. And I felt intense pressure to camouflage my disability and to pretend I could see things I couldn’t to keep others around me comfortable. I didn’t know anyone else who was blind or low vision. Even in books or school, the only blind person I read about was Helen Keller, her long white petticoats firmly grounding her in another time that had little relation to me, on the sideline of a middle school PE game after getting smashed in the face, again, with a volleyball I didn’t see in time to duck.

I wanted to be dateable, attractive, not the awkward kid I saw in photos with thick glasses, a head tilt, and eyes that couldn’t find the camera. Like the ugly duckling or Cinderella, I figured if I worked hard enough at masking, nobody would know I was disabled, and my life would be immeasurably better. I stopped using the binoculars I needed to read the board at school. I always pretended I could see something when someone asked. And when Lara offered to teach me how to drive, I was all in, despite the fact it was dark, raining, and it was her mom’s truck that we both knew I wasn’t supposed to be driving.

Lara drove us to one of the empty parking lots at a nearby college campus. Each row of parking spaces was divided by a grassy median planted with trees. This campus, all modernist water-stained concrete, was built in the 1970s, so by the late 1990s, many of these trees had grown some heft.

We started out slowly and I was doing great. First gear, no problem, then second, third. By the time we were working on shifting into fourth gear, I had to get more speed. Suddenly, in one of the turns, there was a curb sticking out that I didn’t see in time. We careened up over the curb, through the grass, and straight up the trunk of a thick fir tree.

Luckily, we were both uninjured, but the truck sustained considerable damage. I remember shaking from the cold and nerves as we tried to push the truck down off the tree, its hood crumpled.

I am incredibly thankful we weren’t seriously hurt and didn’t hurt someone else. And I’m also grateful that I had this experience, for while it took me another fifteen years to be comfortable enough to openly tell people about my disability, this crash gave my teenage self the knowledge that I could not safely drive.

Looking back now, I’m embarrassed that as a teenager, I didn’t learn how to use the bus system in my town. Yes, it would have been a two-mile walk down rural roads to the nearest bus stop, but even that would have given me some sense of freedom. But I didn’t know how to use the bus, and I definitely never met other adults who couldn’t drive. I couldn’t imagine a future for myself in Washington State where I would have the independence and ease of movement I craved, so I was intent on getting out.

I moved to the Bay Area for college, and New York City after that, where I’d heard there was a subway system, the only one in the country that never stopped running. Twenty-four-hour service represented freedom to me, equality with my peers back in the Pacific Northwest who could grab their keys and go whenever they wanted. But seventeen years later, after having a child, the desire to be closer to family back in Washington pulled my partner and me to move back.

As much as I appreciated being closer to family, the move away from a city where transit access had given me near-equivalent mobility with my nondisabled friends was difficult. In Seattle, I felt resentful every time I looked up directions on how to get somewhere on the bus and my phone showed it would take two to three times as long as it would if I could drive there. What would be a fifteen-minute drive would be an hour-and-a-half, multi-bus trip, where missing bus shelters meant me and my toddler would be waiting on the side of a loud arterial in the rain, covered in