Member-only story
Designing a Town People Can Get Around? Repeat This Exercise.
Anna Zivarts reminds us how we can take an hour to try harder
Anna Letitia Zivarts, in her book When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency, observes that transportation policy tends to center the perspective of drivers—and often, it centers cars. Planners deliberately design a landscape to be more efficient for cars to get around. But people are not cars. Some people are passengers more often than drivers, and some people use cars rarely or never.
Being a driver or a nondriver isn’t a strict binary. Some of us can’t afford to drive or aren’t well enough to do so. In our final years, each of us is decreasingly likely to drive at all. Also, mobility is diverse: people may walk, bike, roll their wheelchair, or take the bus or train. When we talk about so-called “fifteen-minute cities,” in which people can get around quickly without cars, we should remember that not everyone travels at the same speed and there’s nothing sacred about a unit of fifteen minutes. All of this may change and may be unpredictable.
Still, we can coherently talk about what it means to be a nondriver. Nondrivers’ perspectives matter.
Children matter and should be counted: “The needs of young nondrivers are not less important than, or fundamentally different than, the needs of adult nondrivers,” Zivarts says. Remembering this will “help us build the kind of broad coalition we need to undo car dependency.”
This is a practical book for people in a planning or advocacy role. Though I’m not in such a role, there was one suggestion I found especially sticky.
It may seem simple, but people forget this
Toward the end of the book, Zivarts gives an anecdote from Kristina Swallow, director of Tucson’s Planning and Development Services Department and former director of the Nevada Department of Transportation. Swallow asks people to try being a nondriver, even if just for a little while, so they know what it’s like.
“Swallow made a point of walking, biking, and riding the bus to work. In what she called her ‘director’s challenge,’ she asked each member of her executive team to walk, bike, or use…
