Anna Zivarts - mobility system advocate

Image courtesy of Anna Zivarts/Island Press

Around the same time Heidi Across America came out, I saw regular posts in my LinkedIn feed from Anna Zivarts, who’d just published a book with Island Press, When Driving Is Not An Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency. I’m always interested to see other people advocating for nondriving options, and I was compelled by Anna’s experience of not having the choice to drive.

Image courtesy of Anna Zivarts.

Anna was born with the neurological condition nystagmus, which makes her eyes wiggle and bounce. She can see well close, but people and objects across a room are blurry. As a person with low-vision, Anna was unable to pass a driving vision test, and she’s been a nondriver her whole life. Despite not being able to see well enough to drive, Anna does ride a bike. As she mentions in her book, “While it is not safe for someone like . . . me, with less than 20/40 vision, to drive a multi-ton vehicle at 75 miles per hour, [I] can safely pilot a small, light vehicle going less than 20 miles per hour” (page 58).

The audience for When Driving Is Not An Option is largely U.S. policy makers and advocates (active transportation, transit, disability rights) who interface with the policy environment. When Driving Is Not An Option opens with statistics that reveal nondrivers are everywhere in this country. One third of the U.S. population doesn’t have a driver’s license. The majority of these nondrivers are disabled and poor people, unhoused or recently incarcerated individuals, undocumented immigrants, children, young people, and seniors aging out of driving. These nondrivers* tend to exist far from the power structures that would enable them to create environments that would better meet their needs, and as a result, the U.S. mobility system^ is designed almost exclusively for drivers.

* I am a nondriver with a driver’s license. While I choose not to drive, I occasionally do when I have no other option. Anna and many, many other people in the U.S. cannot pivot to make do the same way I can. Mike Steen and Kristin Weiss are two other people I’ve interviewed whose disabilities prevent them from driving.

^ ‘Mobility system’ centers how people get around as distinct from the transportation system, which centers the movement of vehicles.

As Zivarts lays out in her book, the costs of a mobility system designed for drivers force “us to make the land use decisions that drive up housing costs and saddle us with the financial burden of owning, operating, and maintaining a vehicle. Car dependency contributes to the public health crises of air and noise pollution and traffic crashes that cause life-changing injuries or deaths, all of which disproportionately harm low-income, Black, Brown, immigrant and Native American communities. And perhaps most menacing of all, transportation is the leading contributor to carbon emissions. If we’re serious about addressing climate change, we have to address our transportation system” (pages 1-2).

In the climate-friendly section of my Wander & Wonder Venn diagram post, I also show that transportation is the greatest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. across sectors (29%) and in the global tourism industry (49%).

We were both busy touring in 2024 and finally had an opportunity to connect in person in Seattle in late January 2025 and with a Zoom conversation two months later.

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HB: How did you become a transportation options advocate?

AZ: I didn’t start in transportation, but not being able to drive became a defining structure for how I live my life and where I live. I probably wouldn’t be working in transportation if I’d grown up in New York City or a European city or in Asia where there’s great transit because my needs would be met.

I thought I wanted to work in international development, so I earned a Master of International Education Policy then discovered I was more interested in inequities and social justice issues in the U.S. instead of abroad.

I spent several years working within labor unions in the U.S. and got involved in various lefty political organizing and social justice campaigns while I lived in New York City, including the Fight for 15 to raise the minimum wage, the Innocence Project to fight wrongful incarceration, and immigration reform work during the Obama administration when that seemed hopeful. I didn’t end up in disability until later, and my involvement in transportation resulted from my disability work.

HB: Did your move to Seattle coincide with your shift to disability and transportation?

AZ: My son was born in 2016 with the same eye condition I have. I was closeted around my visual impairment up until that point and recognized my trauma around it and didn’t want to pass that on to him. That led me to a reckoning with my own disability, and I got involved with disability groups for the first time. That led me to interest in working in disability and then a friend from high school sent me a job posting back in Washington state, where we grew up, and that brought me home.

When I started working at Disability Rights of Washington, I started to meet a lot of people with disabilities who didn’t drive and realized there were way more of us than I thought. Washington is so car dependent, and the mobility system doesn’t work all that well for us. I wanted to change that narrative and show that, one, we exist as nondrivers, and, two, push for changes that make it easier for us to get around.

My experience as an organizer is an important skillset that I bring to my work because engaging the disability community benefits from the same outreach framework.

HB: Tell me about a Week Without Driving. When is it and how do people participate?

AZ: We launched in 2021, and the challenge was a result of sharing recommendations based on my research. Elected leaders denied that nondrivers existed and also denied that transit operated in their communities. That first year, a Week Without Driving was just in Washington state and helped elected leaders understand that constituents in their communities were using existing transit even if it wasn’t great. Once we were able to demonstrate the need for improvements through this experiential challenge, it was easier to make the case for funding sidewalks, transit, and other active transportation infrastructure.

In 2022, we did another Week Without Driving challenge just in Washington state, but I kept getting calls from people in other states wanting to participate. Organizing a national awareness event wasn’t within my job description or something that could be funded or conducted by my organization. That’s when I reached out to America Walks to lead a national Week Without Driving.

The 2025 Week Without Driving will be held September 29 through October 5. Register and learn more about the Week Without Driving at weekwithoutdriving.org. The focus of the challenge trainings tends to be for elected leaders, transit leaders, and other policy makers since those are the folks who ultimately make the funding decisions. That said, I encourage anyone who’s interested to participate, share on social media, and share your experience with others.

HB: You talked to people all over Washington and across the country, it seems. How often did access to recreation come up in your interviews and who brought it up?

AZ: I think the interest in access to recreation is specific to certain geographies. In Washington, for example, outdoor recreation is part of the state’s cultural identity. Getting outdoors is what people who live here like to do for fun. Among the 70 nondrivers I surveyed in Washington, I was surprised how many of them mentioned the difficulty of reaching the state’s recreational destinations. My sample wasn’t big enough to do a statistical analysis, but I was still surprised how often people expressed wanting better options to reach outdoor recreation.

It’s different on the east coast. In New York, if you told someone you were going hiking, they’d be like, “What?” It’s not a thing there.

HB: For people who are interested in similar research and advocacy work related to recreation and travel, what guidance do you have for how they might take action?

AZ: Recreation and travel are usually born from a need to get away from something. Oftentimes that’s cars.

I was thinking about this the other night. When I take my kid to dance class, instead of staying indoors, I wait outdoors in the parking lot. Even though the parking lot sits back a little from the busy street, I’m still buffeted by a lot of noise and stinky exhaust. On this particular evening, it was light late enough that I went across the street to a park, and I spent a lovely hour away from all the vehicle noises and smells.

My experience in the park is representative of the access that is possible. Wilderness and nature exist outside of cities, but they can also exist within cities. How do we create more spaces within cities that don’t have that stress of car travel, that noise and air pollution? How do we create spaces where our nervous system can unwind outdoors in urban environments?

Block parties are one way to use the public space of streets safe, public gathering spaces. Here, Anna is ready for her neighborhood block party. Anna loves gardening, and her plot is visible behind her. She is especially fond of raspberries - their abundance and deliciousness.

HB: When did you know you wanted to write this book, or how did you end up on the path to writing it?

AZ: I’d done a white paper that was partly to get the word out about a Week Without Driving to a national audience and partly to raise awareness with other state federally funded organizations that are responsible to ensure that people with disabilities don’t face abuse and neglect. There’s an opportunity for more organizations to do transportation organizing – and many do – and to be more connected to the active transportation and transit world and to build a bigger coalition. Having had some success with building that coalition here in Washington state, I wanted to create a map to support other states to develop broad collaboration among active transportation, transit, and disability groups.

Also, it’s important to center the needs of people with disabilities who are often not at the table and may have different and more complicated access needs that advocacy groups may not have considered. If we want to win more projects, we have to bring more people into the conversation even if it makes some people uncomfortable or challenges assumptions of who a city is for. Active transportation can’t work for everyone. Bike lanes do have tradeoffs for folks who are blind, and they conflict with bus stops. It’s important to surface these issues so advocates are aware and better able to collaborate with the disability community and see the value in doing so.

HB: As a nondriver, how did you manage your book tour? What accommodations or other actions did you have to take to make it work?

AZ: I traveled for work all over the country for years before Uber and Lyft. It’s really all about the planning. Is there a cab company? Do you have the phone number? Do you have a ride? Do they know how to find me at the airport because I can’t always find them? For me, flying is relatively accessible, and a lot of distance can be covered in the air. I did have a talk with my publisher to see if they knew of anyone who had done a book tour and made a point of not flying. They didn’t. I think that would be cool, especially if you had the time to do it all by rail or other kinds of transportation.

I tried to take Amtrak back to Seattle from Minneapolis from a book talk this winter, and Amtrak canceled for a week because of freezing temperatures. At first, I kept extending my hotel stay, which wasn’t cheap, and then finally I bought a last-minute plane ticket because I wasn’t going to make it back on time. I was sad because the one time I was going to try rail I couldn’t do it. The U.S. train system isn’t a realistic alternative yet for a lot of trips.

Nondriving and nonflying trips in the U.S. are complicated to plan. I have a book talk in Kent County, Michigan, which is Grand Rapids. If I could drive, I could fly into Detroit and then it would be a two-hour drive to Grand Rapids. Instead, I have to fly into a much smaller airport. I’m glad they have an airport, but it just makes the travel a lot trickier to sort out. I spent a lot of time looking at Greyhound and Flix to see if I could make the schedule work, but there’s only one bus per day, and it’s not at a convenient time.

I don’t love ride hail [Uber and Lyft] for their employment practices and would prefer to take local transit from airports even if it takes longer.

I had one event in Alabama last fall where I hadn’t Googled where the hotel was before the trip. I knew the event was in Mobile, Alabama, and just figured I’d take Uber from the airport to the hotel. As I was in Dallas on my way to Mobile, I realized it was going to be a $600 Uber ride to get to the hotel because it was closer to Tallahassee, Florida, even though it was still in Alabama. I convinced the airline to change my flight to Tallahassee so it was only an hour-long Uber ride. That was a mistake on my part for not looking at the details in advance.

HB: What quirks have you discovered about transportation in other parts of the country? Positive and negative.

AZ: I learn a lot taking local transit, especially buses. The Detroit airport has a speedy bus that goes to the airport that costs more. On the way there I didn’t know this and took the local bus when I arrived. It took an hour and a half to reach my hotel when the speedy bus would have been only 20 minutes. The speedy bus uses the highway, and the local bus travels through communities on the outskirts of Detroit. You do get to see a lot more of a place on the local bus than you do if you’re zipping along the highway.

In Toledo, Ohio, all the buses in the system leave the main bus terminal on the hour at the hour. All the routes are circular and come back to the central hub. I thought it was cool for a city where there isn’t enough of a system to be a true grid. It makes it easy to navigate because you know that on the hour you’ll catch the next bus. The hub had an indoor waiting area and restrooms, so you’re not standing on a random shoulder for 45 minutes waiting for your connection.

HB: What would you like drivers to know, do, or be aware of?

AZ: So many of our trips could be replaced by transit or walking or biking. Sure, it takes longer, but I think it’s important for everyone to consider: “If I couldn’t drive, what would I do?”

Also, many kid activities are often far from home and hard to reach on transit. If you’re a parent who doesn’t drive, you can rely on the kindness of others to get your kid to activities, but relying on others comes with a lot of baggage. If you’re someone who can drive, can you push to have kid activities centrally located, in places with transit access, or in the neighborhoods where kids live? Youth sports is especially problematic. Parents are often like, “I could give up driving except for soccer practice.”

HB: What do you consider one of the biggest gifts of your disability?

AZ: If I could drive, I would. My disability has given me insight into the lives of people who can’t drive, and it’s been a privilege to write and share the stories people have offered to me. I appreciate that I have the freedom to write a book about the challenges of nondrivers.

HB: What’s one place you’d love to visit?

AZ: Japan. I’ve heard amazing things about Tokyo and the trains there. And the maglev trains. I’m not a train nerd, but it would be cool to see a magnetic train and the high-speed trains.

To learn more about the failures of U.S. car dependency and discover ways to drive less or advocate for fewer car-dependent options in society, I encourage you to read Anna’s book and check out weekwithoutdriving.org.

Visit Anna’s website for articles and interviews and follow her on LinkedIn and BlueSky to keep tabs on her work.

Attend an upcoming When Driving Is Not An Option event.