Five years ago in the summer of 2021, I was stumped: How could I get our state legislators to understand that when they worried about a 10-minute traffic jam, their nondriving constituents were stuck at home, unable to access the nearest bus stop because of a broken sidewalk or unable to get to church because transit didn’t run on the weekend.
I had just spent a year collecting more than two hundred stories from nondrivers from all 49 legislative districts in our state, and I’d been sharing those stories through reports, social media posts and short video profiles. These nondrivers had testified at legislative hearings, had written countless letters to the editor, and had shared their stories on TV and radio. But it wasn’t enough: when our elected leaders thought about transportation, they thought about what would make it easier, cheaper and faster for people to get where they needed to go in their cars, and they were preparing to, once again, invest billions in highway expansion while largely ignoring our needs for reliable transit and to build missing sidewalks and safe crossings.
And bigger picture, transportation just wasn’t a priority for most elected leaders. Unless you had a major highway expansion project slated for your district that would guarantee new construction jobs, I had gotten the sense that most legislators were just biding time there until they could land a more prestigious committee assignment.
This is the origin story of Week Without Driving — a full week that September where legislators would be asked to try to get around their communities, fulfilling all their obligations, getting to all their errands and activities without driving themselves so they could understand what it was like for their nondriving constituents.
Transportation access is something you think about a lot if it’s not working for you. But that wasn’t the case for our elected leaders, and we hoped that Week Without Driving would change that.
Fast forward five years and the Week Without Driving has grown from a few dozen elected leaders in Washington state to a challenge with over five hundred hosting organizations in all fifty states. This year the Week Without Driving will take place Sept. 29-Oct. 5 with walk audits, transit ride-alongs and community forums where nondrivers can share their daily experiences of transportation access with elected leaders and transportation agency leadership.
Even after that first year, as elected leaders started citing experience during their Week Without Driving, I knew we had something. On a pedestrian safety bill, a state senator cited her experience during Week Without Driving when she had to navigate a stretch of high-speed road without sidewalk en route to a community center (pretty quickly, we got that missing sidewalk funded and built). In interviews, other elected leaders reflected on the emotional burden of trying to ask others for rides for what was maybe a discretionary trip, something that helped them understand the need to increase state funding for transit service so that nondrivers weren’t always reliant on social networks for rides.
As the challenge has grown, communities across the country have come up with creative ways to talk about transportation access. Transit agencies have celebrated with free bus rides in Kansas, Week Without Driving bingo in Wisconsin and a bus wrap in Toledo. An advocate in North Carolina created a handbook for nondriving transportation in her region, and has found that even outside of the Week Without Driving, she keeps finding ways to share with friends and family when they ask her about routes or tips to get somewhere without a car. In Washington D.C., comments from elected leaders that they couldn’t participate, “transit takes too long,” helped advocacy group Greater Greater Washington develop a campaign around the transportation time tax that they’re using to advocate for more investments in frequent transit service.
Week Without Driving is about nondrivers
It’s important to understand how Week Without Driving is different from “car-free day,” “bike everywhere month” or other events that encourage mode shift.
Week Without Driving comes from our campaign to have those in charge of our transportation networks and investment priorities understand the needs of nondrivers in their communities — in particular involuntary nondrivers who can’t drive or can’t afford to drive. This includes everyone from youth too young to drive, to people whose anxiety makes driving unsafe or really uncomfortable, to folks like my parents who are aging out of driving and can only drive in certain conditions. It includes people like me who can’t drive because of vision disabilities, others with chronic health, mobility, autism, epilepsy and other disabilities, people with suspended licenses or without licenses, without access to a working vehicle, who can’t afford gas, who have to share a vehicle they can’t reliably use to get where they want to go.
Altogether, nondrivers are about one-third of the population — and we all share the need to be able to get places but the inability to do so by grabbing the keys and going. The Week Without Driving is about our needs and imagining communities — urban and rural and everything in between, that could work better for us.
“Week Without Driving is an opportunity to force elected officials to listen more attentively to people they wouldn't listen to,” explains Laura Chu Wiens, executive director of Pittsburghers for Public Transit, which, along with Access Mob, BikePGH and AARP and others, organized both state and local coalitions around Week Without driving last year that centered the stories and experiences of nondrivers.
Chu Wiens pointed out that it’s rare you get two hours of time to build a relationship with an elected leader, but a bus ride-along can take that long, and help you build those relationships, relationships that can lead to change. “Week Without Driving is about having elected leaders see nondrivers as a valuable constituency they want to engage with.”
Echoing the transit “time tax” issue that emerged from Washington D.C., at a press conference with Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, transit rider Damitra “Penny” Harris described the four hours she spends getting to church on the bus, when it would take someone who could drive only 15 minutes.
“Isn’t my time worth as much as someone who drives?” she asked.
In Duluth, Andrea and Crouse, Community Development Manager at the Zeitgeist Center for Arts and Community also expressed the power of bringing together community members and decision-makers in the context of a walk/roll audit.
“We really quickly see the grade or the angle of our streets, both the up and down the vertical of our sidewalks, but also the cross grades can be really extreme at times, and if you are experiencing that in a wheelchair or pushing a stroller it becomes a significant challenge and potentially, really dangerous. It can bring people into action by having those experiences.”
For Crouse, the emphasis on access for nondrivers makes sense — in the Hillside neighborhood where Zeitgeist organizes, around 30 percent of the households are without a vehicle. “Our focus is to create safe and accessible transportation networks so people can move within their neighborhood to get to the social connection, the food and resources they need without having to rely on a vehicle to do that.”
A broader (and different) coalition
One of the themes I heard most often was how Week Without Driving had allowed hosting organizations to go outside of their usual partnerships and build relationships with other groups who they didn’t normally collaborate with — for instance the Pittsburgh coalition included social service providers and environmental groups who didn’t previously participate in transit advocacy.
Heyden Walker from Congress for New Urbanism’s Central Texas Chapter shared, “Doing Week Without Driving as a coalition really helped us grow the coalition, and that makes all the advocacy around everything we do, better.” They built a coalition of thirteen organizations around Week Without Driving to push for an expanded vision for transit for the Austin region.
In New York State, New Yorkers for Transportation Equity heard that bus driver shortages were making it difficult for transit riders in Buffalo to have reliable service, so their Week Without Driving emphasized a collaboration with the bus driver’s union. This year they are focused on access issues in the Hudson Valley, collaborating with the Amazon worker’s union, groups that support prisoner re-entry and working families who rely on transit to push for better connections, in particular to the county center where courts and many government service offices are located.
Building towards this year’s event, for Transit Equity Day, the coalition challenged local council members to try to take transit to one of their council meetings, and the trip (which would be a 20-minute drive) took multiple hours and three bus transfers. Bus service stopped running before the meeting ended, so the local electeds who participated had to get rides home.
Ann Sullivan who organizes with New Yorkers for Transportation Equity said the group is asking electeds to fund better transit and more sidewalk infrastructure to connect to bus stops instead of using funding for a planned Rt. 17 widening project.
In more rural areas, coalition building can look like building relationships with neighbors who also care about active transportation access and safety. Kuanyu Chen who lives outside of Raleigh and is a board member of the advocacy group Oaks and Spokes described meeting neighbors who lived in a 55-plus community with many nondrivers as part of his advocacy.
At the opposite end of the age-spectrum, Week Without Driving can shine a spotlight on how car-dependent communities can fail young nondrivers, especially if they don’t have a parent or caregiver who can take them.
Vanessa Cascio from the Safe Routes Partnership began her advocacy with the advocacy group Living Streets Alliance in Tucson. She recalled an interview with a student in Tucson who said that if she wants to set herself up for college, she needed to pad her resume with all the extracurricular activities that her peers were doing, but she couldn’t because her parents couldn't take her and there wasn’t public transit service or a safe way to bike.
Samantha Lara from Honolulu is focused on how the Week Without Driving can build the movement for communities where kids can be “independently mobile” -- as in they have the ability to take transit, bike, walk or roll where they need to without needing a parent or caregiver to drive them. For this year’s event, she’s hoping to organize a “show and tell” for parents who bike with their kids to help other parents learn about tips and tricks that have made non-car transportation work for them.
But while having the right setup might help some parents switch modes, Councilmember Kristina Walker from Tacoma (a fifth-year participant) notes, “I think one of the things that's really important is to recognize is that our cities are built for automobiles and that it is not your personal failing as a parent that you can't make this happen — there are so many things working against you.”
I want to reiterate this point: needing to drive in a car-dependent society is not some sort of moral failure, nor do we want Week Without Driving to be perceived as a pass/fail test of commitment to accessibility or mode shift. Your ability to participate often depends on the zoning, land use and built environment you live in, as well as whether you live in a community that has prioritized transit access, and a neighborhood that has the political capital to get that service.
Rather we want participants to view it as an opportunity to learn from nondrivers in your community -- your family members, friends, and neighbors who are already not driving. What are the things -- both big and small -- you could work to change to make your community work better for nondrivers, both to allow those who face barriers currently to expand their access, and to allow those who can drive to drive less frequently, less far or less often?
And even if you do end up driving yourself every single time you need to go somewhere during the Week Without Driving, that is not “failing” to participate. Participation can look like what it means to reflect on the lack of non-driving options that are accessible, reliable and timely, and what this means for nondrivers in your community.
Changing who has as seat at the table
The goal of Week Without Driving is to encourage officials to allow more nondrivers, especially involuntary nondrivers, to be involved in decision-making.
In Washington State, I’ve been involved in a multi-year campaign to get our legislature to allow transit agencies to add voting seats to transit governance boards for people who actually ride transit (the way transit governance works in our state currently, only elected leaders are seated on these boards, and most of them rarely, if ever, ride the bus).
This year, we were finally successful in passing the legislation. On the Washington state senate floor, Sen. Liz Lovelett shared that her experience during Week Without Driving led to her championing this bill after she met another transit rider who was a wheelchair user and who described the difficulty he had accessing stops with steep slopes.
“Having representation on local boards [from people] that have lived experience are crucial in providing these resources and services to the community,” she explained.
As we head into our fifth year of Week Without Driving, it’s affirming to see how advocates, elected leaders, transit agencies and departments of transportation across North America are embracing the event and envisioning creative ways to highlight nondriver mobility.
In asking participants to reflect on what it means to get around their communities without driving themselves, we are asking them to help us tell the story of nondriver mobility, a story that is too often overlooked, leaving too many of us stuck at home, unable to fully access and participate.
Join us in telling the nondriver mobility story this year!
Here are some resources to help you get involved with the Week Without Driving 2025, Sept. 29–Oct. 5. Whether you're an elected leader, advocate, agency staffer, or someone who believes everyone believes mobility is for everyone, check out the Week Without Driving resources. Sign up to participate!
For information, contact Ruth Rosas at America Walks by clicking here.
