Talking Headways Podcast: A Week Without Driving

On this week’s episode of Talking Headways, Streetsblog contributor and book author Anna Zivarts hosts a panel of elected officials and advocates to discuss the impacts of the yearly event and national movement known as Week Without Driving, which Zivarts launched in 2021. The panelists hail from Arizona, Minnesota, Kentucky and Washington, DC, among other places.

You can listen to the episode in the embedded player below, read the full AI-generated transcript, or scroll down a little further for a partial edited transcript.

Anna Zivarts:  What was the reaction of your colleagues in city council and other elected officials? When you were talking about the Week Without Driving challenge? How did folks engage and what was your experience like?

Nick Miller, City Councilmember in Rochester, Minnesota: It was a great experience to be able to invite people to join me. I think so much of my experience of riding a bike for my primary transportation around town. My colleagues see me as an outlier, as that would never work for them. That’s just something that Nick’s decided to do. He’s rearranged his life. [I liked] having the opportunity to invite people to try it for a week and not just exclusively biking.

I actually had the mayor and our city council president take me up on it. I saw our council president at several public events that week showing up on his bike and the mayor at least once with a Walk to School Day that we did in partnership with our public school system. But I think it’s been the conversations that I’ve taken after Week Without Driving with other elected officials who didn’t participate that have been most eye-opening.

For example, with the Walk to School day — it happens at one of our schools along the Southeast side of town, which is adjacent to a county road, which is designed much like an urban highway through that neighborhood, the roadway separates a mobile home park from their neighborhood school.

And when I was walking along the side of the mobile home park, no one joined me. All of the kids that were participating in Walk to School Day had been bused over to a public park and were walking along the path, but nobody from the neighborhood on my side was joining just organically. And so as I’ve talked with my colleagues at Olmsted County, I’ve told them that many roads in our city are county jurisdiction or state jurisdiction.

Our county has not adopted a Complete Streets policy, and I’ve been able to educate them on what that would do and how it’s a safety and a pro-human development measure. They often talk about their services as not so much infrastructure, but [the] provision of human services and tying the human health element into infrastructure has been a productive conversation.

We’re not there yet, but we’re in the process of adopting a safety action plan funded by Safe Streets and Roads for All. And that’s one of the key recommendations that I continue to ask that comes out is the recommendation for Complete Streets policy in the jurisdictions within our MPO service area.