Where I’ve Been

If you’ve been a longtime Streetsblog reader, you may or may not have noticed that I’ve been logging about 5-7 bylines every week for this site since I first started in January of 2020. And you also may or may not have noticed that in June, my name pretty abruptly stopped showing up here. That’s because I took a leave of absence following the death of my father.  

My dad was on a very short list of my favorite humans in the world and the most important people in my life, so I won’t attempt to eulogize him here; what he meant to me goes far beyond what could fit within the mission frame of this website.

But because I count many people who read my work as friends who care about me, I want to share a little bit about where I’ve been, and how the experience of becoming his caregiver has impacted my work. 

Over the course of my career, I’ve written countless articles about disability and mobility, as well as the “silver tsunami” of Baby Boomers who are poised to lose their ability to drive in communities where driving is not optional. I have memorized statistics about the third of U.S. households who can’t or don’t use cars, and the rising share of older Americans with mobility challenges who rank among their number. 

None of that prepared me for what happened to my dad. 

In September of last year my father went, in a matter of days, from being a seemingly healthy, active 73-year-old who had recently driven himself more than 500 miles for a multi-day canoe trip, to a stage IV cancer patient with metastases in his bones. Suddenly, dad was relying on a steady diet of sedating painkillers just to make it through the day; chemo soon stole what was left of his energy, and left him falling asleep mid-sentence at the kitchen table.

Needless to say, getting behind the wheel was suddenly and totally out of the question, and the SUV in his garage became an expensive stone around his neck. 

None of my carefully researched articles about increased road testing for seniors or the need for more walkable multi-generational neighborhoods had equipped me with the tools I needed to navigate this. It completely upended my dad’s life, my life, and the lives of my entire family.

It also taught me that it is not enough for transportation reformers to focus solely on projects like bus lanes and infill development. That might help car-dependent families like mine have more mobility options in a few years, or even decades; it would do nothing to help them tomorrow.

That’s doubly true of seniors in ultra-car dependent areas, which unfortunately included my father. 

Recently widowed following the death of my stepmother just a year before, cancer had left my dad functionally unable to leave the condominium in a planned community in rural Ohio that had been his home for 25 years, at least without someone to drive him. That’s because that “planned community” had been deliberately built without sidewalks, any form of fixed-route transit or even basic streetlights on most roads. There was a grocery store next door; you still had to drive to reach it, or walk on a 45 mile per hour arterial. 

The condo complex also backed up to an interstate, which you could hear roaring every time you cracked the windows. Despite the many articles I sent him about PM 2.5 exposure and its links to adverse health conditions — including the type of cancer he eventually developed — Dad still considered that highway an amenity. It allowed him and my stepmother to live deep in the horse country they both loved, where she worked, and he volunteered, at an equestrian therapy center for people with disabilities nearby. 

I think for many transportation reform advocates, it’s easy to write off people who choose car-dependent neighborhoods as uninformed, in dire need of deprogramming from the cult of “car-brain”, or even as victims of the dwindling supply and surging demand for houses along transit corridors. My father’s experience with cancer reminded me that while that can be true, it is also not that simple. 

My dad knew the many ways that his car dependent neighborhood did not serve him, because he read everything I wrote. He was not stubborn or stupid; he was thinking of downsizing before he got his diagnosis. But he loved his home despite all the driving it forced him to do; he was not quite ready to leave the place he’d shared with a wife he was still grieving. By the time he thought he might be ready, he found out he was dying.

As advocates, we can talk all we want about how “housing policy” is intertwined with transportation policy, and why it would be better if more people had the option of living in places without cars. But that is something very different than talking about our attachment to home, which can be among the powerful, emotional and irrational bonds in our lives.

We cannot argue away that love with statistics and policy briefs, even when the person in the car-dependent rural house knows full well that their home does not meet their needs.  

So yes: we tried to keep my dad in his home, despite the fact that he could not safely leave it without someone to drive him.

My sister and I lived multiple states away, but for months, we traded off flying hundreds of miles to stay with him, tag-teaming in and out of our new role as volunteer chauffeurs. Needless to say, we also served as volunteer nurses, and housekeepers and cooks, and about a million other roles; if this were a different type of website, I could write a whole other essay about how the medical system over-relies on the unpaid labor of families, and particularly daughters. 

I tried to keep up with my work at Streetsblog during this period. I wrote articles in the middle of the night, or in short bursts between administering meds, checking vitals, running to the pharmacy, juggling calls to insurance and dozens of specialists, and the zillion other tiny acts of caregiving that often got me up at 4 am and often stretched my days past midnight. (If you’re a troll who harassed me on the internet during this period for being an “ableist” because I want more cities to have bike lanes: well, I hope you feel bad now!) 

Getting my dad to the doctor, though, proved to be a uniquely difficult burden — and often, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

From my reporting, I knew about the challenges people with disabilities face finding a ride, at least in the abstract. I knew that home health aides and the deeply underfunded paratransit system in Dad’s neighborhood weren’t a panacea, not least because both required the kind of advance notice that mapped poorly onto the dynamic schedule of a cancer patient with constantly emerging medical needs.

I also knew that Uber and taxi drivers wouldn’t help him down the stairs from his front door — if those drivers didn’t cancel the ride once they saw how far out he lived, which many of them did. 

Later, when my dad finally decided to move into an assisted living in my city, I would learn that even paying out the nose for the “all inclusive” option wouldn’t solve our transportation puzzle, either. Retirement communities with hundreds of residents all seemed to have just a single driver on staff; outgoing rides required at least 72 hours’ notice to book, and the staff couldn’t just wait around to bring a resident home.

That might be fine for retirees with low vision who don’t mind reading in a lobby for an hour after seeing their general practitioner; it was brutal for a guy with chemo fatigue who needed hours of recovery every time he left his room. 

The worst part, though, was the sheer mental burden of filling the gaps in a very sick person’s transportation schedule, and how that burden compounded the challenges of caregiving.  

From his very first treatment, my dad simply did not have the energy to call a dozen friends and family to see who could take him to the doctor. Even when I made those calls for him, most people we tried couldn’t help; they were too busy with their own punishing commutes across a region that functionally required everyone to drive long distances for most trips.

When I asked the social worker about other transportation resources, they kicked me to a byzantine app-based “platform” that connected patients with volunteer drivers who often weren’t available, either. The idea of making my terminally ill, not-particularly tech-savvy, Baby Boomer father navigate that app while on opioids when his millennial daughter could barely manage it was enough to break my brain. 

So a lot of days, I cancelled all my interviews and drove Dad myself. Some days, we put nearly a hundred miles on his SUV, between multiple appointments on far-flung medical campuses, over whose scheduling and locations we were offered zero say. I learned that this is just how doctor’s appointments work when you are very sick in a car dependent place: you go where the MRI queue can fit you in tomorrow, even if it’s on the other side of town, and your family has to figure out how to get you there. 

Here’s the thing: I am deeply aware that a bike lane would not have made any of this better.  

My dad could barely walk in the last months of his life, never mind ride; moreover, even the best bus driver in the world wouldn’t have accompanied him to and from his stop on days when he was struggling. And before any jerks on the internet swarm my inbox to slam me for the “hypocrisy” of relying on a car to get my dying father to the oncologist: please, just stop, because I am exhausted.

Nothing about the movement to end mass, forced, car dependence in our cities has ever been incompatible with the movement to support truly car-dependent people, which many of us will become as our bodies age or become ill. There was a brief period, before his illness progressed, where my father might have been able to maintain his independence with better paratransit near his home; the fact that this period ended so quickly does not mean that he did not deserve that chance.

And I’d even argue that mass, forced car dependence did make my dad’s life worse, even though he relied heavily on cars in his last months.

I cannot tell you how many times I sat with him in gridlocked traffic on the way to urgent care, desperate to get him care for some symptom that was not quite bad enough for an ambulance, and wondering how many of the able-bodied drivers that choked the road around us could have taken the train. Every time I walked through a hospital parking garage, I wondered if getting him care would have been less of a punishing ordeal if all that space had been used to build offices for his umpteen far-flung specialists instead. 

But there’s also an uncomfortable truth that I had not considered deeply before my dad got sick: that sometimes, when we are very ill, no transportation option really serves us anymore. And that includes cars.

Sometimes, the bike ride to the corner store, the walk to the train station, or even the journey from the living room to the attached garage feels like too much. We become housebound, and then we become bed-bound; our bodies change in ways we never expected. The best we can hope for as this failure progresses is a shorter trip to the doctor, or a visit from a friend that will save us from leaving the house at all.

I wish that more transportation reformers and governments alike would incorporate policies that support people who can’t move much at all into their mobility advocacy, like better home health care access, sustainable delivery options, and massive reform to the caregiving industry, including transportation and strong wages for those desperately-needed workers. It would save so much pain if we did. 

In the very end, I am grateful my father was spared pain by the amazing staff of a hospice house, who took wonderful care of him in his last days. I am equally grateful that my sister and I could be by his side when he passed, and that we could push his hospital bed outdoors to spend his final moments in the garden at sunset.

As a reporter, I have heard countless stories from people who have lost their loved ones to car crashes, including extremely graphic details about what happened to their bodies in their final moments. I do not share all of those details in my writing, but they do haunt me. l do not take for granted for a moment that my father died in peace rather than agony, in my arms rather than on the side of the road. Every single person we lose to traffic violence deserved the same.

In the end, I think the greatest lesson from this time that I will carry into my work is this: there is enough pain in the world already, even before we build a transportation system that ends so many lives too early, and makes so many others harder than they need to be. I still believe that a world with less pain is possible. My dad would want me to keep working to make it real.