Week Without Driving challenges driver-centric culture in Portland metro area and beyond

The fourth annual Week Without Driving challenge kicked off on Monday. The event was created in 2021 by Disability Rights Washington to highlight the barriers nondrivers face, including those who have disabilities, with using public transit or sidewalks and bike lanes to get around. This year the challenge has expanded to all 50 states with the help of dozens of local and state organizations. And while it’s open to anyone, the organizers hope to recruit elected officials whose policies can shape public transit investments and planning decisions in local communities.

Joining us to share more is Abby Griffith, a Portland-based disability rights advocate and co-founder of Empower Movement Washington who is helping organize the event. The Columbian recently profiled her efforts to raise awareness of the mobility barriers she and others with disabilities face. Also joining us are two lawmakers: Khanh Pham, the Oregon State Representative for House District 46, which covers outer Southeast Portland. She is also running unopposed for Oregon Senate District 23; and Claudia Balducci, a King County Councilmember in Washington state. She is participating in the challenge for the fourth time.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The fourth annual Week Without Driving challenge kicked off on Monday. The event was created in 2021 by Disability Rights Washington to highlight the barriers that nondrivers, including people with disabilities, can face when they carpool, use public transit, or sidewalks or bike lanes to get around this year. The challenge has expanded to all 50 states.

Abby Griffith helped organize the event. She is a disability rights advocate and the co-founder of Empower Movement Washington. She was recently profiled in The Colombian and joins us now. Khanh Pham and Claudia Balducci do as well. Pham is a Democratic State Representative from outer Southeast Portland. This is her first year doing the challenge. Balducci is a King County Councilmember in Washington. She is now on her fourth year of this challenge. Welcome to all three of you.

Claudia Balducci: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Abby Griffith: Thank you.

Miller: Abby Griffith, first – you were part of the team, as I noted, that helped start this. What was the big idea behind it?

Griffith: The big idea of launching Week Without Driving challenge is to let lawmakers, policymakers, decision makers who make decisions for our community see how difficult it is to get around by transit for nondrivers, especially nondrivers who are disabled. And we are happy how lawmakers [have been] involved with Week Without Driving since we launched in 2021.

Miller: What motivates you personally in this work?

Griffith: What motivates me? That is a great question. I am [a] nondriver, disabled – I’m totally blind. I take the bus, of course I don’t drive. And getting around was very difficult for me. When I joined Disability Rights Washington to help with Week Without Driving, I was a student, and it was very difficult for me to get around, go to college and come back to my house. It takes me like three hours to commute from my house to Washington State University in Vancouver. And I was like, this is absolutely not fair for us who rely on transit to spend almost three hours one way, when people can drive like 18 minutes from my house to get to my college. It takes me like three hours to get to my college. This has to be changed. I want to get involved, I wanna make change. That is how I was motivated to join Disability Rights Washington and help nondrivers get our voice heard.

Miller: Claudia Balducci, you’re the kind of person who is the target of this, an elected official. As Abby was saying, the idea is for people like you, people in power, to experience what it’s like to not drive yourself around. My understanding though is that this is your fourth year doing the challenge, but you were already a kind of relatively light car user, with transit and biking already in your own personal family transportation mix. So I’m curious what you have actually learned from doing this exercise?

Balducci: Yeah, that’s true. I suspect one of the reasons that I was called early and asked to participate is because I was known as somebody who advocates for transit. And I do, I ride my bicycle and take the bus for many of my trips. And so I have to say, at first I thought, that sounds really, really interesting, I’m happy to do it … but this is going to be easy for me. I really expected it would be no big deal.

But it wasn’t, it was not easy. There is a big difference, as it turns out, from choosing not to drive for many trips, and being unable to drive. Taking a week where you really commit to the idea that you do not get behind the wheel of the car, that was a very different experience. I learned right away that there are places where transit doesn’t fill in. Certain trips, especially from the suburbs where I represent, to other suburbs, that’s a hard trip to make with just transit. It can take a very long time, as Abby pointed out.

Also some of the safety issues, the places where there’s no safe bike lane or there’s no safe place to walk. And if you don’t have a choice, you’re walking anyway. It really was very eye opening even for somebody like myself who lives kind of a car-light lifestyle.

Miller: What kinds of stories have you heard from constituents who can’t or choose not to drive themselves?

Balducci: Many, and they’re quite compelling. I’ll share a couple. One constituent of mine came to me, she’s wheelchair-bound, she is a retired doctor. And she shared that we had cut the fixed route bus near her home, and she was then having to rely completely on paratransit. Paratransit is a very important and necessary service. It’s where people who have mobility challenges and disabilities, you call, the bus comes to you and takes you where you want to go. But it doesn’t go every 15 or 30 minutes. It takes a long time, and it can be circuitous, you end up riding with other people to where they’re going. So what I was hearing from this constituent was that her life, which had already become rather isolated due to her declining mobility, was suddenly very isolated because she couldn’t get to events with friends reliably on time. And if we could reinstate that fixed route bus that came every 15 minutes or half an hour, she could go to those kinds of things. It was a real quality of life issue.

And the second thing I will say is we did hear from somebody who was actually a resident of King County but was participating in organizing the Week Without Driving, that from where she lives, also a wheelchair user, to the bus she has to take to travel, there is no sidewalk. And so she is riding her wheelchair in a lane of car traffic for about a half mile down a hill to get to the bus. If you can imagine here in the Northwest that often is happening in the dark and the rain. So it’s just very, very dangerous, and leads to people just choosing not to go places and self-isolating, rather than being out in the community where they could be having a much better quality of life.

Miller: Khanh Pham, what about you? What have you learned just in the last couple of days of experiencing this or planning for the days to come?

Khanh Pham: I have learned it is challenging for sure. It takes more thought. But I also just want to lift up that it has been also something that has also enriched my life. I have had to now take my e-bike to bike my daughter to school and pick her up, and I found that we are building more connections. I had to go to an event last night and had to ask the organizer to connect me with somebody who could give me a ride because I was participating. And it allowed me to kind of break out of the individualist mentality that I’m often in, kind of being shy about asking for help, and actually just ended up making a new friend and we had a really great conversation.

I think that sometimes … one of my motivations is definitely to learn about the challenges. Because as a State Legislator, who’s going to help shape the transportation package next year, we do need to understand the experiences of the one in four Oregonians who can’t or don’t drive. But I also want to highlight that I did this to enrich my life too. I actually bumped into two friends when I was in a cafe because I had to unlock my bike, not being in a parking lot but being on the sidewalk just allowed me to make deeper connections that I think would have been possible if I’d been in my car.

Miller: I’m interested in the framing that you’re talking about there, not only about scarcity or challenges, but about joy and connection. How does that translate to policy or politics?

Pham: I think we need to bring more of the experience of joy into policy making. One of the most compelling testimonies in the transportation roadshow, which we just concluded last week from the Transportation Committee in the Legislature … We heard from Megan Ramey in Hood River, who organizes their safe routes to school program in their local school district or in the local school. And she said we need to bring back joy. And the joy of kids being able to walk or bike to their local park or to their local school. And we need to center and restore that joy in what kinds of decisions we make about our transportation investments. She just shared a simple story about her son being able to figure out he wanted to go to soccer camp, she couldn’t take him, but she allowed him to take the public transit. And it just made him so proud to have that agency and that self-determination as a teenager to be able to get to camp and figure out the bus route. It was actually from Hood River to Portland, so they’re talking about intercity transit as well.

I think as policymakers, sometimes we can focus on responding to crises. But we also have a responsibility to make sure that children and adults have access to joy. That’s also one of the important goals of governing.

Miller: Abby, we’re talking about a lot of things all at once, because transportation is an enormous issue that’s not just about a bus line, sidewalk, bridge or road repair, it’s everything put together. But I’m curious what you make of a conversation about joy, given the challenges you’ve already been talking about as a person with a disability, relying on a transit system that is often not built for you. What goes through your mind when you hear about joy?

Griffith: What goes in my mind when I hear joy is that if I, and other people like myself who don’t own private vehicles, could just get out … if I can just get out and go [to] like social events, or visit my family or friends, not thinking about how am I going to get there. [When] I don’t have a way to get there, I have to stay home and that causes me a mental health problems because I can’t get out and do stuff easily. But if I could get out and do stuff without being worried about getting there, that is definitely joy. I would say that is a lot of joy for me.

Miller: Claudia Balducci, has doing this challenge – this is your fourth year doing it – led you to push for any specific policies or projects as an elected official?

Balducci: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been a big advocate of a safe system approach to transportation safety, and that includes things that listeners might have heard of, like Vision Zero approaches, basically where a jurisdiction takes a much more holistic look at how the transportation system can be made safer. Instead of just rules, enforcement and education, we think about how are roads designed? How does transit interact with the roads? How are vehicles designed? You look at the entire sweep of transportation to make it safer. There should be no place where a person in a wheelchair has to be in cars with traffic. Our system is failing if we’re doing that.

So I’ve pushed for these safe system approaches in my own city, where I used to serve on the city council, at our county where I currently serve. And then regionally, we’ve been working with the four-county region around Central Puget Sound, which is King, Pierce, Snohomish, and Kitsap County, and the dozens of cities within those counties. And we’ve managed to get millions of dollars in federal transportation funding to help many individual jurisdictions make their own transportation safety plans, that includes planning for disability access in ways that will ultimately make traveling for people who can’t drive much easier and much safer.

I also advocate for increased transit service. We’re building out a light rail system here in the King County, Pierce and Snohomish County areas. And we’re trying to expand and improve our bus connections so that it doesn’t take three hours for somebody to get from home to a destination and back again, even if that is an unusual type of trip.

Miller: Khanh Pham, you serve, as you noted, on the joint Committee for Transportation, and we’re part of this statewide listening tour to hear from people about what they see as their local transportation needs. This is in advance of the not yet released transportation funding package that we’re all expecting in the new session. What did you hear from nondrivers on that tour that is shaping the way you think about what the Legislature should do next?

Pham: What I was really surprised by was the commonalities between both the urban districts and the rural districts – the shared commitment that people said transit is a lifeline. I heard from people in really rural towns near The Dalles, in Coos Bay, Albany, who were experiencing what is just part of life. There are people who had an injury that prevented them from driving, people were growing old and just suddenly weren’t able to drive anymore. And they said, “We need to have other options.” Not everybody can afford to live in a more transit friendly city like Portland. And so we need to invest in public transit across the state.

I was really moved by people who, in Eugene, were talking about recovering from addiction, and needing those bus passes that allow them to get to treatment and to get to job development. Those kinds of stories really helped the legislators understand that transit is not just an urban issue, it’s not just of any one particular demographic. It really is something that all of us at some point in our lives will need, and it will enrich the lives of everybody else when we have access to multiple ways to get around to where we need to go.

Miller: Abby Griffith, can you describe just your vision for the ideal transportation infrastructure or ecosystem, and what it would look like, what it would let all of us do?

Griffith: My vision for our transportation system – no one should walk more than a mile to get to the bus. It should be like one block away. I shouldn’t have to walk more than five minutes to catch a bus and a train. My ideal transportation is that we need a transportation system that works 24 hours, because some bus system stops running 7 p.m.; after 7 p.m., I can’t go nowhere, and nondrivers can’t go nowhere. They have to get home before 7pm so they can be home because there’s no transit to get around. Even some nondrivers work night shift – 9 p.m., 11 p.m. – and they can’t get off of work and take a bus back. Sometimes it’s very difficult for them. So my ideal transportation future is we need to have freedom that we can get out at 4 a.m., 3 a.m., get buses and trains, and get to places.

If I am a driver, I have my key, I can jump in the car and go to a hospital if I’m sick, or do something after 12 a.m. or after nighttime. But if I don’t have that, my bus stopped running, I can’t go nowhere. If I ask somebody, “Can you give me a ride?” They say, “You have to take Uber.” A lot of people don’t have money to pay for Uber and Lyft, especially nighttime Uber and Lyft, [which is] very expensive. And I think we need to have a transportation system that works for everyone. It shouldn’t take anyone more than 30 minutes or an hour to get to places where they want to go.

Miller: Abby Griffith, Khanh Pham and Claudia Balducci, thanks very much.

Balducci: Thanks for having us.

Miller: Abby Griffith is a fellow at Disability Mobility Initiative, a program of Disability Rights Washington. Khanh Pham is a Democratic State Representative from outer Southeast Portland. Claudia Balducci is a King County Councilmember.

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