By Anna Zivarts

In countless conversations about everything from municipal budget priorities to the design of interstate bridge replacement projects, I hear engineers and planners emphasize how they plan to “prioritize all modes.”

Widening a highway and adding sidewalks and a bike lane? That’s “Prioritizing All Modes.” Adding “intelligent signals” that will try to maximize vehicle throughput and reduce delays (for drivers): “Prioritizing All Modes.” Building a pedestrian bridge over a highway and adding benches and art? Definitely “Prioritizing All Modes.”

It is not possible to prioritize everyone.

Every decision has tradeoffs, and it’s clear who those choices prioritize when you consider the comfort, ease and safety of different users. When it’s faster, easier, safer and more comfortable to get somewhere by driving, it’s driving that we are prioritizing.

Very few elected leaders are willing to say they want to slow down car travel and make transit more convenient than driving. Yet unless we have leaders who are willing to do this, cars will continue to kill too many.

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We need to be building communities where it’s possible for more people to travel by car less far, less fast, less often. When it is necessary to travel farther, we need to make driving a less convenient option than riding transit.

This approach is very explicitly not “Prioritizing All Modes.” It is prioritizing the movement of people outside of vehicles over the movement of people in vehicles. It is prioritizing the movement of transit over the movement of cars.

I think that’s the world my parents envisioned for me as I grew up. I could just ask them for rides. As I got older, I could ask my friends, and then I’d get married and get rides from my spouse.

If you ask anyone who’s had to rely on favors to get where they need to go, it gets old, fast. In Washington State, our Legislature funded a study about the mobility of nondrivers and the researchers were surprised to find that while relying on rides was a major source of mobility for nondrivers, the emotional burden of asking for those rides was a significant deterrent, especially for women, low-income and disabled people.

When we insist on visibility as nondrivers, our presence demands a reckoning of the costs and moral efficacy of car dependency. Rather than being ashamed about our disabilities or the lack of resources that prevents us from driving, we should be proud of our status as nondrivers. Instead of a future of congested drive-thrus, oceans of parking lots and freeway-ramp spaghetti nests, our existence tips the scales in favor of communities designed in ways that work better and are healthier for all of us.