Could you spend a week without driving? Maybe that sounds like a challenge, but about a third of Americans don’t drive because of disabilities, age, and the costs of owning and operating a car.
In 2021, Washington disability rights advocate Anna Zivarts started the Week Without Driving challenge. Since then, it’s become a national campaign.
The transit advocacy group Spokane Reimagined is using the week to ask policymakers to put themselves in the shoes of residents who walk, bike or take the bus instead of using cars.
"We're not trying to shame anyone into not driving. We're not trying to force anyone into not driving," Spokane Reimagined Co-Executive Director Erik Lowe said. "It's really an educational campaign, and it's really a matter of showing people what that 30% of the population deals with every day."
To kick off the campaign, on Saturday, Spokane Reimagined volunteers installed handmade benches around the city, one in each of Spokane's 29 neighborhoods. They put most of them near bus stops that don’t have seating.
Organizers said they specifically chose not to ask the city or Spokane Transit Authority for permission.
"We might have gone 80 years with single-family sprawl development, where you don't have a neighborhood grocery store, you don't have a coffee shop, or you have to walk eight blocks to get to a bus stop," Lowe said, "but that doesn't mean we have to keep it that way."
He told SPR he hopes the benches and the campaign spark conversations among policymakers about traffic safety and accessibility.
That includes more seating at bus stops, protected bike lanes and improved visibility at crosswalks.
"It's also a bit of a prescription for a lot of the loneliness that so many of us face," Lowe's co-executive director Sarah Rose told SPR. "I think even just reimagining our transportation for one week, even if you still ride in a car, but you choose to carpool with someone, that's one other person that you're talking to that day."
Cars, she said, can isolate a driver from the rest of their community.
"Things like taking the bus or riding a bike, walking, those really get you face-to-face with a lot more people," Rose said. "And so I think the Week Without Driving can really open up people, not just to transportation, but also to their community in a greater way than we could ever imagine."
The national Week Without Driving campaign runs from Sept. 29 to Oct. 5.
