A week without driving

When invites went out for the Olympic and Paralympic flag installation ceremony at City Hall earlier this month, attendees received an email with exhaustive instructions for how to get there. This email included detailed driving directions from nearby freeways that felt like a pre-Google Maps artifact, a series of annotated photos explaining where to park, and information on how to present a parking pass in order to access the event.

Now, if you've heard one thing about LA's upcoming Olympic and Paralympic games, it's that they are CAR-FREE and there will be NO PARKING AT ANY VENUES. And you'd think that the city might want to get a four-year head start on that messaging, especially to the people who are most likely to be attending Olympics-related events. Unless, of course, the message is that Olympics VIPs will be driving and getting free parking at Olympics-related events while the rest of us ride the bus.

Seeing these parking-only directions irked Eli Lipmen, executive director of Move LA. But instead of cursing at his inbox, he decided to do something far more productive. "When the flag ceremony event shared driving-only directions, we pointed this out and they made a correction," he told me. "Going forward, transit-first and accessibility-enabled should be the default." A second email was dispatched a short time later that included public transit directions and a photo showing City Hall's accessible entrance — pretty important as the event was honoring Paralympic athletes.

Car-free directions were on Lipmen's mind as he'd been recruiting LA officials to ride transit for SoCal Transit Week, which takes place September 30 through October 6. Now we've seen new Metro board chair Janice Hahn on the bus a lot lately, including yesterday, which I thought was significant after a dramatic fatal bus hijacking early Wednesday morning. At the press conference yesterday morning, Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Hilda Solis both said they'd be taking transit next week, then we all rode from Grand Park to Union Station for the Metro meeting. After we boarded the B line, accompanied by a paparazzi-grade press corps, Horvath correctly noted that officials riding transit shouldn't be an event. Horvath also seems like one of the few Metro board members who actually rides it outside of work; when I asked her the last time she used transit, she said she took the very same train line to an event two weeks ago. As for next week: "I'll do my best to be car-free."

SoCal Transit Week aims to make next week low-stakes/high-reward with happy hours and scavenger hunts. Most transit agencies will be free on October 2 for Clean Air Day. But the event is also being held in partnership with the national Week Without Driving, started in 2021 by Anna Zivarts at Disability Rights Washington. Zivarts is the author of the excellent new book When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency, where she drops a pretty shocking statistic: one-third of the U.S. population doesn't drive. And while clean air is nice to rally around, she says, that's not really the takeaway of the Week Without Driving. "The point is really that there are people in our communities, in every community, who don't have the option of driving," she told me. "This is a window into that experience, having it be focused on the existence of non-drivers and the possibility for us to build communities that can work for everyone, including people who can't drive."

So that's actually my challenge to elected officials, particularly after the events of this week — not just to take transit as a clean-air choice, but in solidarity with one-third of your constituents for whom driving is not an option. And that includes working to change your institutional culture — including the way we give directions! — so driving isn't the default. I'll be participating in the Week Without Driving next week, and I hope Torched readers will do the same. Even if you can only do it one day or even one trip, I'd love to hear about your experiences.

And to LA's officials planning "car-free" games — I'll see you on the bus. 🔥