Disability and transportation advocacy
Why leaving out disability rights advocates from your coalition building is immoral, ineffective, unnecessary, and self-harming and how you can win bigger & better together
I regularly chat with a few disability rights advocates (and am married to one) and the topic of car reliance comes up a lot. It’s a sensitive topic, and rightly so. For many people, a privately-owned car is a connective lifeline to the world and essential to their survival. Since our society generally disregards the needs of the permanently disabled, the temporarily disabled, and the elderly; proposals for systemic change can be viewed as potentially threatening to not just their comfort, but their lives. Simply put– most systemic changes have ignored and/or harmed them, so why should they welcome new changes? (This sentiment may be shared by other historically marginalized communities as well.)
When disability rights advocates express concerns that changes to the transportation system will make their community more exclusionary to them, you cannot wave away those concerns. You can’t just point to things like adaptive bicycles, adaptive scooters, e-bikes, seniors biking in the Netherlands, bus accessibility changes, etc and say “see, it’ll all be ok,” and resolve disability rights advocates’ concerns about changes towards car-free or car-lite societies. Part of why I know it won’t work is because I’ve tried that many times (too many times to be honest)!
But leaving out disability rights advocates from the nacho plate of your coalition building is immoral, ineffective, unnecessary, and self-harming.
It’s immoral because intentionally leaving out people with disabilities from your vision of the future for your community could result in isolation, physical harm and potentially death. That’s bad.
It’s ineffective because when you leave out disability rights advocates from your coalition, you can create unnecessary extra opposition to your campaign. You also give your opposition a powerful talking point. Even if the excluded disability rights advocates don’t actively oppose your proposal, your car-centric & temporarily able-bodied opponents can still use arguments about disability access to stop you (even if it’s done in bad faith).
It’s unnecessary because there are tons of solutions that can meet your goal while also enhancing mobility options for lots of people within the extremely diverse disability community. But you can’t come in and say “here’s your solution, like it or lump it.” When building coalitions it’s a lot more productive to come in with openness and curiosity. That means saying things like, “I’d like to collaborate with you on ways to increase car-free mobility options for more people. What would that look like for you?”
And it’s self-harming because if you’re not disabled now, you might be one day. Whether from getting hit by a car, long COVID, or just the aging process, there is a high likelihood that at some point in your life you will have different physical abilities than you have now.
So, as you go about working to get that pedestrian plaza, bike lane, bus lane or other change– remember to reach out early & often to the disability rights advocates in your community. Everybody needs more and better mobility options and our current system is failing lots of people in lots of ways. By working together, we can co-create a better future for a lot more people.
Want help improving your ability to form and work in coalition? Email me at Carter@carterlavin.com and let’s schedule a consultation session.
How I’m walking the talk these days:
For the Safer Streets, Smarter Spending campaign in Oakland, we are advocating for more funding to go to the Oakland Department of Transportation so they can implement more & better solutions sooner. This campaign is focused on the upstream budget process to grow the overall street safety pie by making a more robust OakDOT. By doing that, rather than pushing for a specific solution at a specific spot, we’ve been able to build a coalition that includes groups like Seniors & Disability Action, East Bay Center for the Blind and LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
Upcoming Free Training-- “A beginner's guide to getting a protected bike lane in your community.” TONIGHT, Tuesday March 28th @ 5:30pm PT on Zoom. Register here.
Meet your fellow transportation advocates at the April Open Discussion Zoom Happy Hour! This month’s topic: "Beyond tokenization— how can we all build coalition partnerships that are actual partnerships?" Come learn from allies and share your thoughts. Join the conversation on April 12th
Interested in sponsoring the training of an activist working on an issue you’re passionate about? Let’s chat. Carter@carterlavin.com
An exercise to consider doing this week to strengthen your activism:
Take a bus to the end of the line & back and while riding, try to focus on the movement of your body. If it helps, close your eyes and put on headphones. Try to feel your body and the bus as it moves through your community. Is it a smooth or a bumpy ride? Is it halting or consistent? Does it feel like the people on the public bus are being treated with equal value and dignity as the people in private cars? Write up your thoughts (no more than 300 words) and email it to the city councilmembers whose district the bus passes through.
How this helps your activism: Seeing your community through a different lens helps deepen your understanding of it and your neighbors. It gives you more lived experience and opportunities to make connections with others. By focusing on your body on the bus, you build kinesthetic experiential knowledge that you can tie in with technical/data driven knowledge. Combining the two can help you be a stronger communicator and helps you think holistically about potential solutions & problems. By sharing your insights with your elected official you strengthen your writing skills, you get a bit more comfortable communicating with elected officials, you potentially help them see their community in a way they haven’t before (or affirm something they already know) and you may even start building a connection with the elected official.
Requirements: 1 to 2 hours depending on the bus line you take, bus fare, and email writing time.
Thanks for reading, thanks for forwarding this along, and most importantly– thanks for working to make the world better!
Sincerely,
Carter Lavin