What’s So Scary About Transit Riders?
Transit boards should include people who actually ride transit
By Anna Zivarts
“I have to ride the bus. I have to deal with the scheduling, the condition of the street, getting to and from the bus. Does the schedule work with common arrival times for work, or are you gonna be stuck somewhere an hour before? Is there somewhere you can take shelter in the case of bad weather? All that stuff that if you’re not a regular bus rider, you’re not aware of.”
Aileen Kane, Washington nondriver
“Because many on [transit] boards tend to be car drivers, they really haven’t internalized what it means to be a transit rider. Those decisions determine whether you as a transit rider are going to be able to keep a job, going to be able to continue to be a caregiver, going to be able to continue to go to school.”
Judy Jones, Washington nondriver
In the spring of 2022, I can remember sitting on a bus, attempting to keep a five-year old entertained while I dialed in to give public comment at a Ben Franklin Transit board meeting.
That spring, the board at Ben Franklin Transit (which provides transit in the Tri-Cities region) began discussing a plan to cut the sales tax that funds transit. The resulting revenue loss would necessitate cuts to transit service, including the likely elimination of Sunday service.
In response to this proposal, Disability Rights Washington joined with labor, local advocates and staff from Transportation Choices Coalition to fight back. We reached out to the nondrivers we knew in the region and asked them to share their stories with the media and in public testimony.
Thankfully, after a series of high-stakes meetings, the board voted against the proposed tax cuts and transit service reductions. But that day in April, as I sat on the bus listening to the first of these meetings, I got angrier and angrier. It was very clear that the transit board members proposing the tax cuts and service reductions didn’t rely on transit themselves, nor had many of them ridden a bus in recent memory.
I thought back to how I’d heard many stories like this from the other nondriver advocates I organized with, advocates who for years had been attending transit board meetings and pushing for service that worked better for the people who needed it the most.
In the fall of 2020, Disability Rights Washington launched the Disability Mobility Initiative to start organizing nondrivers across our state. We started by trying to interview nondrivers from every legislative district about how they get around, the barriers they face, and what they would change to make their communities more accessible. To date, we have 275 stories that are documented in our nondriver storymap, the visible part of our organizing work that eventually led to state-funded research showing that nondrivers make up 30 percent of our state population.
Blind advocate and Kitsap County resident Kris Colcock recalled: “It was suggested that the commissioners of Kitsap Transit take a day and just use the bus system. The immediate response was, ‘Well, we don’t have time to do that.’”
In these interviews, I kept hearing anecdotes—especially from the older nondrivers who had gotten frustrated and decided to show up at a transit board meeting—about how frustrating it was to discover that transit boards were made up of elected officials who themselves didn’t rely on transit, and in many cases, thought they were too busy or their time was too valuable to use the service they managed.
Vivian Conger, a blind nondriver from Walla Walla, shared that when she attended her local transit board meeting, she was shocked to learn that one of the board members had ridden transit for the first time that very day. Blind advocate and Kitsap County resident Kris Colcock recalled: “It was suggested that the commissioners of Kitsap Transit take a day and just use the bus system. The immediate response was, ‘Well, we don’t have time to do that.’”
In Washington State, a Public Transit Benefit Area (PTBA) is a governing body established by state code to create and run a transit agency. Current Washington state laws dictate the composition of PTBA boards, which include local elected officials from the area plus a nonvoting labor seat.
After hearing so much frustration from nondriver advocates, and after the experience with the Ben Franklin board, we collaborated with other advocates prior to the 2023 legislative session on a bill that would have added a voting seat for transit riders on these PTBA boards. Unfortunately, although the bill was drafted, opposition from transit agency lobbyists killed it before it was filed.
It’s unclear why having a voice for transit riders is so threatening. Perhaps it’s because labor has also been asking for a voting seat. Last year, they were successful in getting legislation introduced and will be working to get it passed again during the 2024 session.
Ensuring bus drivers have a voting seat on transit boards is critically important too, especially considering how much agencies across the state have struggled with staffing. In their 2022 report, “Bus Operators in Crisis” the national transportation think tank TransitCenter notes: “The disconnect in who holds central office and leadership positions (majority white and male) and frontline staff (majority people of color), can impact people’s commitment to the job, their perception of advancement opportunities, and overall frustrations. … Frontline workers, who are demographically more reflective of riders, have particular expertise about day-to-day operations and regularly interact with the public, yet are typically not included in decision-making.”
There’s a similar divide between the daily experience of transit riders and transit boards. TransitCenter’s 2022 “Who Rules Transit” report notes: “Most transit agency boards in the U.S. operate without much public attention, and many are unrepresentative of the public they serve, composed of people unfamiliar with transit itself or the communities and people transit serves.”
The path to becoming an elected leader and therefore being eligible to serve on a transit board is extremely difficult for most nondrivers. After participating in the Week Without Driving, Councilmember Neal Black from Kirkland reflected, “It’s kind of hard to imagine how someone who didn’t have access to a car could do the job of a city council member. Our expectations are to be in a lot of different places, and a lot of different times. In a suburban city like ours, it’s a challenge to do that without driving, and that means there’s a large segment of our population excluded from serving in this role.”
At the same time, many transit boards across the state struggle to get engagement and attendance from elected leaders who have many other responsibilities and priorities outside of serving on transit boards as one of their many committee assignments.
Nobody wants transit to succeed more than the people who rely on it day in and day out, which is why we hope that legislation to add a voting seat for transit-dependent community members moves forward in the 2024 session. And we hope that labor also gets a voting seat, because the expertise of bus drivers is too valuable to overlook.
“Most of our board members are not frequent transit riders. We recognize the direct stake that riders have in public transit, and Clallam Transit’s board discussed adding rider representation but decided against it because current Washington State law isn’t clear about whether this would be a properly constituted transit board,” said Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, a Clallam Transit board member and Port Angeles City Councilmember since 2018. “We need clear state statutes that make for better representation on transit boards especially by non-drivers. This is a simple policy that ensures ‘nothing about us without us,’” he added.
Intercity Transit in Thurston County has rewritten its bylaws to include community members in their board as voting members. In fact, they have three voting community representatives, and their current chair is a community representative. Since the seats were added, every time the board composition has come up for a vote, they voted to retain these voting seats.
Nobody wants transit to succeed more than the people who rely on it day in and day out, which is why we hope that legislation to add a voting seat for transit-dependent community members moves forward in the 2024 session. And we hope that labor also gets a voting seat, because the expertise of bus drivers is too valuable to overlook.
Of note, not every transit agency in our state is authorized through PTBAs, although many are. King County Metro and Sound Transit both have different board structures. We hope that the change in the PTBA structure is the first step in more universal representation across all transit boards. For example, we are eager to support King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci’s suggestion that Sound Transit’s board should include rider representation.
For people who can grab their keys and drive where they need to go, transportation isn’t a major concern. But for those of use who can’t drive or can’t afford to, transportation access is something we think about for hours a day: As we’re waiting in the rain for a delayed bus, as we’re trying to figure out the schedules to transfer between one county’s system and another, as we’re mapping the least stressful, best lit, and least hilly route to an unfamiliar bus stop.
We care deeply about how transit works because it is such a major part of our every day and can make the difference between getting to do the things that connect us to our communities—things like running errands, seeing a friend, or getting to an appointment. Without functional transit, we can be stuck at home—or, if we’re lucky, reliant on a friend or family member having time to drive us.
Instead of fighting us, transit agencies should harness this passion, this commitment, and our years of expertise to make transit better.
Anna Zivarts is a low-vision mom and nondriver who was born with the neurological condition nystagmus. She directs the Disability Mobility Initiative at DIsability Rights Washington and launched the #WeekWithoutDriving challenge. Zivarts serves on the boards of Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium, League of American Cyclists, and Commute Seattle. In 2024, her book When Driving Isn’t an Option: Steering Us Away from Car-Dependency will be published by Island Press.