You cannot prioritize all modes
A guest blog post from Anna Zivarts
Photo looking South from the Downtown Links elevated highway constructed in 2022 in downtown Tucson.
I’m writing from a house built at the turn of the last century when Tucson was a booming railroad town. It’s less than two hundred yards from the old railroad yard, where you can still see the tracks in the gravel next to one of Tucson’s many bike paths.
It’s a beautiful early spring desert evening, but I have the doors and windows closed because I’m also within a few hundred yards of I-10, the major north-south highway connecting Phoenix to Tucson and continuing on to the border. The roar of the highway is like a geolocator; you know you’re in a community that was, at least historically, poor and nonwhite.
The irony of this neighborhood, Barrio Veijo, is that its houses now sell in the millions. Everyone loves the narrow, walkable streets, the lack of setbacks. But when the freeway was built this was considered a slum. Much of the northern part of this neighborhood was bulldozed for urban renewal, replaced by a convention center and office complex (the office complex was then demolished in 2018).
We have not learned anything from what happens when you bulldoze communities to expand roads for cars. Right to the east of me, a giant widening project on Broadway was completed in 2023 that expanded this crosstown road from four to six lanes. Also completed that year -- the “Downtown Links” a multi-lane road that was envisioned in the 1980s as a highway connecting the Davis-Monthan air force base directly to I-10.
Tucson was the first place I visited outside of NYC that I really, really wanted to move to, and I felt, with its network of bike trails and bikeable climate, that Tucson was a place I could see myself living without being able to drive. But my love for the desert, the community and the miles and miles of bike paths is mitigated by the fear I feel as a nondriver, especially as I started biking and walking the city with my kid.
When I moved to Tucson, I started volunteering with the advocacy group Living Streets Alliance and produced videos about their Complete Streets campaign, Cyclovias, and the pedestrian safety crisis. On a particularly awful day, which also happened to be my birthday, I went out to film a vigil for a mom and child who had been killed crossing Pima Road, one of these awful, high speed arterials that form a grid of death across the city.
As a nondriver in Tucson, you might be able to walk around your neighborhood and enjoy the speckled shade of palo verde trees and quiet streets, but eventually you’ll have to cross one of these sun-baked, multi-lane 'stroads.’ If you aren’t strategic, you might have to dash across, as the signals are often far apart. This ensures that cars can travel as quickly as possible, but means long detours for walking or biking.
The intersection where the mother and child were killed didn’t have a stop light. As the vigil ended, I had to cross back to the other side to head home. I hesitated. Should I walk half a mile down the road out of my way to the nearest intersection with a signal? Or should I risk it and try to dash across between gaps in the speeding cars? I was tired. I decided to risk it. It’s a choice I’ve made a million times now as a parent when the kid is whining, hungry and has to pee.
In Smart Growth America’s 2024 Dangerous by Design report, Tucson was just named the third most dangerous metro area, and pedestrian deaths have continued to rise in Tucson and across the country. According to the report, 2022 (the most recent year with complete federal data) marked a 40-year high in deaths of people struck and killed while walking.
My family left Tucson in 2018, moving back to Washington State to be closer to our extended families. While family was the main pull, I was also pushed by Tucson being one of the most dangerous cities in the US to be a pedestrian.
As communities across the US struggle with pedestrian safety, when even states that follow Vision Zero best practices continue to see deadly crash rates increase, it’s time to question whether we are actually going to be able to reduce deaths and serious injury by continuing with the current approach.
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.
Making it safer for people outside of vehicles necessitates making vehicles go slower. Cars kill because they are heavy and fast, and even the slightest mistake can have horrific outcomes. At slower speeds they are less lethal, and at slower speeds, the time savings of car travel over other modes decreases.
Slower vehicles require a conversation about land use, zoning and housing. When more affordable housing can only get constructed twenty miles outside of town, we are building ourselves into decades of increased traffic deaths.
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.
To get to this point, we need coalitions big enough to insist that it’s possible to deprioritize car speed. Let’s start with the third of people living in the US who can’t drive because of disability, age or income. Because we’re lower-income, youth, nondriving seniors and disabled people and more likely to be from Black, Brown, immigrant and tribal communities, our mobility needs as nondrivers aren’t given as much weight. We need to change that, by insisting on being visible.
Since 2021, when we launched the Week Without Driving in Washington State, we’ve seen how this challenge has become a tool for visibility and education. The idea behind the challenge, which last year included participation from organizations in 41 states, is that elected leaders and policymakers are invited to spend a week as if they were a nondriver, getting around riding the bus, walking or biking, and asking or paying for rides.
When someone who normally has the ability to grab the keys and go experiences what it’s like to cross that busy road with their kids at night trying to get home from dance class, or misses a doctor’s appointment because the bus they were counting on got canceled, they start to understand the impacts of prioritizing car travel on people who can’t or can’t afford to drive. This awareness is the first step in taking action, action that can reduce our car dependency and move us toward more inclusive communities where we make it safer and easier to get around without driving.
Anna Zivarts is a low-vision parent, nondriver and author of When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island Press, 2024). Anna launched the Week Without Driving challenge at directs the Disability Mobility Initiative at Disability Rights Washington, where she organizes to bring the voices of nondrivers to the planning and policy-making tables.
The Week Without Driving will take place this year September 30-October 6. You can sign up and learn more at weekwithoutdriving.org.
Anna Zivarts will be hosting book events at Culdesac in Tempe (September 12) and in Tucson with Living Streets Alliance on September 13.
Anna used to live in Tucson and helped us produce this video as part of our Complete Streets campaign back in 2018. We're excited to welcome her back to Tucson with a book talk and signing event on Friday, September 13 and hope you can join us.
Space is limited! RSVP at bit.ly/AnnaZivarts