A Belated Look at the Recent ‘Week Without Driving’ And the Need to Recognize That Non-Drivers ‘Exist’ 

The 2024 edition of a Week Without Driving wrapped up on October 6 and BhamByBus participated by default because, well, when you’re a non-driver, every week is pretty much a week without driving. But it was wonderful seeing some great examples of people getting around the City of Subdued Excitement without a car, whether it was by e-bike, walking, or using Whatcom Transit Authority buses, like representatives from the Port of Bellingham and others did trying out WTA’s new Route 47 (Harbor) bus to reach the waterfront. Although it’s hard to point to ephemeral Instagram Stories that disappear, I saw examples of parents and their kids using WTA’s Route 1 bus to bring their kids to a Village Books in Fairhaven for story time; an e-bike commuter carefully monitoring their battery strength to reach their workplace across town; and bicyclists discovering and reporting some curb-adjacent potholes in bike lanes. 

Part of the purpose of the annual Week Without Driving – something that started in Washington state a few years ago thanks to the efforts of Disability Rights Washington organizer and transit advocate Anna Zivarts and has expanded nationwide – is to get elected officials, civic stakeholders, and others to commit to refrain from driving over the course of one week, then document and reflect upon their experiences. That way, they’re able to experience first hand some of the mobility-related challenges that their non-driving constituents and neighbors face everyday in places dominated by car dependency.  

Zivarts, author of the book When Driving Isn’t an Option: Steering Away From Car Dependency (Island Press, 2024), will be speaking in Bellingham this Friday, October 18 from 5-7 p.m., at Structures Brewing’s W. Holly Street location as part of a Housing Week 2024 event co-organized by Walk & Roll Bellingham and the Whatcom Housing Alliance. 

In When Driving Isn’t an Option, Zivarts notes that about one-third of all Americans do not have a driver’s license, a stat that catches many people off guard. In a Streetsblog USA Talking Headways podcast interview with Jeff Wood, Zivarts said:

There’s data on the number of people with driver’s licenses in our country and that’s about one-third of people in the U.S. do not have driver’s licenses. But you know, that’s, it’s not really as simple as that. There are people without driver’s licenses who do drive and there are people who have a driver’s license and can’t drive.
And so I knew that that wasn’t really the number. And so I started pushing for research on how many non-drivers, we got a study funded in Washington state that [was] conducted by Toole Design to look at the percentage of non-drivers. And that study found that about 30 percent of our state are non-drivers. The state of Wisconsin had similar research there.
Their state DOT collects vehicle registrations and driver’s license data in sort of the same database. And so they were able to pull that number pretty easily and they found that 31 percent of their population are non-drivers. And so based on that and based on what we can sort of see in other, you know, cities that have this data, it really is around a third of the population, can’t drive, can’t afford to drive, is too young to drive, is aging out of driving.
And that’s a lot of people. And I think there’s not a recognition that there are that many people who are so poorly served by a system built around driving everywhere, around car dependency.

As Zivarts wrote in a recent op/ed in The Urbanist, a necessary step to improve mobility options for everyone is to first recognize that non-drivers exist:

Simply to suggest so many nondrivers exist forces a conversation about how our mobility needs are discounted as unimportant, secondary to the “real” people who can drive where they need to go. It’s the conversation we need to be having, but it is a challenging conversation for everyone who is benefiting from the status quo.

BhamByBus is a firm believer that local officials and civic stakeholders don’t have to wait for a specific week each year to show their support for transit and for their neighbors and constituents who don’t drive. Giving up driving cold turkey isn’t a requirement. But putting the car keys down and hopping on a bus or bike from time to time instead, however, is. 

For Bellingham’s local leaders and civic stakeholders, attending Zivarts’s book talk on Friday may give them a much-needed lens for looking at some of our biggest local challenges – including housing scarcity, job access, and the sky-high cost of living – from the perspective of the one-third of us who don’t drive.    

Overlooking the Need for North Cascades Transit Access During ‘Larch Madness’ 

In an October 8 article, Cascadia Daily News contributor Elliott Almond wrote about the social media fueled “Larch Madness,” a series of weekends in October when throngs of hiking enthusiasts, social media influencers, and other nature lovers jam the North Cascades Highway and illegally park along State Route 20 near certain popular trailheads in search of larch trees during their peak golden-yellow autumnal glory. It’s another example of how we can love the outdoors just a little too much and the outdoors we all love suffers as a result. 

This year, staff at the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest and Washington State Department of Transportation, Almond noted, produced public service announcements warning larch-seekers just how unappealing crowded popular trailheads and trails would be. 

Timed-entry permits, which have been introduced at Mount Rainier National Park to better manage crowds, could be a potential solution to better accommodate October’s Larch Madness overtourism in the North Cascades. 

BhamByBus would like to offer another solution, one that at least would help better manage the number of larch-seeking motorists vying for limited trailhead parking: Federal, state, and local agencies coming together to run or otherwise support the creation of a bus or van service along Skagit Transit’s Route 70X (Mount Vernon to Concrete via Sedro-Woolley) corridor into North Cascades National Park, with stops at key trailheads. Essentially, it’d be a version of King County Metro’s popular Trailhead Direct summer bus service, which is co-sponsored by King County Parks, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and Amazon.  As Meg White, who jumpstarted the To the Mountains Shuttle connecting Seattle to mountain destinations along Interstate 90, in 2022 told The Seattle Times earlier this year: “We can’t make more environmentally friendly choices if they don’t exist.”   

Looking down on a larch tree in a ravine.
An example of a transit-accessible larch tree in Seattle's Cowan Park, as seen from the 15th Avenue NE bridge over Ravenna Creek. (Photo by Michael Grass / BhamByBus)

It’d be amazing if similar transit options existed connecting the Amtrak Cascades (and Interstate 5) corridor at Mount Vernon to popular North Cascades destinations, or linking Bellingham with nearby trailheads in Larrabee State Park and elsewhere along Chuckanut Mountain, as BhamByBus has previously suggested. Buses, transit operators, and plentiful funding certainly don't grow on trees, but BhamByBus and others can dream of having some sort of transit access to reach those larch (and other amazing) trees in the North Cascades! 

A public works crew works on reconfiguring a bike lane, marked with green paint.
The City of Bellingham recently made changes to the Holly Street bike lane between Bay and Commercial streets in Downtown Bellingham. (Photo via City of Bellingham / Facebook)

Transit Bypasses Months of Holly Street Bike Lane Discourse 

BhamByBus has mostly steered clear of the ongoing local discourse about the City of Bellingham’s Holly Street Bike Lane Pilot Project, which has sparked months of letters to the editors in the Cascadia Daily News and fueled passionate and sometimes cantankerous online comments, many from irked motorists who don’t like the early May rechanneling of Holly Street’s three one-way westbound travel lanes into two one-way westbound travel lanes between Ellis Street and Bay Street through Downtown Bellingham. The lane consolidation was done to accommodate Holly Street’s new and long-planned bike lane, part of which – between N. State Street and Bay Street – are positioned between parking spots and the right-side curb.  

As someone who regularly walks around, patronizes businesses, and attends cultural events in Downtown Bellingham, the changes along the Holly Street corridor have been most welcome, primarily because vehicle traffic seemingly moves more slowly, which makes for a far more pleasant sidewalk environment for strolling. 

Most recently, the City of Bellingham made an adjustment to the Holly Street bike lane between Commercial and Bay streets that, essentially, shifts back the point where westbound Holly Street motorists heading to make the right turn onto Bay and Prospect streets mix with bicycles going from the curb-adjacent bike lane and toward the bike lane continuing westward, which is now nestled between the right-turn lane and the lane continuing on westbound Holly. That somewhat eases bike-car conflicts at the intersection of W. Holly Street & Bay Street, but creates a new point of conflict closer to W. Holly Street & Commercial Street. Lines of sight for the new mixing zone for cars and bikes on that block, marked with green dashed paint, are seemingly better. But BhamByBus doesn’t bike nor drives on Holly Street, so a sidewalk-centric perspective on the situation may be somewhat limited – though certainly better than someone stuck with a windshield-only perspective.   

A diagram showing how the realigned bike lane on Holly Street is now set up between Bay and Commercial streets.
Here's how the realigned bike lane on Holly Street is now set up between Bay and Commercial streets. (Image via City of Bellingham / Facebook)

Comments about the recent changes to the bike lane on the City of Bellingham’s Facebook October 7 post are what you’d expect for bike lane discourse online on Facebook these days. “Here’s a concept. Get rid of the bike lanes and [street cafe] establishments and return to three lanes for cars pretty simple,” one commenter wrote, which drew counter responses like: “Simple if you're a self-centered person who only thinks about transportation via single-occupant vehicles.”

A recent CDN letter to the editor by Joe Abbott, published October 9, decried the Holly Street bike lane, citing experience as a bus operator in Seattle in the 1960s and how training “taught us NEVER to let a car, bike, or pedestrian get between our bus and the curb, especially if we were going to turn right.” While Abbott is raising concerns about any conflict involving a bike lane and turning motorists, buses are definitely – and thankfully – not part of the right-of-way equation on Holly Street in the heart of Downtown Bellingham. Although there are buses on E. Holly Street east of N. Forest Street, and on W. Holly Street west of W. Champion Street, WTA buses don’t travel along the stretch of Holly that has sparked so much furor and second-guessing, especially among area motorists.   

If anything, WTA bus-bike conflicts on E. Holly Street in the Sehome neighborhood have been somewhat minimized with changes brought about by the bike lane pilot project. As BhamByBus wrote this summer, the WTA bus stop at E. Holly Street & N. Forest Street was moved around the corner from Holly to Forest. That eliminated a complicated bus maneuver, where bus operators on downtown-bound routes along the Blue and Plum GO Lines had to cut across the Holly Street bike lane to serve the old stop before cutting back across the bike lane to then turn right. While the bus stop relocation to N. Forest Street doesn’t eliminate the right-turn conflict for the bike lane users, it seemingly eases some of the unpredictability.  

Let’s be thankful that WTA buses on routes to and from Bellingham Station via Magnolia and Champion streets are civically dull compared to bike lanes on Holly Street!  

An Update on Downtown-Bound Route 47 Bus Stops

When BhamByBus first checked out WTA’s new Route 47 (Harbor), connecting Bellingham Station and Squalicum Harbor on opening weekend in September, we noted a lack of stops along Roeder Avenue, which parallels the BNSF railroad tracks. But on subsequent Route 47 trips, there are now indeed downtown-bound Route 47 stops along eastbound Roeder Avenue, at Bellwether Way and F Street. Regardless of whether BhamByBus missed those eastbound stops on Route 47’s first Sunday of service or if they were quickly added to the waterfront route, they’re indeed there now and provide helpful connections to waterfront destinations like the Hotel Bellwether, the Marine Life Center, and the Port of Bellingham headquarters.