Anna Zivarts is an outspoken advocate for disability rights and safer mobility and access for all. As a former NYC resident and bike racer now living in Seattle and working at Disability Rights Washington, Anna offers her perspective on urban mobility, parenting, and her days as a racer.

Can you give us a quick and dirty background on Disability Rights Washington and specifically Rooted in Rights so we have a sense of what you do?

I was hired a little over two years ago to lead the video advocacy team, Rooted in Rights, at Disability Rights Washington. Pretty quickly, I realized there was a tremendous opportunity for us to do transportation access and equity work, as for so many people in the disability community, driving isn’t an option. We are now in the process of launching a dedicated mobility equity and access project within Disability Rights Washington. Stay tuned - I’m really excited to now be able to fully focus on transportation!

Bearing in mind that you work on a range of projects at Rooted in Rights, what is an average work day like for you?

Before the pandemic, I spent a lot of every week in community meetings and transportation policy workgroups. Seattle and Washington have a deep culture of work-grouping everything, which is both a really wonderful way for someone like me without a formal transportation or planning degree to start to really understand policy and have an impact, but it’s also a way for every small decision to get drawn out in the process of trying to be inclusive. Having spent a year now in countless different government committees and workgroups, I say “try” because most are unpaid and don’t provide childcare, so participation is limited to those with jobs (like mine) that allow them to participate on work time, or people who have financial security and lack of caregiving commitments that allow them to participate.

You are an outspoken advocate for making cycling easier for everyone, but in particular those with disabilities (who might otherwise be unable to drive). Can you tell us some specific policies or goals you are working on to change the urban environment in Seattle?

It starts big picture with land use and how those policies have led us to build communities here in the West that make it really challenging to get around without owning a car. So at that level, anything we can do to encourage building housing close to transit, and then insisting that everywhere people live within our urban growth boundaries (basically everything that’s not rural), our infrastructure provides accessible walking/rolling/biking and transit infrastructure.

Seattle, like many growth centers, is expensive, so we have to talk about this at a county level in order to include many folks who have been priced out of living in Seattle, into suburban areas with no sidewalks, horrible ‘stroads,’ and no frequent transit service.

As a mom who gets around exclusively by bike, walking, and public transit, what is one thing you wish elected officials and urban planners understood about mobility?

I really don’t think our electeds and planners really understand what a large percentage of our population doesn’t have access to owning/driving a car. We don’t actually do a good job of counting this, and so exact numbers are hard to track down, but if you just look at who has driver’s licenses, over a quarter of our population here in car-centric Washington State don’t. And we’re not even touching the folks who can’t drive anymore because of age or disability, undocumented folks who don’t want to enter driver’s license system, or people who have a driver’s license but don’t have a car, because of economic necessity or choice.

What are some of the examples of progressive action on mobility that you would like to see cities aspire to?

This is a hard one. We were in the midst of pushing for a big county-wide transit levy (tax increase) that would have allowed King County to expand service in new and more equitable ways. That's off the table - we’re talking about huge service and future project cuts for transit in our region.

Public transit is on the rocks all over the country, with declining ridership really scary revenue cliffs. Sure, we’ve seen an increase in biking, but biking doesn’t work for everyone, especially without the right infrastructure. When roads get icy/snowy, what will happen? With our sprawling communities connected by highways or stroads, it’s going to be really hard for biking to be a full substitute for transit for many people and many trips. And I worry about what will happen to people who can’t drive or can’t afford to drive, when public transit is cut. There’s a narrative that on-demand transit options will replace fixed route transit, but there are many access limitations (for wheelchairs, strollers, kids/car seats, bike racks), and the cost/ride just doesn’t scale.

When living and commuting in NYC, what was your biggest challenge that able bodied folks might not be aware of?

New York was this magical place for me in some ways, because so many people don’t have driver’s licenses, it wasn’t ever something that defined me and my options or friendships the way that it does everywhere else in the U.S.

Reading the news now about so many people who have the choice going out and getting cars in NYC does make me sad. There has always been this little voice in the back of my head that said that if for some reason my partner died, I could always move back to NYC, because there I can get around without needing someone to drive me. I wonder if NYC will continue to be that place.

How did you get started riding? Was it a mode of transportation before it was a pastime or sport?

I definitely started commuting. I went to school in the Bay Area and would bike around campus and when I moved off campus, to and from school. Then my bike got stolen right before I moved to NYC, and I didn’t replace it. I lived off of Flatbush in Prospect Heights initially and rode the subway exclusively, but when I moved to Red Hook in 2006, I started biking for transit because the B61 was slower than walking.

Racing came after my husband had some friends who got him into riding River Road/Nyack. One of them raced for Dave Jordan. I heard about Tara Parson’s CRCA clinic, and I was hooked.

What drew you to the racing element of the cycling community?

It was really fun to be able to drop guys who decided to get on my wheel when I was out riding by myself.

What lessons, if any, did you draw from your experience as a racer?

I’d never been a really serious athlete and I’d never had proper athletic coaching/training. It was awesome to get to know my body in new ways. I was terrified of racing, from the moment I went to Tara’s first pre-race clinic practice, to my last race. I knew that my vision wasn’t as good as the other riders, and I was really really worried about causing a crash. And while some people who got to know me better knew about my vision, I was also terrified of telling people widely, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep racing. And I loved racing so much that it wasn’t until I got pregnant and had a moment to step back, that I was able to pull myself away, even despite all the fear.

Now, nothing I try in life feels as hard as rolling up to the start line. Every time I think I’m nervous about taking a step in my life, all I have to do is compare it to any race start, and it feels easier.

Do you think the racing community can/should get more involved in advocacy work?

Now that I’m a parent, I feel much more nervous about going out on long road rides, because of the prevalence of distracted driving, and the knowledge that it would just take a second of someone glancing down at their phone for them to run me down. There really aren’t great places to ride where I live now in Seattle that I can get to from my house, where I feel really safe riding.

That’s a total bummer, and I think it’s the case for most places in our country. Those of us who want to go out on long rides just have to roll the dice. I think this is something that most racers can understand, and so I think there’s a chance to have a conversation about how we’ve built our transportation infrastructure to serve cars, at the expense of all other kinds of travel. What would it look like if we invested instead in routes so we could walk/roll and bike where we needed to go in really healthy environments where we weren’t breathing exhaust and dodging multi-ton vehicles? These are all choices we can make.

How would you recommend that the average bike racer get more involved with advocating for cycling as a mode of transportation/street safety issues?

Start replacing your car trips with bike trips or walking trips. Start noticing the infrastructure choices we’ve made, and how your time, your health, and your comfort are often afterthoughts in the design of public space. How many ways are there for cars to leave the island of Manhattan? How many for people on bikes or on foot? How long did you have to wait at that light? Did you have enough time to cross safely when it did turn? Did it change for you at all?

If you were pushing a stroller or cart, or using a wheelchair, would you be able to get through that narrow spot in the sidewalk? Was there a curb ramp?

Throwing back to your days as a racer, what was your favorite race and why?

That’s a really hard question, especially knowing how much effort organizers put into holding races, and so I’m going to base this on the people who I know work hard to pull things off, and believe in supporting women’s racing like CRCA and Woodstock. One of the most incredible experiences I had was going up to race Gatineau in Ottawa and being hosted by a men’s team up there (the Wheelers), who not only provided us with housing, transportation, race support and meals, at the afterparty they threw for us, we were presented with hand-crafted leather belts from one of their members (it’s still my favorite belt). The next year or maybe it was two years later, I was racing Bear Mountain when I was pregnant, and I felt absolutely horrible. A few weeks later I blacked out while riding my bike and ended up in the hospital with a concussion, so it was probably a preview of my body telling me to stop riding, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew is that I couldn’t possibly make it up the climb again. And so I dropped out.

I was sobbing and still questioning my decision to have a kid, and the first person I saw in the feedzone was Anthony Prior, who had been my host in Ottawa. He had a young son who made me this very sweet “medal” after I finished the race there, and I went to Anthony and confessed I was pregnant and wasn’t sure if I even wanted to be a parent and was it worth it? He was so kind and assured me being a parent was the best decision he ever made, and he’d really recommend it. He was right.

You’ve mentioned to some of us before that when you were growing up, your mom treated you as though you didn’t have a disability. How do you think those circumstances shape your work and more importantly, how you raise your own child?

I could write a dissertation on this one, and I’ve done some processing of this on the Rooted in Rights blog. The American’s with Disabilities Act wasn’t passed until 1990, so I experienced much of my early life in a very different world than the generation of disabled young adults I work with now. I still wish my parents had found a way to connect me and introduce me to other disabled people so I could learn from them and feel less alone, but I know, just as it is now, the stigma is deep. And so if your kid can “pass” as non-disabled, society encourages that.

My kid is still so young that we haven’t had to figure out a lot of things that I know will be really hard. He doesn’t really understand his vision is different yet. He hasn’t been bullied yet. He hasn’t started kindergarten where he’s expected to see the board, and will have to figure out hacks around that. One choice we did make was to enroll him in an inclusive preschool where half the kids are disabled. So he’s learning right now that he’s not the only one who’s different, and that there are lots of different ways to be in and experience the world.