Nondrivers Alliance

Moving our communities beyond car dependency

Leadership

Executive Director and Lead Organizer: Anna Zivarts

As a visually impaired parent and author of When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island Press, 2024), Zivarts believes that through building the nondriver movement, we can reduce car-dependency. Zivarts launched the Week Without Driving in 2021 and is a member of the Transportation’s Research Board’s Committee on Public Health.


Director of Coalition Building, Ruth Rosas

Chicago-based bilingual organizer Ruth Rosas led the national expansion of Week Without Driving and Freedom to Move at America Walks and brings over 15 years of experience advancing mobility justice. Their background includes leading public health, walkability, and transportation equity initiatives at Lurie Children’s Hospital and serving in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji, where they helped create a youth cycling cooperative promoting sustainable transportation and climate resilience.

Updates and Posts

Fiscal Sponsor: Alliance for a Just Society

view of people sitting on the bus

Do you rely on the bus?

Would you like to make transit work better for your community?

In 2025, transit riders in Washington state won an important victory — a piece of legislation which allows 20 transit agencies across Washington State to add transit riders as voting members to their transit boards.

Previously, transit agencies were only allowed to include elected officials on their transit boards, many of whom rarely, if ever, rode transit.

Nondrivers Alliance is working to identify and train transit riders to serve as advocates for better transit and step into leadership roles.

Not only will transit agencies be better able to serve transit riders when people who use and rely on transit get to be in the room, our hope is that this training and the appointments of transit reliant community members to transit boards will create pathways to leadership (both within agencies and within local government)  for communities that are often not at the table. Additionally, organizing transit riders to advocate for better public transit service can provide a critical counter to the narrative that public services aren’t wanted or needed.

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