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.
Read more:
- New Bill Gives Transit Agencies Opportunity to Include People Who Rely on Transit to Improve Service. Disability Rights Washington Blog, May 2025
- To End Car Dependency, We Must Change Who Has A Seat At the Table. Publicola, March 2025
- Washington State Should Allow Riders to Serve on Transit Boards. The Urbanist, January, 2025
- What’s so Scary About Transit Riders? Publicola, December, 2023