Anna Zivarts on the Past, Present, and Future of Transportation

A leader in the disability justice space weighs in on sidewalks, organizing to defeat bad transportation spending bills, and centering our language around needs of people with disabilities.

I’m fortunate that my work on Exasperated Infrastructures affords me the ability to talk to so many interesting people across the transportation and political space in the United States. One such person is Anna Zivarts, whose work I admire and respect so much that I had to ask for an hour of her time to tell me (and now you, dear reader) about all the great work her team does to advance the political power of a historically underrepresented group of people in the transportation and infrastructure space—people with disabilities.

Here’s how I understand the theory of change behind Anna’s work: instead of centering the needs of people who have many, our system is designed to support the wants of people who can do without—without endless highway widenings, without more free parkin…