The Urbanist and Downtown On The Go are excited to co-host a two-part book talk event in Tacoma on Saturday, August 3, featuring Disability Mobility Initiative director Anna Zivarts and Seattle Bike Blog founder Tom Fucoloro. The safe streets summit will kick off with a family-friendly social at Wright Park from 2pm to 4pm. Attendees will then head over to King’s Books, a few blocks away, for a book reading from 4:30pm to 5:30pm.
Zivart published When Driving Isn’t an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency with Island Press in May 2024. Fucoloro published Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars with University of Washington Press in September 2023.
Both books are excellent primers on safe streets advocacy in the Puget Sound region. Both recount the many obstacles people advocating for safety and accessibility have encountered and how those obstacles were surmounted — or might be soon by continued progress of the safe streets movement.
Zivarts is a low-vision parent and nondriver who created the #WeekWithoutDriving challenge. She is passionate about bringing the voices of nondrivers to the planning and policymaking tables. Zivarts’ biography notes she sits on the boards of the League of American Bicyclists, the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium and the Washington State Transportation Innovation Council. She also serves as a member of TRB’s Committee on Public Health and Transportation (AME70) and the National Aging and Disability Transportation Center Coordinating Committee. Zivarts is also an occasional contributor at The Urbanist, where she recently published a reaction to the response her book has been getting, saying “it’s not about toughing it out.”
Fucoloro is originally from St. Louis, Missouri, and sold his car to pay for his move to Seattle. His biography notes he is an independent journalist who believes more people biking more places safely is a good thing for society. Fucoloro has honored with numerous awards for his advocacy journalism. Seattle Neighborhood Greenways named Fucoloro the 2014 Greenways Champion as “the individual who has most advanced the cause of safe streets in Seattle.” Seattle Met named Fucoloro one of “The 15 People Who Should Really Run Seattle” in 2015. Cascade Bicycle Club named him the recipient of the 2023 Doug Walker Award “for outstanding leadership in improving lives through bicycling.”
It could well be the event of the summer for the Tacoma safe streets community. So we’d love for you to join us!
Event hosts strongly encourage attendees to RSVP on the event page.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city in bus lanes, and unleashing a mass timber building spree to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.