My transportation story

Veronica O Davis in her introduction to Inclusive Transportation, tells her “Transportation Story” — where she came from and how she got into transportation at a young age. It’s a useful way both to get to know her and her work, and get to thinking about your own history and where you came to the ideas and ideals you hold. Here’s mine.

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When I was a kid, my parents were Michigan State University graduate students. The University at the time had its own bus system — and my parents would take me for rides on the bus around campus to get me to sleep. My dad took me to preschool on the back of a bike. Although we did eventually have a car — an old, must have been late ’70s, Plymouth — one of my earliest memories is watching from the apartment door as flames ate through the hood…. Its replacement, an ’82 Chevette, was hit in the side as my dad and I drove back from the grocery store by a driver who did not look before backing out of their driveway. I remember being told that if I’d been sitting on the right side instead of the left, I might have been seriously injured or worse. Somewhere around this time, I also began to learn about an old friend of my mom’s from Berkeley who had lived in a vegetative state for many years after being hit by a driver while riding a bike.

My mother has multiple significant vision disabilities, including no ability to see distance — everything appears in the same flat plane — so I grew up with only one parent who could, let alone did, drive. This had multiple effects on my life, but one was that I grew up riding the bus or walking everywhere; not only to get places, but much like many drivers enjoy cruising I would pick a direction and start walking. (I never thought to try walking every street in the city or anything of that nature, but I did at least walk to every part of the city…)

In high school, I got interested in both the design of the bus system and in information systems. In particular, I didn’t like the rather abstract route maps printed in the bus agency’s system booklet, so I set out to make actual, representative, to-scale route maps. (This being approximately 1996, I did this by hand, with colored pencils and pens, on art paper laid over a street map….) I then started thinking about ways to improve not only the maps but the routes myself, and started drawing “better” route designs, too.