Dani Izzie, a wheelchair user with quadriplegia, tried to take public transit, as she usually does, when visiting Miami in 2022. Heading to catch a bus, Izzie came to the end of a street without curb cuts—meaning she couldn’t safely cross it to the bus stop. She tried to get an accessible taxi; none were available. The door-to-door paratransit service wasn’t an option, since it needs advance scheduling. It ultimately took a call to police, who helped her down the curb.

This wasn’t the first time, says Izzie, that “the absurdity of one little oversight” limited her autonomy and mobility. The real estate website Redfin’s Walk Score rates Miami the sixth-most walkable large city in the United States. But its methodology, Redfin confirmed to me, does not account for accessibility.

Since the 1990s, there’s been a push among urbanists to reduce city driving and its hazards: American pedestrian fatalities number more than 7,000 a year, and with each car in a city releasing close to 5 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, car reliance harms everyone else, too.

The rate of vehicle-pedestrian deaths among wheelchair users was 36 percent higher than that of the overall population.

Some US cities—including Los Angeles; Tempe, Arizona; and Jersey City, New Jersey—have made great strides toward limiting cars, mainly by designating car-free streets or areas. But car-free zones have met opposition, and not just from irate conservatives. Opponents of such initiatives have called them “exclusionary,” “not progressive or inclusive,” and bound to “hurt people with disabilities,” pointing out that many disabled people simply need cars to get around.

But Anna Zivarts, director of Disability Rights Washington’s Disability Mobility Initiative and author of the book When Driving Is Not an Option, points out that disabled people are actually less likely to drive than nondisabled people “and more likely to get around [by] walking and rolling and taking transit.” Car-heavy cities are also disproportionately dangerous for disabled folks: A 2015 study by Georgetown University researchers found that the rate of vehicle-pedestrian deaths among wheelchair users was 36 percent higher than that of the overall population.

Zivarts herself bikes, not drives, around her city of Seattle: She lives with the eye condition nystagmus, as does her son, which makes operating a car unsafe. Fighting for greater accessibility, she says, would also “make the world more accessible for him.” That doesn’t just mean car-free zones, but issues like sidewalk safety: One of her initiative’s first major successes was helping to get an additional $83 million added to a levy on Seattle’s November ballot to fix and expand sidewalks for accessibility, which ultimately passed with 66 percent support.

Maddy Ruvolo, a disabled transportation planner for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, focuses on mobility and accessibility. Ruvolo acknowledges that some disabled people find car ownership “important for their mobility”: It “wouldn’t be fair to say that no disabled people need cars,” she says. But she’s concerned to see “accessibility used as a political football.”

In Vancouver, opponents argued that a bike lane hurt disabled drivers’ ability to get to a public park—though some disabled people themselves supported the initiative—and got most of the lane removed by the Vancouver Park Board. And vice versa: Ruvolo says it’s also harmful for people to throw “statistics around disability and transportation as a way of arguing for active transportation projects that don’t necessarily take accessibility into account.”

Evidence shows that walkable communities are good for disabled people—even beyond simply letting them enjoy the considerable benefits of being outdoors. A 2022 study in the Journal of Transport Geography scored walkability across six Southern ­California counties by housing density, street connectivity, and land use mix: An area with abundant sidewalks and, say, pharmacies and grocery stores was rated more walkable. It found that a modest increase in walkability meant disabled people took transit 33 percent more often than before—likely because better walkability made transit stops easier to get to.

Making cities accessible is also an equity issue. Ruvolo is a member of the US Access Board, an independent federal agency that works toward better accessibility for people with disabilities. Disabled people, she notes, are more likely to have lower incomes—they’re twice as likely to live below the poverty line—and to rely on public transit by necessity. In San Francisco, for example, low-income people with certain disabilities have qualified for free bus and subway rides since 2015. Paris does the same for many aging adults and some disabled people. That’s much cheaper than gas and auto maintenance.

Retrofitting sidewalks and adding shuttles can make a dent in a city’s budget. But in theory, as pointed out by Sarah Kaufman, executive director of New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, in a Scientific American opinion piece, you can solve that problem by linking accessibility to congestion pricing. Before it was blocked for months by Gov. Kathy ­Hochul, New York City’s charge on Manhattan traffic was set to help fund accessibility upgrades, like elevators, to its subways. Hochul decided to restore that plan in November, ahead of a possible ban on such charges under Donald Trump’s administration.

As Kaufman wrote in August, when Hochul was still preventing its implementation, “the defeat of this measure—meant to bolster public transit use and reduce city traffic—served as yet another accelerant down the road to a looming crisis across the US: the growing inability of aging boomers to travel.” London has had congestion prices since 2003—disabled people who qualify are exempt from its costs—and just four years later, reports showed that the system had generated tens of millions of dollars annually for transit improvement.

Better public transit improves quality of life for disabled people, Ruvolo says, “as long as accessibility is baked in there.”

There are undeniably cases in which walkability and accessibility come head-to-head: Take some historic pedestrian-­only alleyways in Charleston, South Carolina, which can be hard to navigate with a walker due to their unevenness. Yet there’s often an affordable solution to be found. In 2022, when San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park permanently closed a major boulevard to cars, opponents, including city Supervisor Connie Chan, said it was disabled and aging folks who would pay the price. But free shuttles, ­accessible to anyone, now bridge the gap. Other roads throughout the park remain open to drivers.

For Ruvolo, the key to solving accessibility problems is soliciting disabled residents’ input—and using it. She and her team meet regularly with disability groups in San Francisco, incorporating their ideas into new and existing initiatives. In 2023, for example, the team had disabled students test electric scooters for the city’s scooter-share program. Their feedback helped make the program better for disabled people: Officials picked more scooters with backrests and larger wheels that keep them stable. Better public transit improves the quality of life for disabled people, Ruvolo says, “as long as accessibility is baked in there.”