We’ve been asking you how the issues with the Washington Bridge have impacted your life, as part of our ongoing community-centered project, Breaking Point. Providence resident Traci Picard wrote in to say that, as someone who doesn’t really drive, it hasn’t affected her much at all – but she said she does see this as an opportunity to improve transportation and mobility throughout Rhode Island. So we sat down with her to learn more. Here’s what she had to say.
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My name is Traci Picard, and I'm a public historian from Providence, Rhode Island, which is where I live now, and I am 40ish.
So we're a family of five and only one driver and one vehicle. So most of us are busing, biking and walking.
The closure of the Washington Bridge has not impacted my day-to-day life very much at all. The biggest way that it's really impacted me is just hearing about the closure of the bridge, but it hasn't changed my habits, and it hasn't really changed my feelings about going to and from the East Bay.
I became interested in transportation issues as a kid, just trying to get around. But the way I really got interested in this is traveling outside of Rhode Island to other places. And I just couldn't believe how wonderful and easy and amazing it was to ride the subway, to ride some other bus systems, to get around in different places where they prioritize this.
And it seems to me that each state or city makes a choice. They choose to prioritize cars, or they choose to prioritize multimodal transit, which includes cars. And it feels different to live in, visit, or get around in places that prioritize cars compared to places that don't.
I would love to see the state of Rhode Island help out with the traffic on and off the bridge, and with mobility.
So first, we need an absolutely comprehensive, super, amazing transit system, both in Providence and for the whole state. So right now we have RIPTA, which they are doing — attempting to do a nice job, but there's a lot of issues with connectivity, with frequency, with mindset of people who have a very negative view towards RIPTA, with getting across and in around certain areas, with getting anywhere at night. I mean, I'll leave it off there.
I loved the idea that when the bridge was out, they immediately thought of a ferry, but the ferry didn't really connect to anything, and didn't really — it just seemed like it didn't really work out very well, right? But this is an opportunity, right? There's something wrong with the bridge. It’s a great opportunity to think about ferries, to think about trains, to think about bike lanes, to think about transit.
And a big issue is that the immediate narrative immediately turns towards car-centric, right? How is this affecting drivers? How is this affecting drivers who commute?
So the reason I see this as an opportunity is it's an opportunity for us to all call for a bigger picture approach, to look at this in context, right, as opposed to just being super mad about this one bridge. How does it fit into the bigger picture of moving around Rhode Island? How does it fit into the bigger picture of different opportunities to access transit, as opposed to just making sure that drivers of private vehicles can get where they're going at the speed that they think is correct?
There is a group of people out there working on these, you know, working on transit, who really care about this stuff and who are really thinking hard about it and advocating for this, whether it's our elders, the disability community, low income people, or people that just really value the experience of multimodal transit. And asking bigger questions will really help the conversation expand beyond just, you know, I'm late to work in my car. It really can help us to connect this to a lot of bigger issues and to history.
There's a lot of history to why our roads and bridges are how they are. So expanding it to different communities and to different time periods really gives us a lot, a lot richer of a conversation than just zooming in on anyone's personal experience of being, you know, stuck in traffic.
