We’re thrilled to invite our community, supporters, and friends to join us in person at two upcoming Beat the Bay State events!
Whether you’re participating in the challenge, looking to learn more about our mission, or want to hang out with great people for a good cause, we’d love to see you there.
1. Beat the Bay State Kickoff: Beer, Bites & Eastie Vibes
Kick off the movement with us in East Boston! Join our team, board members, and fellow supporters for drinks, light bites, and great conversations as we introduce the Beat the Bay State initiative and discuss the impactful work we’re doing.
2. Beat the Bay State Mid-Challenge Fundraiser Meet-Up
Keep the momentum going at our mid-challenge meet-up in Harvard Square! Grab fresh food, chat with our board and team about our mission, and learn how your involvement makes a real impact across our community.
Where: Sweetgreen (39 John F. Kennedy St, Cambridge, MA 02138)
Connect with Leadership: Meet our board members and team to hear firsthand about our goals, upcoming programs, and vision for the community.
Support the Cause: Learn how your involvement directly drives our mission forward.
Bring a Friend: Help us grow our impact by bringing friends, family, or colleagues who care about making a difference!
Can’t Make It? You Can Still Support Us!
If you can’t join us in person, you can still help spread the word! Share these event links with your network on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram to help us reach more community members.
Week Without Driving was originally launched by the Disability Mobility Initiative (a program of Disability Rights Washington) under Anna Zivarts. In 2023, America Walks stepped in to organize the initiative nationally, and today it is led by the Non-Drivers Alliance.
The effort isn’t about shaming drivers or demanding everyone abandon their vehicles forever. Instead, it serves as a tool for experiential learning, reflection, and policy change built on three core principles:
Dignity & Access to Life: Everyone deserves the freedom to travel safely where they need and want to go.
Equitable Transportation: Those who walk, roll, cycle, or take public transit every day are the real experts on gaps in local infrastructure.
Justice: Mobility barriers disproportionately impact low-income individuals, communities of color, and people with disabilities.
From Experience to Advocacy: Why Storytelling Matters
A central takeaway from Ruth’s presentation is that transport network gaps become glaringly obvious the moment you step out of a personal vehicle. While transportation discourse often separates walking, biking, and transit, the lived reality of a non-driver intersects with nearly every aspect of civic life—housing, health care, and climate action.
Uncovering Hidden Needs
When decision-makers experience transit firsthand, policy priorities shift. Ruth shared an instance where a city council member invited a mayor on a bus ride along during Week Without Driving:
“The mayor went, and they missed the bus. They were late to the City Council meeting, but in that, the mayor also got sunburnt. The mayor realized, ‘Oh, this is why you need bus shelters.’ It didn’t click as a necessity before—it seemed like a ‘nice-to-have.’ But when you’re waiting for more than 5 minutes, you feel the heat, the rain, or the snow.”
Grassroots Actions Across the Country
Communities have adapted the initiative to address local transit challenges in creative ways:
Spokane, Washington: Activists secured free lumber and built 27 bus benches across the city where seating was completely absent.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Advocates organized press conferences during the week to highlight impending transit budget cuts and rally support for public funding.
Rural Communities: Research interviews uncovered how non-drivers in rural areas face unique gaps, such as a lack of ride-share availability on Sunday mornings for church services due to late-night shifts the evening prior.
Rapid Growth & Local Impact
Rather than operating top-down, the campaign empowers local “community leads”—which include non-profits, transit agencies, regional planning commissions (MPOs), and individual advocates—by providing customizable media templates, outreach graphics, and storytelling guides.
In places like Worcester, Massachusetts, local organizers are entering their third year of hosting Week Without Driving events, using the momentum to build partnerships with elected leaders and secure regional sponsorship.
The Intersection of Data and Lived Experience
Looking ahead, the Non-Drivers Alliance is expanding its research efforts in partnership with institutions like UC Davis, the Climate Community Institute, and Transit Center. A primary focus is equipping advocates to pair hard data with personal storytelling.
While statistics show transit gaps on paper, pairing a data point with a human story transforms abstract numbers into actionable policy decisions. As federal funding fluctuates and local budgets face pressure, keeping these personal narratives at the forefront ensures that mobility remains recognized not as a luxury, but as a fundamental lifeline.
Learn more about Week Without Driving and watch the recording of this WalkMass network here.
Blogpost by Emma Itri, Dev + Comm Manager.
Join upcoming walk audits in Wakefield and Melrose
Help us make our streets safer, more accessible, and climate resilient: join WalkMassachusetts and local community partners for our upcoming Climate-Safe Walk Audits this September! These walk audits are funded through a grant through MAPC’s Accelerating Climate Resilience grant program. We are exploring local streets to identify infrastructure challenges and opportunities related to safe mobility, heat islands, and flooding. In addition, these walk audits will help you develop the skills to lead a walk audit in your own neighborhood. Everyone is welcome: residents, business owners, and advocates alike!
Participants will observe, discuss, and help identify opportunities for improvement. We’ll also discuss climate/sustainability goals and how they might connect to our streets/sidewalk design.
Upcoming Dates & Locations:
Wakefield: September 9th @ 6 PM Meet at Galvin Middle School We’ll begin with a brief overview and then walk together through key areas including the Main Street/Water Street and Main Street/Nahant Street/North Avenue intersections. RSVP & more info here.
Melrose: Sept 10th @ 4:30 PM Meet at Wyoming Hill MBTA We’ll begin with a brief overview and then walk together through key areas, including Main St, the business district, and ending on W Emerson St where the farmer’s market is held every Thursday from 2:30 – 6 PM. Note: This audit is a point to point route. RSVP & more info here.
Walk audit participants gather to share observations on the Tri-Community Greenway where it crosses Main Street / Route 28 in Stoneham, MA. August 27, 2026. Photo by Marc Armena.
As part of this project, we’ve also led walk audit trainings in Danvers, Salem, and Stoneham. Be on the lookout for the walk audit findings from each of those efforts, as well as next steps on how you can keep in touch with other participants who may be leading additional audits in those communities in the future. Curious if a walk audit has happened in your community before? Take a look at our interactive map, or learn how to lead your own!
Building a Movement for Street Safety: Lessons from Dan Langenkamp and the Ride for Your Life
When Foreign Service Officer Sarah Debink Langenkamp returned to the U.S. after managing a $600 million program in Ukraine, she chose to ride her bike as often as she could—to enjoy the outdoors and live lightly on the planet. But riding home from her children’s school in Bethesda, Maryland, she was struck and killed by a turning truck.
In the wake of her loss, her husband, Dan Langenkamp, was forced to confront a devastating reality: the national epidemic of traffic violence. The year Sarah died was the deadliest year for pedestrians in forty years and the deadliest on record for cyclists. But rather than letting grief remain silent, Dan turned tragedy into an engine for national legislative change, giving rise to the Ride for Your Life movement.
At WalkMassachusetts, we know that transforming our roadways requires more than just mourning losses—it demands organizing communities and pushing directly for systemic policy fixes. Dan’s journey from a single memorial ride in D.C. to massive multi-city events in Boulder, Madison, and Boston offers a powerful blueprint for effective road safety advocacy:
Center the Human Experience: Every event centers on a real person—like Sarah, Magnus White, or Louisa Gag—putting a personal face on statistics that decision-makers too often treat as abstract numbers.
Pair Remembrance with Direct Policy Asks: Memorials must drive actionable legislative changes. Dan’s efforts helped pass state-level safety bills and introduced federal acts like the Sarah Debink Langenkamp Active Transportation Safety Act and the Magnus White Cyclist Safety Act.
Unite Pedestrians and Cyclists: True safety advocacy spans all vulnerable road users. By intentionally pairing bike rides with accessible, one-mile “Walks for Your Life,” these events invite families, walkers, transit riders, and cyclists of every age and ability to stand together.
Build Broad Coalitions: Winning real policy requires coordination between local bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organizations, victim advocacy groups like Families for Safe Streets, municipal leaders, and industry partners.
Whether we are addressing truck safety regulations, closing gaps in pedestrian infrastructure, or tackling vehicle speeds, systemic change happens when leaders see a unified constituency demanding better. As Dan reminds us, our roadways aren’t built for throughput speed alone—our streets exist for everyone.
Join WalkMassachusetts and the Ride for Your Life at our upcoming local events to help us push for safer, more accessible streets across the Commonwealth. Ride for Your Life in Boston will be on October 25th, 2026. Learn morehere. A recording of this Walkmass Network from August 2026 can also be viewed here.
Blog post written Emma Itri, Dev and Comm.
To Build Walkable Communities, We Must Make It Easier to Build
Walkable, connected neighborhoods were created not by chance but were built, brick by brick and bylaw by bylaw, through a century of deliberate land use decisions that determined not just where housing goes, but who gets to live there. During June’s WalkMassachusetts Network meeting, Boston Indicators Senior Fellow and housing and zoning expert Amy Dain laid out a simple, urgent framework. If Massachusetts wants to address housing supply and affordability while strengthening walkability, it has two core strategies: adding housing to neighborhoods that are already walkable, and adding housing to existing neighborhoods while simultaneously making them more pedestrian-friendly. Both matter, but as Dain made clear, one is much easier than the other. Using her own Newtonville neighborhood five years after the passage of the MBTA Communities Act as a case study, she showed how multi-family housing near transit, shops, and schools creates more than homes. It creates the density that keeps local businesses alive, supports transit, and makes walking a practical part of everyday life.
The biggest obstacle, Dain argued, is often not design but engagement. Hyperlocal public hearings and discretionary zoning can turn every housing proposal into a referendum on neighborhood concerns: traffic, flooding, parking, neighborhood change, among others. Those concerns are real, but Dain noted how they can create a system that lets legitimate neighborhood concerns, voiced by those already housed, crowd out the broader regional need for more homes. Massachusetts’ 2021 MBTA Communities Act is one attempt to change that by requiring multifamily housing near transit to be allowed “by-right,” reducing barriers to the kinds of small-scale infill, accessory dwelling units, and mixed-use projects that can gently grow our walkable centers. If we want more walkable communities, we need to make it easier to build in them.
Much of today’s housing growth is happening in strip malls, office parks, and highway corridors, the very places least designed for walking. These sites are huge opportunities if we plan holistically. Rail trail connections, wider sidewalks, shade trees, bus service, safer crossings, and less parking sprawl all can be part of the equation for addressing housing and walkability. To learn more, you can find Amy Dain’s presentation at this link.
Blog post by Marc Armena, Summer 2026 Intern for WalkMassachusetts.
