The sudden emergency closure of the Washington Bridge has disrupted lives across our state. As we report on this massive failure of infrastructure, we’ll continue to deepen our engagement with you, our community. How has this crisis affected you? Where have you found hardship, support, and hope?
This space is for your stories - the struggles, the workarounds, and the ways people have come together to explore what’s possible. We’ll be sharing them here.
“The closure of the Washington Bridge has not impacted my day-to-day life very much at all. 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 places that I really got interested in this is traveling outside of Rhode Island, 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. It feels different to live in or visit 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. This is an opportunity. There’s something wrong with the bridge. There’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 narrative immediately turns towards car-centric.
I don’t really want to get political. I think I would say that there is a group of people out there 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. I think it’s really important (to listen) to the people who really care about this instead of only repeating the same answer. I think that asking bigger questions will really help the conversation expand beyond just I’m late to work in my car. It really can help us connect this to a lot of bigger issues and to history. There’s a lot of history, too, 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 richer conversation than just zooming in on anyone’s personal experience of being stuck in traffic.”
