Ideas & Planning Call for National Week Without Driving 2025

WHAT IS WEEK WITHOUT DRIVING?
Week Without Driving is a challenge that invites people who typically drive—especially elected officials, planners, and community leaders—to go a week without driving in order to better understand and address the barriers nondrivers face. In 2024, over 520 groups in all 50 states and D.C participated in the annual challenge.

HOW DOES SOMEONE PARTICIPATE IN THE CHALLENGE?
When someone decides to take on the challenge, they follow six basic steps:

1. Choose your goal. You can choose to avoid driving altogether, or something more feasible for your circumstances (more on this later).
2. Sign up for the challenge, either on the official WWD website or on a participating organization's (i.e. Dallas Urbanists STLC) website.
3. Research, plan, and prepare. Oftentimes, people who drive everywhere simply don't know how to get anywhere without car. To succeed at the challenge, participants will need to learn (e.g. how to buy a bus pass), plan (e.g. commute routes & schedules), and prepare (e.g. buy/borrow a bicycle) well in advance.
4. Follow-through on your goal from September 29 – October 5, 2025.
5. Document your experience by taking plenty of notes, photos, and videos along the way. As you do, think about what works, what fails, and how it could be improved.
6. Tell someone. Post on social media, email your city council member, or start conversations with friends, family, and colleagues about what you learned from this challenge.

The most important part of this challenge is the story you tell others about your experience. It's in this regard that the Week Without Driving challenge aligns with our mission as Dallas Urbanists to "foster informed and empathetic conversations about walkability, transportation, and housing in Dallas neighborhoods."

WHY HAVE THIS PLANNING MEETING?
As a host organization for the WWD challenge, not only do we want to get more people to participate, we also want to help set people up for success. That means doing what we can to enable and support participants through each of the six basic steps outlined above.

Although the challenge starts in 3 months, we need to start posting promotional and educational material in 2 months. In order to do that, we need to start creating and editing content in 1 month. In order to do that, we need to start planning now.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND THIS MEETING?
Anyone who

• Is thinking about participating in WWD for the first time, and wants to learn how to have a successful experience; OR
• Has participated in WWD before and wants to enhance their participation this year; OR
• Wants to boost the number of participants this year by helping with promotion content and activities; OR
• Wants to set participants up for success by helping produce educational content; OR
• Wants to tell compelling stories by helping participants document their experience and share their stories; OR
• You don't know yet how you can help, you just know what you want to help in some way.

HOW TO JOIN MEETING
We'll meet using Discord voice channel + screenshare.
To receive an invite to our Discord server, please RSVP here on Meetup. You need to RSVP and be signed up as a member before we'll share our Discord invite link. If you're new to Discord, please go the Discord website and register an account before the start of our meeting.