Gin Kilgore addresses the audience on car-free families. Photos by Brian Addison.

The first Women’s Bicycling Summit—directly following the last day of the national Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference held this week in Long Beach—hosted some of the most influential women in the biking world to address the ways in which females (and their male supporters) can help alleviate the gender gap in biking as well as use women to create innovative ways to make biking more accessible.

On this latter note, Gin Kilgore of Atla Planning+Design—the car-free matriarch with her son, Miguel, and husband, Micahel Burton, in the city of Chicago—moderated a discussion that, particularly within the confines of Southern California’s overwhelming car culture, discussed the possibilities (and struggles) families can face if they opt to go car-free or car-lite and the freedoms (and difficulties) of helping your child “transvelopede,” her term for rearing one’s child to get used to active transportation.

After stating her 5 1/2-year-old son recently rode 8 miles—much to the applause and shock of the audience, as well as a sarcastic comment regarding someone calling Child Protection Services—Kilgore was both eloquent and reasonable in her approach to having a car-free family.

“I like to frame our families as ‘transportation rich,’ because it is not necessarily that we are lacking but rather have more options available to us,” Kilgore stated. And those options not only leave a smaller footprint on the earth, they are healthier and create more cohesive, safer neighborhoods.

Beyond the simple environmental benefits, she pointed out that large portions of our society are car-free, with Chicago’s population being somewhere in the range of 28% car-free. This means, at least for Kilgore and many of the panelists, a needed focus for advocacy, education, and planning for more modes of alternative transportation.

Manal Aboelata, Managing Director of the Prevention Institute in Los Angeles, pointed out the disturbing jaywalking-death case of Raquel Nelson, whose son was struck by a drunk driver after she and her two children crossed a road instead of walking the half-mile to the nearest crosswalk.

“What really struck me about this Atlanta mother was the narrative that was playing out,” Aboelata stated. “It was focused on blaming her: ‘How can she let her kid jump out in front of her? How could she let her kid race out into the street? What kind of mother is she?’ And yet, never any questions about what really was going on: the fact that this was totally predictable. The streets were designed in such a way that no adult, much less a child, could safely navigate it.”

This was a recurring theme amongst panelists: a lack of education and policy are playing major roles in dissuading the public from alternative forms of transportation and, if these two poles were better engaged with civic activity, that would alter.

“The Expo Line changed my life,” Aboelata stated, referring to the new Metro Rail that now connects Santa Monica to Downtown Los Angeles.

She opted to begin taking her sons on the train and walking from the stop to their schools instead of taking a car and the results, at least for her, have been impressive, noting the increase in strength and activity amongst her children and the nuisance driving becomes after one is removed from it.

“There’s a couple times I’ve chosen to drive because it either feels far or is not near enough to transit and it feels like a nuisance and imposition. It really becomes a trip to go through this phase, where I’m in this transformation about transportation,” Aboelata explained.

And as an Angelino submersed in car culture, along with Kilgore submersed in frigid winters, Aboelata is proof that even in social climates that seem to be overwhelmingly anti-active transportation or at least lack a catering to it, there are ways in which both biker and commuter can work together to include all forms of families.

Even those so-called odd car-free ones.