The transportation industry must stop excluding disabled and BIPOC candidates from employment opportunities with unnecessary driver license requirements.
As we conducted interviews with nondrivers across Washington State for our Transportation Access for Everyone Storymap, we kept hearing about unnecessary driver license requirements preventing people from finding employment.
At a bare minimum, jobs in the transportation industry are open to nondrivers. Too often we see driver’s license requirements on job postings for jobs that have nothing to do with driving a bus.
Recently, we noticed Sound Transit had a job posting for their new ADA coordinator that required a driver’s license. We got them to fix it, as well as fix another service planner job they had posted that had a driver’s license requirement as well.
We’re continuing to work with Sound Transit to make sure that there’s not some default driver’s license requirement on all their job postings (we heard this was the case at WSDOT and Seattle DOT and we got them to change that.) We have also asked the Washington State Transit Association to screen for jobs that have unnecessary DL requirements before they post to their job board.
For more background on why this matters, you can check out our “Equal Access to Employment and Driver License Requirements” white paper or this Eno essay and video.
Don’t miss our upcoming National Academies Transportation Research Board webinar March 23rd, 2023 where we’ll be talking about why the transportation industry has to bring nondrivers into leadership roles.