Talking bikes, buses and Billy Corgan with Ashevillian Kim Roney

An interview with one of Appalachia's biggest public transit advocates

I met countless interesting people while traveling by bus and train through Southern USA last year. It’s been over six months, and I’m still getting through the many interviews I recorded. For tonight's Substack I am revisiting a lovely afternoon I had at The Laughing Seed Cafe in Asheville, North Carolina in mid July with city council member Kim Roney.

Asheville is one of my favorite places on god’s glorious earth; I lived there for four years while attending Warren Wilson College. Asheville is a progressive, creative, beautiful place, although undoubtedly gentrifying.

A friend and mentor of mine named Calyx reads my Substack. She and I first met in Asheville right when I graduated college in 2009. Calyx read that I would be travelling back through my old stomping ground and recommended I get in touch with Kim Roney. Kim is a great advocate for transportation in a region that’s not usually known for such things. She’s also currently up for reelection, fyi.

Please enjoy Kim’s thoughts below. If you like what she has to say, give her a follow on Instagram or Facebook. If you live in Asheville, consider voting for her too!    

Kim described herself to me as a queer abolitionist transportation advocate who loves a good story and growing and sharing.

Like me, Kim’s from South Carolina, but unlike me she is the oldest of 8 kids! She grew up in Darlington County, South Carolina, near Florence. But her great grandmother was born in Asheville in 1910.

“My great great grandparents, even as the descendants of white colonial settlers, they worked with the Indigenous people here. And they wrote a book about life at the Cherokee and in it is a deep concern about the new tourism industry, displacement of working and poor people, displacement of Indigenous people. And so now that we're having a conversation about the impact of tourism and housing and displacement, it does feel like it was so easy for me to have roots here because I have family history here,” she says.

Now in her early 40s, Kim spent much of her childhood raising her younger siblings. Her mother was one of many people who struggled with what’d we’d all later learn was the opioid crisis. Her mom was in an accident which led her to getting hooked on drugs. Her father was a delivery driver working 80 plus hours a week. Kim and her family were 20 minutes away from the closest gas station, further from the grocery store. They needed access to health care, diapers, intimate partner violence services. They were stranded. Growing up, her only option was to walk down the side of a highway with no sidewalk.  

”You don't have to have my lived experience to see that what we're doing isn't working,” she told me.

Kim went on to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She did her internship in Philadelphia and after college lived in Richmond for two years. While in Virginia, she started riding her bike.

“A lot of us did a lot of bike riding in Philadelphia and in Richmond, because there was more of a shoulder between the driving car and the parked car. But I didn't ride the bus until I came to Asheville,” she says.

When she moved to Asheville she worked in the lodging industry at Biltmore Estate. It was a dream job but incredibly difficult to use multimodal transportation to get to work. She would bike in at four in the morning to get there for coffee service.

“Thankfully they had facilities so we could change and get ready for work. And it was a lot,” she says.

When she left that job in 2008, she decided to work closer to home (West Asheville). She and her partner helped their friends open Harvest Records Store. Now her partner works here as well.

”Because we're going to be closer to work and I'm going to be teaching piano, I could get rid of the car.” she says.

She and her partner had already gotten rid of the first of their two cars while they lived in Richmond. Her partner commuted and Kim biked. Now that they both lived close to their work, they decided to see how long they could go without a car.

“Now that last car was a 96 Cadillac DeVille. It's like driving a sofa around town. And one of my favorite stories about the constant upkeep of maintaining the little lady from church’s car that we ended up with is, that we were repairing it and stuff all the time. Car repairs get expensive, and they add up, right? So one time I'm like, ‘the brakes are getting a little fuzzy.’ And I'm dropping off my partner at the Mountain Express where the big iron is and the brakes are mushy. I'm pushing the brakes and it won't stop and we’re in the crosswalk. Then this person puts their hand on the car as the car barely rolls to a stop. And it's Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. I almost smashed the pumpkin, right?”

the big iron

The first album Kim ever bought was Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness. She had tickets to go to their show. After the near pumpkin smash happened, Kim gave up her car and never looked back.

“It has not been cute. It has not been fun. But we're not alone. Twelve percent of North Carolinians do not have access to a car. People who are elders, disabled, young people, people with financial limitations,” she says.

She originally thought giving up her car was going to be a thing that she could do for the planet, but it became something far greater than that.

From then she fell in love with her city on the bus. In 2008 the city of Asheville temporarily trialed free buses to see if it would increase ridership. It did and she was one of the riders. She figured out how to get on and off the bus and how to take her bike on the bus. She witnessed deep disparities and how people were moving in unnecessarily difficult conditions.

“Thirty percent of our buses end at or before 7:30 (pm). You're like, ‘why is this bus empty in the evening?’ People could get to work, but they couldn't get home,” she says.

Taking the bus regularly helped her pay more attention to the economic situations of the people in her city. Kim started learning more about the work of advocacy groups like Just Economics. Just Economics is an organization which identifies and promotes local employers that pay a living wage. Right now the living wage of Asheville’s Buncombe county is $22.70 an hour. Minimum wage in North Carolina is $7.25, as is the federal minimum wage. It hasn’t been raised since 2009.

Kim and her partner have since bought a home near the bus line.

“We were able with a lot of privilege. And, you know, the privilege of not only whiteness, but also capital and some family support, which a lot of people don't have. There's no way that we could buy a home today. So there were a lot of factors in that. But the bus is where I was like, ‘wait, why are we making this so hard? This is something we could do’,” she says of her revelation.

I asked Kim the standard questions that I asked everyone I met in the South. For Kim the best things about Asheville are the people and the mountains. The worst thing is it takes so long to get to everything that you need.

“We could spend a lot more time building community and building awesome things. But we've taken huge steps back. We used to have the second best transport trolley system in the country. We used to have the train. Why did we let those things go away? One of the things about being in Asheville is that we come up with really good ideas. We don't always implement them because we disagree on how to get where we're going. And it takes forever to get there,” she says.

She commented on Asheville’s southern-ness.

“It's a very southern town, even though we have a lot of transplants like myself. It’s still pretty southern. One of the ways that I know it's really deeply southern is that we have that sense of hospitality and politeness. But, boy, it's a catfight sometimes.”

I asked her about a local controversy.

“The controversy that we're dealing with right now is a deep desire after the COVID 19 pandemic to return to the way things were before. Public safety, income inequality, a less focused understanding of what's happening with racial and class disparities. We're in North Carolina; there's a war on LGBTQ people happening in North Carolina. Trans youth are dealing with some of the worst, hateful, bigoted, legislative language of the country. Like it's really intense right now. But some folks would say ‘why can we just go back to when I felt better?’ And I think that's the controversy. The North Carolina slogan is to be rather than to seem. And I would say our big controversy is we're really good at seeming and not being, and we all argue about the being part,” Kim says.

She added that one of the ways that she’s participated in escalating a little bit of a controversy is by having the audacity to run against the mayor. (She lost and the city survived.)

She loves Laughing Seed (the restaurant where I interviewed her), but her favorite, favorite place in Asheville is the family owned and operated Limones.

I asked her what she wished the rest of the world knew about where she lived.

“The South is full of very progressive, big hearted, hard working, salt of the earth kinds of good, badass folks. But I think we get misrepresented a lot. It's also where a lot of change happens and is incubated. One of the things I wish people knew about my home here in Asheville is that the Indigenous people, before colonialism in renaming places, called this place Tokiyasdi, which means the place where they race. And it was known as a place for convening people for personal and collective excellence. They would take disagreements to the field in competition. And the more I learned about the people of these Western North Carolina Appalachian Mountains, striving for personal and collective excellence, that story doesn’t get told a lot,” she says. “But even when we've struggled, even though there's deep poverty now, I've seen some of the most amazing struggle and collective resilience too.”

Thanks again to Kim for taking the time to sit and chat with me that rainy Asheville afternoon. I spent years in Asheville, but over that quick cup of tea Kim taught me a lesson in place and community. She reminded me of a few things I’d forgotten about the city too. I wish her the best in the upcoming election!

Things I’m reading or learning about this week.

I’ve got a new, collaborative event coming up called Common Ground. It’s dedicated to having challenging and difficult conversations collectively, and I’ve been reading Dr Russell Blackford’s latest book How We Became Post-Liberal, the Rise and Fall of Toleration. I will interview Russell about his book for this event .

I read this great article in The Atlantic about the value in making friends with people from different age groups.