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City Council members on April 8 welcomed Sarah FioRito home to Evanston, where she grew up and has now returned to serve as the city’s transportation and mobility coordinator.

“There is so much potential and possibility here,” she said, crediting the staff, past and present council members, and residents for the work they have put into “making transportation options for our community as high quality as possible” and promising to work collaboratively with all of these groups.  

‘Infinite room for improvement‘

“I’ve been traveling the streets and moving around this area since I was young,” FioRito told the RoundTable a few days earlier. “The first bus I ever took was the 208,” which travels west on Golf Road. (She actually lived just over the border in Skokie.)

After graduating from ETHS in 2008, FioRito headed off to McGill University in Montreal, where she majored in international management with a minor focused on environmental economic policy.

“I started really becoming concerned about climate change,” she said, “about all the systems that make up our lives, and how they could work a lot better.” 

During a year abroad in the Czech Republic, FioRito was inspired by Prague’s transit system. The potential of transportation policy came into focus as she was working on a paper about urban sprawl and climate change.

“I am very solution oriented. It gives me energy and makes me excited to think about how much better we can make the world work for people,” she said. The country’s transportation system, she said, “has infinite room for improvement.“

Community organizing and education, with a focus on bicycles

Her interest in transportation – and the potential of bicycles – accelerated after she graduated and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia.

“It was my first time living in a temperate climate,” she said. “I started riding my bike in the middle of winter there. And that’s where I really saw the possibility of, ‘Wow, this is a really serious form of transportation that I could use all year round.’”

FioRito went to work as an organizer with Streets For Everyone, a grassroots initiative that grew into a campaign of the BC Cycling Coalition. That involved building relationships and support – “all kinds of support, community support, business support, community-based organizational support for complete street infrastructure, streets designed for all users,” she said.

Later she worked on a campaign with the Bike Right coalition, “to organize for universal cycling education in the school system in British Columbia, for kids.” She was appointed to Vancouver’s Active Transportation Policy Council, served as a board member and volunteer at the equity-oriented transportation resource center Kickstand, and worked as youth program coordinator, facilitator and mechanic at Pedal Society, yet another community bike organization. 

Then in 2020, “I rode my bicycle back home to Skevanston with my sister,” she said.

She went to work as a mechanic and community mechanics instructor with Working Bikes, a nonprofit based in Little Village that has much in common with groups she worked with in Vancouver. In addition to offering training in bicycle mechanics, especially for “folks who have barriers to employment and historical underrepresentation in the bicycle industry,” according to its website, Working Bikes repairs bikes and provides them to thousands of people around Chicago and the world.

As FioRito said, “That shop does a lot of work around bicycle access skills, and just transportation access, period.” 

Transportation touches everything

After just over two weeks on the job with the City of Evanston, FioRito ticked off the departments she already had met with: planning, economic development, traffic safety, sustainability, engineering, law, streets and sanitation, workforce development, accessibility, health

“What am I missing? … I think the reason I love transportation is because it’s very interdisciplinary,” she said. 

FioRito will be working with the engineering team this summer on the Sidewalk Improvement Program. She already is aware of gaps that need to be filled, especially in some areas of the city.

“My understanding is, a lot more is needed,” she said. “That’s something that I really want to support.”

She is identifying grant opportunities at the state and federal level and looks forward to “bringing more of a framework” into policies related to electric vehicles, bike parking, crosswalk frequency and more. 

FioRito has also begun talking with people from transportation-focused community groups.

“A lot of people in Evanston are really passionate and really involved. That’s a really great foundation,” she said. “And I think part of the work is getting more people involved.” 

“My intent is to speak to everyone that’s interested and just in general have open channels of communication,“ she said, including responding to community complaints.

Walkability, traffic speeds, and intersections are among concerns she’s been hearing about so far.

Prospects and possibilities

Looking ahead, FioRito is excited about opportunities for job training and prospects for employment in the transportation industry.

“Transportation trends are changing,” she said. “There are a lot of jobs in transportation right now, a lot of agencies are looking to hire.”

She also stressed the importance of better transportation education for people of all ages, “ideally, starting with folks who are younger, on how to be great, conscientious, safe, educated road users.” 

“We need to be innovative about how we approach safety – as that relates to walkability, bikeability, ‘transit-ability,’ drivability, all these things,” she said. “Really looking at these things as a life skill, something we teach, something we’re really being conscientious about.”

FioRito has been sensitive to the importance of safety from the time she was riding her bike around Skevanston as a child.

“I loved riding my bike,” she said, but her mother had strict safety rules, and “I was too embarrassed to ride my bike with the helmet and too scared to ride without it, because what if I actually got hurt?”

On the track team at ETHS, she “began experimenting with jogging as a means of transportation to the beach during the summer,” she said. “I still like jogging to my destinations when it is possible today.” 

Energized by the possibilities

She credits her parents, an architect and a doctor, with far more than her awareness of bike safety.

“I do think a lot about wellness. I do think a lot about design,” FioRito said. “I think a lot about how to make places that work well for humans and the natural environment around them.” She envisions “inviting spaces for people to want to be outside, to see and talk to their neighbors, to just even sit down on a bench. These are positive things for human wellness, and also for the natural environment.”

“I definitely call myself an optimist,” she said. “I’m really motivated by optimism. And I really believe in our ability to create a world that is more worthy of who I believe we are deep down. … I mean that in the deepest sense. I think we are capable of so much. … We could have a transportation system designed for livability, efficiency, enjoyment, beauty – these are realistic things that we can actually center our designs around. That gives me energy, because I see the possibility.”

You can meet Sarah FioRito at the Earth Day event from 12-3 p.m. on Saturday, April 20, in Ingraham Park, behind the Civic Center. Look for the transportation and mobility tent. 

Climate Watch is a series of occasional articles and essays about what climate change means for Evanston and what we’re doing locally to make a difference.

Meet Sarah FioRito, Evanston’s new transportation and mobility coordinator is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.