This week, we are spotlighting WMATA President, Sylvie Hyman. From growing up in Florida, to beginning to cycle for transportation in college, then to relocating to Minnesota, and everything that has happened since, her story connects closely to WMATA’s origin.
My Path to Advocacy
Name: Sylvie Hyman
Role: WMATA President
City: technically St. Louis Park
My name is Sylvie and I’m an engineer turned high school teacher who spent the past three years trying to make it as an activist. Growing up in South Florida, I got into biking with my mom and stepdad to avoid Shabbat services with my dad. We would pile 3 bikes into our minivan and drive to the beach to ride on A1A, the only road people ever biked on as far as I was aware. I wanted to ride my bike to school, 3 miles from my mom’s house, but she, correctly, insisted it was too dangerous.
I finally got to ride a bike for transportation in college where I joined my University’s cycling team, getting my first taste of group cycling and organizing. Bikes were how I made friends and sustained both my mental and physical health, but after a few close calls on road rides, I got into mountain biking so I could hang on to what I loved about cycling without exposing myself to dangerous roads as much. My college town had one fully dedicated bicycle path, the Gainesville/Hawthorne trail, which served as my most stable home throughout college.
In the fall of my senior year, I got my first, and only, job offer to be a design engineer in Minnesota. Knowing almost nothing about Minnesota, I asked some friends about it and they insisted I would love it, so that Summer I moved up here and never looked back, except to visit. My mother insisted that I get an apartment with a heated garage, believing that I wouldn’t survive if I had to scrape snow off my car in the winter. I don’t think either of us could have imagined me abandoning the car all together about 5 years later.
Same as in college, I used cycling as my main method of making friends in Minnesota, eventually moving to St. Louis Park to be closer to them and more bike trails. Going from my hometown (0 bike trails), to college (1 bike trail), to the Twin Cities (seemingly infinite bike trails), I thought this place was heaven. But then, the North Cedar Lake trail into downtown closed for the Green Line Extension project and I learned how fragile my new heaven was. A few months into the closure I had a close call on Hennepin while riding the detour due to a line of police tape. I discovered later that a different cyclist had been killed on the original detour which is why the police wouldn’t let me through.
After getting voluntarily laid-off from my final engineering job in the spring of 2023, 4 years into what was supposed to be a 2.5 year trail closure, I finally had the time to start digging into how I could help prevent these types of tragedies in the future. I joined an urbanist discord server, then another one, discovered organizations like streets.mn, Our Streets, and Move MN and quickly volunteered for too many things and made a bunch of new friends. But most of the work existing groups were doing was centered in the urban core while I was, and still am, based at the corner of St. Louis Park, Hopkins, and Minnetonka. So I started the WMATA discord server in late 2024 to connect with other folks in the west metro interested in a better connected and more sustainable west metro.
A few months later, I enrolled in a graduate program to study advocacy and, more importantly, figure out if I could make it as an activist. In my second semester I took an organizing course that required that I build a small support and action group and host at least one meeting. That meeting was WMATA’s first meeting ever in June of 2025. Much of WMATA’s work for the first year was directly connected with my graduate coursework, with a brief hiatus to run for St. Louis Park City Council in the summer and fall of 2025.
At the end of the Spring 2026 semester, having worked the past three years as a substitute teacher to make ends meet, I decided to look into full time teaching jobs; in part to be closer connected with youth who should be at the center of transportation and land use advocacy work, but also because being a full time activist was seeming less and less feasible, financially and mental health wise.
Now I am teaching Computer Science and Engineering courses at Hopkins High school while juggling advocacy and political work on the side. I also enjoy knitting, sewing, and embroidery crafts, camping, foraging, spending time with my partner, sPk, and my cat, Dora , and almost everything that has to do with bikes. I’m very excited for WMATA’s future and my own and I hope you’ll consider joining us to help make walking, biking, and transit better in the West Metro!
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