It’s time for another Member Spotlight! This week, we are featuring WMATA Member Huong Dang. Read about how growing up in an unincorporated Florida community and now regularly going out to the West Metro suburbs from her Minneapolis home have motivated her to become involved in WMATA.
I grew up in an unincorporated area of Orange County, Florida about a fifteen minutes drive from Orlando city proper. My adolescent and teenage years were spent shuffling from the seat of my parents’ Toyota to school and extracurricular activities. My parents were, and still are, deathly afraid of driving on the highways, so the places I could be driven to were limited to the local roads that were within a five mile radius of my home.
I joined WMATA because I still think of my younger self who was helpless in the face of car dependency. The suburbs can be a lonely and isolating place to be, and I believe in my heart of hearts that multimodal transit is the cure. Being able to bike to a friend’s house or take a bus to a diner or walk to school were all things I couldn’t do growing up in the suburbs; there was an intentional divestment away from biking, walking, and transit infrastructure.
Although I now live in Minneapolis, a city where I can easily get places by bike and bus, I spend a fair amount of time in the west metro. Thanh Luong Vegetarian in Minnetonka is the place that I can reliably count on to serve up Vietnamese dishes from my childhood. The Mann Theatre in Edina was my tried and true spot where I watched Zootopia 2 twice; fun fact, Minneapolis is allergic to having movie theaters that show new and popular movies. Bryant Lake in Eden Prairie, Bush Lake in Bloomington, Fish Lake in Maple Grove, and Shady Oak beach in Minnetonka are my regular haunts whenever I need to escape the bustle of the city and meander on my paddle board. I have a whole operation where I would ride my bike while hauling my inflatable paddle board on my beloved trailer.
I hope that with my advocacy, I can help at least one person be able to bike a little easier or walk with a little less fear in the suburbs. I’ve learned that there’s so much joy and independence to be experienced without the involvement of a motor vehicle, and I want multimodal transit to be an option everywhere, not just in Minneapolis.
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