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Rose Lanes get love from Portland City Council

The Portland City Council is moving forward with a plan to improve transit service through a series of targeted improvements to some of the city’s most delayed bus and streetcar corridors. Known as the Rose Lane Project, it’s designed to advance equity, reduce carbon emissions, and increase transit ridership with quick-build projects. It also offers lessons to other cities struggling with sluggish transits systems mired in a sea of cars.

Yesterday, the City of Roses (Portland, OR) unanimously adopted an ambitious plan to speed up transit service by freeing it from traffic and improve racial equity across the city. Aptly named the Rose Lane Project, the adoption of this plan follows high-profile changes in New York City and San Francisco that have closed entire streets to private vehicles in order to free riders from crippling traffic and open up space for pedestrians and cyclists.

But the Rose Lane project, while sharing similar goals, is different. Instead of closing a single street to vehicles, the city is launching a series of improvements to speed multiple bus lines and streetcars through the city with a variety of treatments, including but not limited to bus lanes. And it’ll all happen fast. The Rose Lane Project is designed to be implemented as pilot projects that can be deployed quickly with low-cost materials, evaluated and tweaked over time, and then made permanent if they’re successful.

Phase 1 consists of 29 separate projects from transit queue jumps to traffic light changes to bus lanes that will be implemented this year and next. Projects in Phase 2 will bring further, tailored street improvements to a network of high-priority transit corridors in 2021 and 2022.

The scale, timeline, and explicit focus on equity and climate change makes the Rose Lane Project unlike anything else being done in the U.S. though it is based in part on the success of Seattle in implementing transit priority and the resulting increase in transit ridership.

The city takes action

In many cities, a transit agency operates the transit system—hiring drivers, collecting fares, maintaining rail lines, etc.—while the city controls the street. A transit agency may request changes to traffic lights, bus stops, or lanes but it’s ultimately up to the city to actually implement those changes on public roadways. This divided responsibility can be a huge obstacle to change; political will, more than money, can become the limiting factor in whether or not transit is truly prioritized on the street. The same truth holds in efforts to dedicate more safe infrastructure for people walking and biking.

In Portland, the unanimous adoption of the Rose Lane Project by the city council sends a clear message: transit is our priority. When fully implemented, the Rose Lane Project will reduce travel times for hundreds of thousands of riders everyday, improve access to jobs and services across the entire city—particularly for low-income households and communities of color—and help the city reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by making transit a more attractive choice to more people. Ultimately the city hopes the Rose Lane Project will help it achieve a goal of 25 percent of trips in the city made by transit.

“The Rose Lane Project demonstrates how equity and climate are interconnected. My office developed this bold, transformative vision for transit with PBOT by centering racial equity—setting a goal to reduce commute times for communities of color—and in doing so we created a powerful tool that will advance our efforts to confront climate change,” said Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) Commissioner Chloe Eudaly. “The Rose Lane Project is a major step toward meeting our equity, climate, and transportation goals by making transit a more viable option for more Portlanders.”

PBOT has put together a full report on the Rose Lane Project that is chock full of easily digestible information and great graphics. Cities around the country should take note—inequality and climate change are issues that every community is dealing with and the Rose Lane Project offers a vision of a healthier, safer, more equitable transportation system.

Engaging east Portland to plan a more inclusive bus rapid transit line

When roughly 14 miles of a bus rapid transit line was proposed along Division Street in East Portland, the effort was greeted with interest in an often-neglected area of the city, but also concern about the possibilities of displacement and development poorly engaged with the unique local culture. To address those concerns, community members throughout the Jade and Division Midway districts were engaged through arts and culture projects to recalibrate the plan to better serve community needs.

This feature is part of arts and culture month at T4America and Smart Growth America, where we’re sharing a handful of stories about how arts and culture are a vital part of building better transportation projects and stronger communities. This feature is adapted from a longer case study that will be featured in Transportation for America’s and ArtPlace America’s upcoming field scan on arts, culture and transportation due to be released later this month.

When we consider the role of art in transportation, most people probably first think about artistic contributions to the physical environment like creative streetscaping, transit stations, or other parts of the built environment. But art can be just as vital to the process of planning & building transportation projects.

In Portland, Oregon, arts-based engagement is helping to build dialogue between local agencies and the community to ensure that a new planned bus rapid transit (BRT) line serves the residents of ethnically diverse, low-income districts in the eastern part of the city. The Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) and the Division-Midway Alliance (DMA), two nonprofits located respectively in the Jade and Midway Division districts along Division street in Portland, have been empowering residents, businesses, and students to actively shape the evolving BRT project through arts and culture.

Home to many immigrant and refugee families that give this area a distinct ethnic and cultural diversity, the Jade and Division Midway districts have historically lacked strong, safe, transportation infrastructure. However, in recent years citizens have also witnessed development that has led to displacement throughout many communities in Portland. So Jade and Division Midway community members met the BRT proposal with curiosity but also scrutiny.

As stated in the Jade Midway District Arts Plan:

The BRT project will impact local businesses, and a city-wide housing emergency is driving housing costs up. Housing complexes in the district have changed private owners and renters experienced rent increases. Our work remains to address these challenges to continue to root the community in place.

Creative tactics, spearheaded by APANO and DMA, have created a platform for the community to advocate, express, and communicate their desires related to this new transportation proposal to ensure that the final project best serves their needs, reflect what makes their community unique, and is embraced by the people it serves.

For example, neighborhood artist Solomon Starr and local youth used hip hop to document the experiences of southeast Portland community members taking mass transit, while artist Tamara Lynne engaged community members who live, work, and travel along the proposed transit route through interactive performance.

To further build local capacity to do more of this kind of creative engagement with the community, these organizations built a Placemaking Steering Committee comprised of eight civic, nonprofit, and government members to guide creative placemaking plans in the district, and ultimately strengthen coalitions. APANO also launched a creative placemaking project grant program that is funding projects in the district led by cultural workers. These cultural workers then participate in a cohort known as the Resident Artist Collaborative, in which they receive training to help engage the community in the production of new artworks.

By building public awareness and political pressure through arts and cultural projects, APANO and the Division Midway Alliance helped to pause construction of the BRT planning process until the Portland Bureau of Transportation, TriMet, Metro, and others made formal community benefits agreements and agreed to mitigation measures to ensure that this vital new transit service would serve the community’s needs.

This project is just one of the many case studies that will be featured in Transportation for America’s upcoming field scan on arts, culture and transportation, commissioned by ArtPlace America. The field scan is intended to examine the ways in which transportation professionals are exploring new creative, collaborative and contextually-specific approaches to engage the community in more inclusive processes for planning and building new transportation projects.

Stay tuned for more about arts and culture during the rest of September.

Oregon’s attempt to raise new state funding for transportation is coming down to the wire

The Oregon legislature has just two weeks left to vote on a transportation package that — in addition to funding highway maintenance and expansion — takes steps to significantly fund transit, safe routes to school and implements forward thinking strategies like congestion pricing and active transportation management.

Flickr photo by Oregon DOT. https://www.flickr.com/photos/oregondot/15035881385

Update: 7/6/17: A deal was struck by legislators and approved in the Oregon House and Senate this week. More details here in this newer post.

The Co-Chairs and Co-Vice Chairs of Oregon’s Joint Committee on Transportation Preservation and Modernization Committee (JTPM) have been negotiating the details of HB 2017 while a constitutionally mandated end-of-session ‘sine die’ on July 10 looms. This committee was formed last year to develop a transportation package for the 2017 legislative session, and has conducted a tour of state to gather input and convened many meetings to develop and flesh out the details of the package over the course of this past year.

The package has too many moving parts to describe in this post, but here are five notable elements to Oregon’s proposal:

1) Five diverse sources of revenue

To raise new transportation funds, the proposal includes traditional mechanisms like gas tax and registration fee increases, and not-so-traditional ones like an excise tax on bicycle sales, employee payroll taxes and congestion pricing. These sources are so diverse in part because of a strong interest from legislators in seeing different user groups have ‘skin in the game,’ and because Oregon’s constitution prohibits any motor vehicle-related user fees from being used on transit, off-road paths, or non-highway freight infrastructure. Add in new tolls and there are actually six sources of revenue contained in the legislation.

2) It includes significant funding for transit operations

The state of Oregon pays only about 3 percent of the cost of operating the numerous transit systems in the state while nationally, states cover about 24 percent of transit operations. A new 0.1 percent statewide payroll tax on employees would significantly change that, dedicating 85 percent of the projected $107 million it would raise toward transit operations annually. This would bolster transit service in small towns and large cities across the state, improving access to jobs and other services, and making the state a valuable partner in running the multimodal transportation networks that are vital to the state’s prosperity.

3) Freeway widening is not the only congestion solution offered

Like other recent state transportation funding packages, Oregon’s includes funding for freeway expansion — including freeway projects intended to address three specific bottlenecks in the Portland region. But an earlier presentation outlining the proposal also acknowledges the limitations of this approach, noting that we “cannot tax our way out of congestion” and “cannot build our way out of congestion relief.” The bill calls upon the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) to implement — where possible — pre-construction tolling, congestion pricing, “zip lanes” (we take this to mean high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes) and active traffic management. While the benefits of freeway widening are often lost to induced demand, congestion pricing can more effectively address congestion if coupled with investments in other traffic-reducing travel options like transit.

4) A “Regional Increment”

The biggest congestion challenges in Oregon are in the Portland metropolitan region. While business interests around the state are concerned about congestion in Portland since they move their goods through this port city and economic hub, it’s still a tough sell for the rest of the state to pay for big freeway projects in Portland. To solve this politically and financially, the package levies an additional “regional increment” on the Portland region with higher gas taxes, registration fees and title fees, and dedicates that funding to projects in the Portland region. This helps Portland fund its big projects and holds together political support from rural, more tax-averse parts of the state.

5) Significant discussion on accountability

We’ve written before about Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) effort to regain public trust.

“While the agency is respected for innovative programs like ConnectOregon’s competitive grants and a strong commitment to fix-it-first principles, it has stumbled occasionally as well, including the failure to win support for the problematic Columbia River Crossing mega-project, massive cost overruns on a rural highway project in the landslide-prone coastal mountains, and ill-timed miscalculation of carbon emissions estimates related to failed 2015 transportation investment legislation.”

Legislators are anxious to show the public that they can improve transparency and accountability in this bill. The proposal calls for giving the Oregon Transportation Commission greater power and capacity to oversee the Oregon Department of Transportation. It also calls for cost/benefit analysis of future projects and communicating construction progress on an improved website.

We expect new amendments to be released this week as the legislature races to complete its work before the deadline.

Arts and culture are helping three cities transform neighborhoods in a positive way

From new light rail systems to bus rapid transit lines, cities are planning major new transportation investments to spur economic development and better connect people to opportunity. But how can they ensure that these investments — often in diverse and quickly evolving parts of their cities — transform neighborhoods in a positive way by building social capital, supporting local businesses, and celebrating the stories, cultural history and diversity of existing residents rather than displacing them?

Through a generous grant from the Kresge Foundation, over the last two years we’ve worked alongside local partners in three rapidly changing, diverse communities around the country to explore how arts and culture and more creative forms of engaging the public can provide positive answers to the questions asked above.

We’re seeking to award $50,000 (each) to creative placemaking projects in three new cities for 2017-2018. Find out more about the grant opportunity and apply today.

Learn More & Apply

In three specific cities outlined below (and elsewhere), an approach known as creative placemaking has helped engage community members in a deeper way than traditional transportation and public works agencies have managed to do, enabling and empowering true community-led visions for the projects at hand. This approach demonstrates tremendous promise for transportation agencies and local governments at a time when many have historically failed to win deep public support for important projects, often delaying or derailing implementation.

Over the last two years of our Cultural Corridor Consortium project, as it’s called, we’ve witnessed artistic and cultural practice sparking deep public engagement, facilitating the difficult — but necessary — conversations required to create better projects that more fully serve the needs of these communities and reflect what makes them unique in the first place. The consortium consists of trusted local partner organizations working in transit corridors in neighborhoods just outside urban cores: the Nolensville Pike Corridor in Nashville, the University Avenue corridor in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood, and Division Street in Portland’s Jade and Division-Midway Districts.

Here are brief versions of each of their stories:

Nashville

In south Nashville, the Nolensville Pike corridor is a thriving community of recent immigrants, primarily of Latin, Kurdish, Somali, and Sudanese origin. Today, Nashville welcomes more than 1,000 refugees a year, has the fastest growing immigrant community in the United States, and is home to one of the largest Kurdish populations outside the Middle East. Nolensville Pike, which has been dubbed the “International District,” serves as the focal point of these immigrant communities.

Nolensville Pike is also a congested, typical arterial highway that carries 60,000 automobile trips a day while also serving adjacent commercial uses and residential neighborhoods. Though it serves as the central commercial spine of immigrant life in south Nashville, it has eroded or non-existent sidewalks, few crosswalks, insufficient bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, and no bus shelters, making travel outside of a car a downright unpleasant and often dangerous experience.

In 2015, Conexión Américas began hosting community meetings — facilitated by artists — to solicit ideas for transforming the road and surrounding spaces. At these meetings, the public expressed their desire for unbroken, connected sidewalks, artistic crosswalks, slower traffic, public art, and bus shelters. To bolster this work, we supported Conexión Américas and the Nashville Area MPO to facilitate community-based arts and culture public engagement to plan and implement improved bus service and, eventually, light rail.

Through a student-led bus shelter design/build project, an intergenerational oral history project, and dynamic “Creative Labs” community meetings, the community came together to dream about the future of Nolensville Pike. This work was documented in Envision Nolensville Pike and led to the creation of the city’s first-ever bilingual crosswalk, situated on Nolensville Pike.

Supported by new analysis that T4America and Conexión Américas are releasing in the coming weeks, these partners are producing a plan to avoid commercial displacement and cultural gentrification along the corridor while building a better Pike for everyone. The next phase of this project will bring some of these visions to fruition to test ideas, push boundaries, and further build relationships along the diverse corridor.

The Nashville MPO formally launched its creative placemaking efforts with the adoption of its most recent regional transportation plan, and recently hosted a Creative Placemaking Symposium that convened area elected officials, transportation planners and engineers to think through applying creative placemaking to transportation projects.

San Diego

Since the mid-1990s, the neighborhood surrounding the intersection of 50th Street and University Avenue in the eastern City Heights neighborhood of San Diego has been a landing pad for newly arrived refugees from Somalia and other East African countries. Nearly three decades later, the bustling neighborhood, often referred to as as Little Mogadishu or Little Somalia, continues to serve the Somali and other East African communities. It’s a regional hub for other East Africans from throughout San Diego, a neighborhood hub for those that have been living there for years, and continues to be a welcoming home to new refugees. Many of those who arrived in the 1990s have become established business and community leaders, pillars of a strong local social fabric. In the neighborhood you’ll find Somali businesses, mosques that attract and support new arrivals, and affordable housing apartment complexes, all which contribute to the rich sense of culture and home.

Despite the sense of community that the the neighborhood has nurtured, it’s a dangerous area to walk, with high rates of pedestrian fatalities and other safety issues. The City Heights Community Development Corporation (CHCDC) has been engaging the community to envision how they can integrate their art, culture and history with a safer streetscape. Picking up on that work, Circulate San Diego, alongside CHCDC, initiated new programs to engage with largely East African and Somali residents to define community assets, and discuss how these assets can be reflected in art to improve the overall transit ridership experience with bus rapid transit on El Cajon Boulevard.

All of this public engagement has led to the development of parklets, gathering spaces, a pop-up coffee shop, local farmers market and traffic calming murals that have helped solidify sense of place, strengthened community ownership, and increased pedestrian safety.

The neighborhood’s “Take Back the Alley” mural project brought community members together to create a mural near a BRT station. This public art piece, and the positive effects it has on the surrounding area generated inertia, encouraging a small business owner nearby to clean up an adjacent parking lot and repurpose it as a café space, now leased by a local start-up coffee cart business.

Our partners also spearheaded the new San Diego Neighborhood Placemaking Collaborative, a collection of five neighborhood-based organizations who meet regularly to advocate for creative placemaking in the region. Last year, Circulate San Diego produced A Place for Placemaking in San Diego as a roadmap to overhaul the regulations and permitting policies that negatively impact creative placemaking projects in San Diego. The white paper is already helping to shape new permitting procedures by defining creative placemaking in San Diego’s Municipal Code and subsequently providing for a new process for community organizations and other applicants interested in pursuing neighborhood placemaking projects. Circulate San Diego and CHCDC also recently participated as key stakeholders in a city-led “Complete Boulevard study” to bring a complete streets design concept and creative placemaking elements to El Cajon Boulevard and this neighborhood in particular.

Portland

In Portland, arts-based engagement has helped build a positive dialogue between local agencies and the community to ensure that a new planned bus rapid transit line serves the residents of ethnically diverse, working class districts in the eastern part of the city. The Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) and the Division-Midway Alliance, two nonprofits located respectively in the Jade and Division districts along Division street in Portland, have been empowering residents, businesses, and students through arts and culture to shape the evolving BRT project.

This area is home to many immigrant families that give the area a rich ethnic and cultural diversity that is increasingly rare in Portland. In a corridor with members from such diverse backgrounds, creative tactics allow the community to advocate, express, and communicate their needs and interests related to this new transportation proposal.

By building public awareness and pressure through placemaking work and community organizing, APANO and Division-Midway Alliance helped to pause construction of the BRT planning process until the Portland Bureau of Transportation, Trimet, Metro, and others made formal community benefit agreements by agreeing to mitigation measures to ensure that the new vital transit service would transform the community in a positive way.

Similar to Nashville and San Diego, our partners in Portland also developed a community-based vision — the Jade-Midway Districts Art Plan — to guide their arts and culture solutions to transportation challenges. To further build local capacity, our partners built a Placemaking Steering Committee comprised of eight civic, nonprofit, and government members to guide creative placemaking plans in the district. APANO also launched a creative placemaking project grant program, which funds the creation of cultural worker-led projects in the district. These cultural workers then participate in a cohort known as the Resident Artist Collaborative, in which they receive training to help prepare to produce community-engaged work.

One of the most exciting products of this work is the creation of a new community placemaking grant program at Metro, which will institutionalize this cultural work through the Portland area. Metro, the Portland region’s MPO, kicked off their inaugural Community Placemaking Grant last month, and we were on hand, and we were on hand.

Arts and culture contribute to the unique identity of a city and exert a powerful emotional pull. They’re intrinsic to preserving what’s great about the places people already love, and for creating new places worth caring about. We firmly believe that engaging the public through the arts and culture helps produce better projects, promote social equity, and is part of building better places that are loved and cared for by a more diverse community of people.

In all three of these cities we’ve seen a deep commitment to community-building between local organizations and municipal agencies lead to new institutional creative placemaking programs that will last long after these isolated projects are finished. The pilot projects have led directly to new funding programs and policy changes to build a sustained practice of creative placemaking in the three cities, while bringing new voices to the table.

Bring creative placemaking to your city through a new grant opportunity

After working closely with these cities over the last few years, we are eager to expand on this work — we’re seeking to award $50,000 (each) to creative placemaking projects in three new cities for 2017-2018.

Find out more about the grant opportunity and apply today.

Learn More & Apply

This post was produced by Mallory Nezam and Ben Stone on our arts and culture team.

New to the world of creative placemaking? Catch up with our recent work

At T4America, we’ve stepped up our work in the arena of creative placemaking, traveling the country to learn from what others are doing and sharing the experience of our growing staff when it comes to this emerging approach for transportation planning.

National examination of the practice of creative placemaking. Late last month we announced that Transportation for America has been commissioned by ArtPlace America to undertake a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in transportation to better understand how and where artists, designers, and cultural workers are collaborating with local governments and community partners to solve transportation challenges. T4America was chosen to lead this transportation field scan research and subsequent working group convening because of our “strong institutional commitment to creative placemaking, comprehensive knowledge of the transportation sector and recent commitment to the creation of an arts & culture program with Ben Stone at the helm,” according to Jamie Hand, ArtPlace’s Director of Research Strategies.

Portland, OR

Kicking off Portland’s new community creative placemaking grants. Our creative placemaking work also recently took us to Portland, Oregon where our arts & culture team met with key stakeholders and toured the creative placemaking projects we support through a grant from the Kresge Foundation.

In east Portland, the Jade and Midway Districts — led by our partners at APANO — are building public support and awareness to ensure that a new bus rapid transit project best serves the needs of the local community. Our team also presented at the launch of Metro’s new Community Placemaking grants, which have been inspired by the implementation of the APANO’s Jade-Midway District Arts Plan.

A creative city going deeper with a creative approach to engaging the public. The Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) is deepening its commitment to engaging the community in creative ways, and integrating artists into community development and transportation projects. The Nashville Area MPO recently launched its creative placemaking efforts with the adoption of its most recent regional transportation plan and has a long-term goal of emboldening and equipping their members to facilitate more valuable public engagement and further community outreach in local planning efforts.

Nashville, TN, Creative Placemaking Symposium

In March, the Nashville MPO convened their first Creative Placemaking Symposium, bringing together area elected officials, transportation planners and engineers from local and state governments to learn how and why creative placemaking works. Rochelle Carpenter, T4A Program Manager and Nashville MPO Senior Policy Analyst, was a key organizer for the symposium, and brought in our Director of Arts & Culture, Ben Stone, to share his insights on how to build effect creative placemaking projects.

How are artists and municipal officials learning to work together? The integration of arts and culture as new tools to help solve civic challenges is an exciting new development in the field. We’ve seen these tools better involve community members, and help to create places that are more meaningful to and reflective of the people that live, work and play there. The artists and cultural workers bridging the conversation between local communities and civic/transportation professionals are now serving an important role as co-problem solvers. But how are the municipal officials and artists being equipped and trained to work together and build these valuable partnerships?

Hear more by catching up with the recording of our most recent webinar on creative placemaking, Training for Artists and Civic/Transportation Collaboration, where we learned about these programs from the perspective of a national practitioner, local training organizer, and an alumna of a training program who also happens to be one of our newest staff members, Mallory Nezam.

Through this webinar we learned how these practitioners are being equipped to work in multiple sectors, communicate with diverse stakeholders, and harmonize the goals of different players. These programs train artists in both practical skills — like writing contracts — and community organizing skills–like how to work with diverse populations. As a result, these training programs are preparing artists to think outside of their traditional role and work with local communities, civic professionals, and local governments. When artists understand the benefits they can bring to the civic sector, we are able to work together to create thriving places that work for everyone.

Lastly, if you haven’t yet, please do check out our guide to creative placemaking, The Scenic Route, intended for a lay audience of elected officials, planners, or other local leaders.

Trickle-up performance measures

While working to enhance its performance-based planning framework, Metro, the metropolitan planning organization for the Portland, Oregon region, can draw from the experience of local jurisdictions within its own region — bringing unanticipated benefits through “trickle-up” learning.

This is the second of a series of posts on the issues and challenges of performance-based planning in the Portland region.

When Metro kicked off the process of developing its long-range transportation plan governing the next ten years of spending it was clear that performance measures would be a focus, both because of the new requirements created by the 2012 federal transportation law (MAP-21) and a growing public interest in making smarter choices about transportation investments.

Metro convened a workgroup of stakeholders to provide guidance on performance measures. To get things started, Metro hosted a workshop in January of 2016, which included presentations on the performance measure work of two local jurisdictions: City of Portland and Washington County.

The experience of each of these jurisdictions offered up lessons that have informed the workgroup’s efforts to identify performance measures and develop a framework to inform Metro’s next long-range plan.

As part of its transportation plan, Portland has used performance-based criteria as a way to prioritize investment, and has been careful to ensure that those criteria reflect the city’s values. Criteria were derived from numerous sources that incorporate citizen input. The seven criteria are “cross-modal”; they evaluate various concerns and support a balance among modes.

Portland’s evaluation criteria

In 2014, Washington County published Multimodal Performance Measures and Standards, prepared by Kittleson & Associates. The report strives to identify performance measures that are relevant to non-automobile modes of travel. While the suite of performance measures identified in this study are useful fodder for Metro’s workgroup, some of the greatest value is the lessons learned in the process, and the opportunity to adapt some of the study’s approaches to evaluating the performance measures themselves.

While the study lists five lessons learned, the first two are most of interest:

Different measures are best for different planning applications.
Different measures may be needed to assess the same goal.

These two lessons, along with the use of matrices to visually compare proposed measures, are playing the biggest role in informing the work of Metro’s performance measures workgroup.

Performance Measures, Graphic, Transportation Planning, Grid, Chart, Corridor Planning, Development, Crash, Pedestrian, Mode Share, Travel Time, Portland, Oregon

Washington County, Oregon developed matrices to identify how proposed performance measures could be applied.

Taken together, these lessons led the workgroup to ask for matrices to illustrate the role of performance measures under consideration for Metro’s long-range plan. Metro is using two types of matrices to answer two questions. First, what is the relationship between the proposed performance measures and the region’s goals. Second, at what stage of planning can each performance measure be applied?

For example, Metro is using vehicle miles traveled as a performance measure in several stages of planning. It’s important to understand how this measure relates to several of the regions’ goals including efficiency of the transportation system, reducing household transportation costs, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving safety. A matrix comparing proposed measures with the region’s goals helps workgroup members to visualize those relationships and identify redundant measures.

RTP, Evaluation System, Matrix, Graphic, Chart, Portland, Oregon, Measures, Evaluation, Travel, Region, Efficient, RTP Goals

Metro staff developed a matrix that communicates how each proposed performance measure addresses the region’s goals.

Likewise developing a matrix to look at how measures can be applied is also helpful. For example, crash rate is something that cannot be predicted in Metro’s travel model. So while safety is a major goal for most transportation agencies, a proxy may be needed to inform selection of a preferred scenario or project prioritization. Metro is considering a measure they are calling “VMT exposure” which is the amount of traffic on surface streets. While this isn’t an exact measure of safety by any means, it is strongly correlated and can be easily forecast in a transportation model. Crash rate will be used as a monitoring measure to determine if the region’s investment strategy is working to reduce crashes in hindsight.

Besides the ideas on how to evaluate performance measures, there is an additional benefit to learning from local jurisdictions: consistency between local measures and regional measures. Getting everyone on the same page to coordinate regional investments helps ensure that all dollars are going to accomplish goals that are shared across the region. Regional performance measures that reflect those bubbling up from local jurisdictions will help local jurisdictions like Portland and Washington County that are already ahead of the game develop local plans that reflect their own local values while still being consistent with the regional plan.

Politics of performance-based project prioritization in Portland

Leaders and advocates in the state of Oregon and in the Portland metropolitan region have been discussing how to use performance measures to inform smarter investment decisions and build public trust in how transportation dollars are spent. As the Portland-based representative for Transportation for America, I’ve been deeply engaged in these discussions, including serving on a work group for Metro, Portland’s metropolitan planning organization, providing guidance on performance measures in the next long range transportation plan, and working with state leaders on legislation to integrate performance-based decision making into the Oregon DOT’s programs.

This is the first of a series of posts on the issues and challenges of performance-based planning in the Portland region.

Many staffers working on Metro’s long-range transportation plan — referred to locally as the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) — had the opportunity to attend a two-day symposium at Portland State University focused largely on performance-based project prioritization. Robert Liberty, director of the Urban Sustainability Accelerator at Portland State University, organized the symposium entitled New Thinking for a New Era: A Symposium on Transportation Investment Decision-making. Attendees included staff from MPOs around the country and experts at the cutting edge of performance-based planning.

Participating with T4A director James Corless and SGA senior policy advisor Lynn Peterson, we heard about a range of new policy developments and technical tools from:

Chris Ganson, California Governor Edmund G. Brown’s office, on the implementation of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as a primary measure of environmental impact (instead of level of service (LOS)).
Eric Sundquist, Managing Director of State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI), on accessibility performance measures and the Sugar Access tool developed by Citilabs, and the implementation of Virginia DOT’s ‘Smart Scale’ project prioritization.
Sam Seskin, recently retired from CH2M HILL, on the development of Oregon’s MOSAIC
Steve Heminger, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (the MPO for the San Francisco Bay Area) on their approach to performance-based project prioritization.

Of particular interest were the lessons learned on the politics of integrating performance-based project prioritization into the MPO planning process. A recurring theme was the need to give decision-makers the space and time to get comfortable with a new approach. It can be a challenge to sell elected officials or skeptical board members on a performance-based project prioritization that allows a process imbued with the region’s values to elevate the best projects — rather than a process where the most influential or persuasive voice gets their project funded.

There were a few recommendations for putting elected officials at ease in the early stages of developing a prioritization process:

Develop a prioritization system in a way that does not initially put projects at risk of being removed from funding consideration. Local projects are precious to local officials, and they will initially do everything to protect them — even at the expense of the long-term regional gains and smarter investments.
Limit the array of projects that will be subject to prioritization. For example, if a project is close to construction, consider it a done deal. Expend effort on analyzing more expensive projects rather than cheaper ones, and focus on capacity expansion projects as opposed to maintenance and operations.
Consider if projects need numerical rankings. MTC categorizes projects as high priority, medium and underperforming and uses those categorizations to inform subsequent decision-making.

While these are all ideas to consider, it became clear at the symposium that local context matters. In the Puget Sound region, Councilmember Balducci shared the story of opposition to a specific proposed road through pristine land that helped initiate Puget Sound Regional Council’s (PSRC) project prioritization process. In addition, PSRC developed its process in a time of plentiful funding, and so it was ready to apply when scarcity arose and the MPO needed to cut projects from its constrained list.

MTC has gone through an iterative process that has added rigor over the course of 15 years. At a time when there was controversy over some particular measures, support for the overall approach was strong, and so they continue to expand the program. Originally applied only to projects that expand the system, they have begun evaluating state-of-good-repair projects for prioritization as well.

As Metro considers using performance-based prioritization in its investment decisions, these stories could help inform how to bring skeptical decision-makers on board. It’s challenging for local leaders to switch from the political wrangling they’re accustomed to, to a rational approach that elevates the best projects based on their merits. However, when they emerge on the other side with smarter investment decisions, the ability to communicate decisions more transparently, and as a result, greater public trust and greater ability to raise more transportation revenue, there is no compelling reason to go back.

Walking the talk with Mark Fenton in the Portland region

Back in December, two T4America members in the Pacific Northwest (Portland Metro and the City of Portland) and other allies organized events to bring in Mark Fenton, a leader in clear thinking on transportation, health and walkable communities.

The Portland region was Mark’s first stop on a speaking tour of Oregon supported by the state Department of Land Conservation and Development. I attended both events, and I was most impressed by Mark’s persuasive arguments for charting the smartest course for making our communities the best places they can be, even if it cuts against the pervasive conventional thinking about moving cars.

SGA Local Leaders Council member Mayor Denny Doyle kicked off the morning event at the Beaverton Public Library by sharing the work this light rail suburb on the west side of the Portland metropolitan region has been doing to boost its downtown vibrancy and walkability.

Then Mark took the stage, and after having us close our eyes and recall our first memories of being physically active, led the audience through a few points of agreement:

Generation Xers and Baby Boomers (the vast majority of those in attendance) grew up “free range” and experienced physical activity that way – with their friends and typically without adult supervision.
Most kids do not have the same opportunities for free range physical activity today.
Everyone in the audience agreed kids would benefit from being more free range today.

So, “What are you doing about it?” Mark asked.

He then put forward a compelling argument that right land uses, complete active transportation networks and welcoming community design are the key issues to to make walking, biking and transit safe, convenient and intrinsic to daily life. Doing so can act as a foundational component of getting people physically active again so that we can address the public health crisis and escalating costs to taxpayers — America spends 30 percent of its GDP on health costs.

Along the way Mark invited participants to air concerns and addressed them.

Stranger danger is the same today as it was in the 1970’s.
Legal pressures against free-range parenting are overblown. In Bethesda, Maryland, where two kids were scooped up by the police for being a half-mile from home, the city has since adopted a resolution supporting free-range parenting.
Cultural norms around active transportation aren’t going to shift if the infrastructure doesn’t change. Cultural norms around tobacco use shifted because public policy compelled changes in bars, restaurants, planes, and workplaces.

Mark also met with community leaders and city staff in East Portland’s Jade District, where T4A has been working with Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) on creative placemaking around the proposed Powell Division bus rapid transit line.

The proposed BRT improvements have raised local hopes of improved transportation in their neighborhoods, but also heightened fear of displacement as property values and rent costs increase when the neighborhood becomes more desirable. This conflict can lead disadvantaged communities to resist necessary improvements they would otherwise want because they’re scared that if the neighborhood becomes too desirable, they’ll be priced out.

Mark’s take: gentrification is already happening, so arguing for the “B-version” won’t prevent displacement, but will certainly result in a neighborhood that is less than it could be. Instead, Mark argued, leaders should push for both: the best anti-displacement strategies and the best possible project. (Something that a creative placemaking approach can help achieve.)

I’ll be watching to see how these ideas resonate and impact the conversation amongst members and allies in the Portland region.

Effectively linking transportation with economic development: Beth Osborne visits the Pacific Northwest

On September 10 and 11, T4A brought Senior Policy Advisor Beth Osborne to the Pacific Northwest to speak with audiences in Seattle, Portland and Eugene about the links between transportation investment and economic development. There are countless examples of these links in each city, and local speakers shared those stories at all three events.

A good crowd gathered at Metro’s policy breakfast with Beth Osborne in Portland.

This November, Seattle voters will decide whether to support the Move Seattle levy, an ambitious plan to invest in five bus rapid transit (BRT) lines and a range of complete streets projects to improve Seattleites’ mobility and safety by updating the design of city streets to better match the demands being placed on them by a greater range of users. Mayor Murray’s transportation policy director Andrew Glass-Hastings was there to share details on that effort. (The City of Seattle is a T4A member.)

The Portland event was hosted by Metro, another T4A member. Years of hard work have come to fruition with both the Portland Milwaukie Light Rail (PMLR) line and Tilikum Crossing over the Willamette River opening immediately after the event on September 12, and the region is hard at work planning a Bus Rapid Transit line from Portland to Gresham. (Both cities are members of T4A as is TriMet, the region’s transit district.) Brian Newman from Oregon Health & Science University shared the story of the hundreds of millions of dollars of current and planned economic development in the South Waterfront spurred by the new light rail line, streetcar, the aerial tram and TIGER-funded improvements to S.W. Moody Avenue. Duncan Hwang from the Jade business district spoke about their efforts to minimize or prevent displacement of disadvantaged communities when the Powell Division BRT line is built in the next 5 years.

Beth Osborne sharing with the crowd in Eugene

The third event was in Eugene, where the neighboring city of Springfield (another T4A member) has a TIGER application in for streetscape improvements on Franklin Boulevard that could spark substantial infill development — including new hotels to serve the visitors at the 2021 World Track Championships hosted by the region. Springfield Mayor Christine Lundberg shared those aspirations, and Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy, Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce president Dave Hauser and PIVOT Architecture principal Kari Turner all testified to how Eugene-Springfield’s growing regional BRT network is part of their economic development strategy. In fact, T4A member Lane Transit District received federal Small Starts funding for its West EmX BRT project on the same day as our event in Eugene.

The local stories at all three events helped provide context for Beth’s Ms. Osborne’s message: if your region wants to get the best economic development results from transportation investments, it’s imperative to carefully measure the outcomes against your region’s values. Measure outcomes like congestion the wrong way, and you could be inhibiting economic development in favor of moving cars around quickly for no economic gain.

Referencing a series of recent T4America and Smart Growth America reports – Measuring What We Value, Core Values, The Innovative MPO – Ms. Osborne pointed to new approaches yielding better results.

These recent events are sparking productive conversations in each region. Interested in organizing an event like these in your area for members and non-members? Get in touch with us and feel free to share ideas for topics and speakers.

performance-measures-members-featured Relatedly to the topic of measuring outcomes, don’t miss Beth’s ongoing series on performance measures, available only for members.

Feel a little lost when it comes to the concept of transportation performance measures? In this short series expressly for T4A members, our resident expert and USDOT veteran will help bring you up to speed on an issue that’s complicated but represents a smart way forward on transportation planning and spending. Read more.

Join T4A’s Beth Osborne in Portland and Seattle next week for talks on transportation and economic development

Beth Osborne, Transportation for America’s senior policy advisor, is making three stops in the Pacific Northwest soon to discuss how investing in transportation can help drive economic development.

The three sessions will focus on how we can plan and develop our roads, transit systems and freight networks to bring the best possible economic returns. You will learn how regions across the country have made investment decisions and the results they achieved with regard to economic development and competitiveness.

Beth Osborne brings five year’s experience from US DOT, including serving as Acting Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy, and a national perspective on prospects for improvements to transportation policy and funding. Sign up today. T4America members should have already received a promo code for discounted registration.

Find out more about each session and register with the links below.

Healthy economies need healthy people — Nashville leads the way for other regions

What’s the connection between healthy residents and a healthy bottom line? Why should a local business community care about improving the health of the residents that live there? Representatives from five regions gathered last week in Nashville to learn how providing better transportation infrastructure and building more walkable communities can help improve residents’ health — and boost local economic prosperity and competitiveness.

This post was written by Rochelle Carpenter and Stephen Lee Davis with Transportation for America.

The Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, responsible for planning and allocating federal transportation dollars in the seven-county Nashville region, has become a nationally recognized leader in prioritizing health when selecting transportation projects.

Getting to that point wasn’t easy, but their hard work to make that shift was kick-started by two related developments: the widespread recognition of a looming health crisis in the least active state in the nation, and the realization that there was pent-up demand among Nashville residents for healthier options to get around —whether safer streets with new sidewalks, trails, transit, or bikeshare.

One economic connection is obvious: employers are often the ones paying a large share of healthcare costs for employees. If those employees are living in a place where it’s challenging to get or stay healthy because of factors inherent to the built environment, that’s a cost that those companies have to bear. If those costs become a known challenge within the business community, it presents a major roadblock when recruiting new employers or trying to retain them.

Whether by continuing to make ambitious plans to bring new bus rapid transit to the city, building new projects that make it easier to walk or bike, or through incorporating health considerations into their process for funding transportation projects, Nashville is trying to stay ahead of their growth challenges, remain competitive for new talent and ensure that their residents can be healthy — all helping to boost the bottom line for the region. It’s a region experiencing some of the fastest job growth in the country, but they know they can’t rest on their laurels.

We’ll be publishing an in-depth profile of how Nashville began to integrate health considerations into their planning efforts sometime in the next few weeks. Watch this space, and sign up for our emails to be notified if you haven’t already. –Ed.

To learn from Nashville’s experiences, T4America and the Nashville MPO — through an ongoing grant from the Kresge Foundation — brought civic leaders and agency staff from Seattle, San Diego, Detroit and Portland, OR, to the Music City last week; sharing best practices and hoping to build on what the others have done.

MPO staff and advocates from Nashville, San Diego, Detroit, Portland and Seattle along with Nolensville staff and leadership during last week’s gathering in Nashville.

Meeting in the Bridge Building overlooking downtown Nashville and the Cumberland River, the group of leaders from across the country saw the rapid changes made in the downtown core to improve streetscapes and public spaces to create vibrant, welcoming places for the many families, professionals and visitors.

While Nashville proper is making significant strides, other communities around the MPO’s seven-county region are also eager to expand their options for walking, bicycling and transit.

The delegation visited the rapidly growing town of Nolensville (pop. 8,000) on the south side of the region.

Nolensville Mayor Jimmy Alexander led Transportation Choices Coalition Executive Director Rob Johnson, Upstream Public Health Policy Manager Heidi Guenin and Transportation for America Field Organizer Chris Rall along Nolensville Road. The town was recently awarded half a million dollars to construct a greenway parallel to Nolensville Road, providing a new safe and convenient route between popular destinations.

Nolensville Mayor Jimmy Alexander described the town’s ambitious goal that local leaders see as critical for their local economy and competitive advantage. “We want to make it possible for every student in Nolensville to be able to walk to school,” he told us. The town has passionately sought and secured federal, state and local funding for multi-use paths, sidewalks and greenways that will eventually link the community’s most-visited destinations: residential neighborhoods, the historic district and commercial town center, schools, Nolensville Ball Park and the Williamson County Recreation Center.

Nolensville’s early leadership in clamoring for more of the infrastructure that makes it easier to safely get around on foot or bike — and the Nashville MPO’s response in providing technical assistance, policy and funding — will help them reach their goal in just a few years time.

The tour of new, energetic thinking on transportation and community development in the area would not be complete without a visit to Casa Azafrán, a community center and home to several nonprofits that serve the thousands of recent immigrants and refugees that are settling in Nashville and helping shape its future.

Renata Soto, Executive Director of Conexión Américas, led the delegation on a tour of Casa Azafrán, including a day care center, culinary incubator, health clinic and classrooms. But since moving to their new location on busy Nolensville Pike in south Nashville two years ago, Soto has witnessed first hand the challenges of poor transportation infrastructure. She took it upon herself to get the city to install the city’s first bilingual crosswalk to allow clients and visitors to safely cross busy Nolensville Pike while welcoming non-English speakers.

During a visit to Casa Azafrán, a community center and home to nonprofits serving New Americans, Renata Soto explains the new bilingual crosswalk installed to make it safer to get to work, the bus stop and several restaurants on both sides of busy Nolensville Pike.

The signs on the new bilingual crosswalk on busy Nolensville Pike.

The promise of a new rapid bus line coming later in the year will help, but challenges remain. “There are so many high school students who could use our facilities,” Soto explained. “But they can’t get here — they’re so close, but so far away.”

This gathering last week in Middle Tennessee offered inspiration, new information and a meeting of the minds to generate new ideas and discuss how to overcome political and technical challenges in our path. Stay tuned as we report more from each of these regions over the coming months.

DOT chronicles the inspiring success story of United Streetcar

There’s been a resurgence of streetcars in the United States, with dozens of cities from Washington, D.C. to Tucson, Arizona and Cincinnati, Ohio competing each year for federal dollars to build new streetcar systems to help fill gaps in the existing transit network, bring new development to neglected corridors, and provide another travel option for folks to get from A to B.

Washington, D.C.’s new streetcars were built in Europe, because frankly, most of the expertise on building transit vehicles has been concentrated in countries other than the United States for the last few decades. But now, at least one American company has entered the market and written their own success story.

Streetcars are coming back to the United States in a big way, and United Streetcar, a company based in Portland, is taking advantage by producing Streetcars here in the United States, hiring American workers and boosting the local economy. (Ed note: we profiled United Streetcar in this 2009 post)

It’s a good reminder that our federal transportation priorities and spending have real implications for jobs and the economy here in the U.S. More money for streetcars in the transportation bill not only means better transit options for more people in our cities and communities — it also means more money flowing to companies like United Streetcar; companies that are creating jobs for Oregon residents with trickle-down effects to hundreds of other vendors and suppliers.

More money for transit means more success stories like United Streetcar.

Watch the DOT video below, and read the original post on Secretary LaHood’s blog.

Smarter transportation case study #5: Traffic signal optimization; Portland, Oregon

Portland officials improved the timing and coordination of traffic signals in 17 key intersections, resulting in lower auto emissions and less traffic.

In 2002, the Climate Trust, a Portland-based non-profit, contracted with the City of Port- land to buy offsets from a project aimed at improving traffic signals.

Naito at Night Originally uploaded by ahockley to Flickr.

Portland traffic flowing smoothly at night.

The traffic signal optimization project ensures maximum green light times for the heaviest traffic flows and allows signal cycle time to adjust based on changing demands during peak times, such as rush hour. Seventeen major arterials were identified for improved signal timing using studies on optimizing traffic flow and reducing gridlock.

“It’s like having the Internet for our transpor- tation system,” said Peter Koonce, Division Manager of Signals and Street Lighting for the City of Portland.

After the signal timing has been completed, the Climate Trust pays Portland based upon the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that will be avoided.

In the program’s first six years, more than 157,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions were prevented, the equivalent of the emissions generated from burning 17.7 million gallons of gasoline. As a result of this success, city officials extended the partnership contract through 2012 with a goal of reducing an additional 21,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The project was awarded a ‘Smart Solutions Spotlight’ from ITS America in February 2010.

For More Information: Daily Journal of Commerce, Oregon

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Editor’s Note: Our new report on smarter mobility demonstrates how existing and emerging technologies can squeeze more capacity from over-burdened highways, help commuters avoid traffic delays and expand and improve transportation options, all while saving money and creating jobs. Many of these smart transportation solutions are already fueling innovation throughout the country, through both the public and private sector. These 14 case studies from around the U.S. and the world demonstrate the community benefits smart mobility solutions are giving regions, cities, and businesses.

Read the ITS Case Study Series

Videos from last week’s Portland Streetcar unveiling

Youtube user bobrpdx has some great videos of last week’s unveiling of the made in the USA streetcar in Portland, including interviews with Rep. Pete DeFazio and Rep. Earl Blumenauer. Check out the rest of his videos for more Portland transit goodness.

In this particular video, Rep. DeFazio talks about the streetcar made locally by Oregon Iron Works with great admiration and pride: “Here’s the product. It’s an improvement on the European design, something I believe that in a very short period of time we’ll be exporting back to Europe,” he said.