2024 Active Transportation Summit Moves Oregon Forward
The Street Trust convened experts and the community with the goal of making Oregon the safest, most multimodal state in America.
In this edition: #OATS24 Recap, setting our 2025 legislative agenda, photos, and more!
The 2024 Oregon Active Transportation Summit (aka OATS), held this June at Leftbank Annex in Portland, was a resounding success, drawing together a diverse group of leaders, experts, advocates, and community members passionate about improving public and active transportation across the state. This year’s overarching theme from the main stage designed to Move Oregon Forward toward a better statewide transportation package in 2025. Expert sessions were broken out across four tracks: Future-Proofing our Transportation System, Big Ideas & Innovations, Bridging our Divides, and Safe Routes & Great Streets for All.
This year’s program included sessions on mobility for all ages and abilities, the transformative potential of community-based street transformations, advancing pedestrian and cyclist safety through infrastructure investments, and presentations and site visits on electric mobility and sustainable urban delivery, and more. Over several days, participants engaged in presentations, in-depth discussions, workshops, panels, study tours, and networking events to exchange the latest strategies and innovations to advance programs and investment for people walking, biking, rolling, and using transit in Oregon and beyond.
Kicking us off on Day One, we heard opening remarks from City of Portland Bureau of Transportation Director Millicent Williams, who thanked active transportation advocates for helping pass the city’s recent renewal of a 10 cent per gallon gas tax to support safe, complete streets. Up next, Oregon Transportation Commissioner Alicia Chapman shared her statewide perspective, and made clear her commitment to investments in safe streets and a complete, multimodal system. She also made the connection between local communities and the federal government, deftly moderating a plenary highlighting the role of community leadership from Albina Vision Trust in securing the largest Reconnecting Communities grant in the nation from the Biden Administration.
But perhaps most compelling in setting the tone for this year’s conversation was the powerful and sobering Keynote Address from Multnomah County Health Department Chronic Disease Prevention & Health Promotion Director Charlene McGee. She provided hard data and real talk about the epidemic of traffic violence and why we need to adopt a public health approach with a focus on racial equity first if we hope to achieve safer streets for all. Traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in Multnomah County and our current investment levels reflect and exacerbate racial disparities in our community. See her presentation slides here.
She was joined by a high “scholar” through the REACH Public Health and Civic Literacy Academy (PHCLA) who worked on a photovoice project about the direct impacts of traffic violence in her community, and who plans to carry on this important work through her studies in epidemiology at Spelman College this fall.
Setting Oregon’s Active Transportation Agenda for 2025 and beyond
As you may have read in OPB this week, Oregon’s transportation system is due for an overhaul next year. Over the years, the Oregon Active Transportation Summit has been a catalytic event aligning leaders, introducing solutions, devising strategies, and powering collaboration across communities and sectors.
This year, our primary goals in convening were educating and empowering our community to advance major public and active transportation investments through a package in Salem in the 2025 Legislative Session. As Oregon considers changing how we fund our transportation system, we need to ensure that every dollar delivers on our climate and safety goals while expanding well-maintained, sustainable transportation for all.
At The Street Trust, we know that ensuring adequate funding for a complete, safe multimodal system is inevitably political, and is going to require all of us working together to pass forward-thinking legislation that advances racial equity and benefits both rural and urban communities. As hard as it going to be to pull this off in 2025, we belive that transportation can be a uniter rather than a divider. and that our future policies and investments can serve as a bipartisan bridge despite the contentious political landscape in which we are operating. You might remember that we started this future of transportation funding conversation at last year’s summit. This year, we dove deeper and emerged toward common ground solutions.
On Day One of the summit, Toole Design’s Portland Office Director Talia Jacobsen moderated a deeply educational yet somehow entertaining plenary discussion on how we got into his transportation funding mess in Oregon… and the ways we might start digging our way out of it. In addition to pulling insight from city, county, regional, and state experts, Jacobsen’s audience polls proved popular and insightful, crowdsourcing answers to questions including, “What’s the most meaningful state funding change we could make in the next decade?” and “How do we build public support in Oregon for funding transportation?”
You can read all of the audience replies here. [PDF]
On Day Two, The Street Trust Board Chair Thomas Le Ngo convened us with the mandate of putting our heads together to figure out where we go from here. He advised that with a focus on equitable outcomes, will can overcome the political gridlock that ignores our most urgent needs, costs us time and money stuck wihout safe travel options, and threatens the lives and livelihoods of everyone who depends on our streets - especially BIPOC and low-income communities. He reminded us that the hundreds of attendees in the room demonstrate the extent to which we are poised in the 2025 Oregon Legislative Session to win transformative policy and major investments that save lives, reduce barriers, and expand opportunities to the people and neighborhoods our current system neglects - but only if we can work together across our differences.
Metro Councilor Juan Carlos Gonzalez took the challenge to attendees a step further, setting a bold agenda for greater Portland region, where he chairs the powerful Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation (JPACT) at Metro.
His comments were too inspiring for us to paraphrase and too important for us to condense, so we quote him at length:
We are at the Oregon Active Transportation Summit because we believe everyone deserves safe and affordable mobility regardless of where they live or where they come from. Our mission is to ensure our legislative champions have our support to pursue revenue reform and overhaul the gas tax; to secure sustainable funding that supports transit agencies, cities and counties; and to cultivate a new generation of transportation leaders.
There’s no secret that every soul in this room wants to do the right thing and put the money into the projects that make our system safer, more equitable, more accessible. But we’re facing the difficult reality that many of our local transportation budgets have gone off a cliff. The money is just not there right now. This upcoming 2025 session is going to be our first real opportunity to take a swing at this….
It’s time to move beyond a culture of disinvestment. We need to dream big and build the appetite to just go for it… We need to mobilize the political will with one unified voice to support our legislators and decision-makers and local business to develop new revenue tools that can stand the test of time. But we can’t just fill gaps at the state, we need to also empower our communities to find ways to create local funding for transit and safe streets and local transportation bureaus to fulfill what our communities have asked for. There also comes a point where a single project can’t fix an entire system. We need to take a holistic approach by getting good at building big projects again and building them regularly, so that we don’t feel like we need to put all our eggs in one basket and squabble over the details. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. And finally, we’ve gotten too comfortable riding the coattails of our past active transportation visionaries and our past efforts.
Following a round of applause, Gonzalez passed the baton to Co-Chair of Oregon’s Joint Transportation Committee and key architect of the 2025 Transportation Package, Oregon State Representative Susan McLain, who heartily agreed with his remarks and expanded upon them with her vision for the future. Facing a gargantuan task ahead, she enlisted the support of attendees in helping her put safety first, investing in Great Streets and Safe Routes for all, reducing our vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and protecting our environment for future generations. She stressed that we must update and diversify how we fund our transportation system as the gas tax declines and major project funding remains uncertain. She stressed that our funding solutions must deliver real value for our dollars, and the costs of the system need to be distributed equitably across modes and communities. It was an honor and a privilege to have Rep. McLain in attendance to collaborate with our community and rally us for the hard work we must do together in the coming year.
Next up on this all-star roster was 2024 OATS Keynote Speaker Minnesota State Representative Larry Kraft, who traveled to Oregon to share lessons with us from his state’s groundbreaking transportation package in 2023. He shared inspiring stories about community-based organizations aligning to win a transportation future. Key lessons he shared included making sure the policies were ready to go pre-session, and seizing the moment of Democratic leadership across branches (ahem, Oregon) to win a transformative package. Since this year’s OATS was in-person, there’s no video recording, so we’re sharing Rep. Kraft’s slide deck and our takeaways from his lecture with you:
Indexed their gas tax to inflation
Raised registration fees (1.54% of MSRP) and sales tax on cars (6.875%)
Innovated a new delivery fee to pay for streets ($0.50 on deliveries over $100)
Local 3/4 cent sales tax for Minneapolis/St. Paul to generate $550-624M for transportation
Passed GHG and VMT bill to avoid inducing demand through highway projects and created GHG impact mitigation working group; continuing to refine in subsequent session
Not mentioned? Road user charge (aka VMT fee), which panelists in the following plenary stressed as being essential to Oregon’s future
Following his talk, Reps. McLain and Kraft sat down with Burgin Utaski, The Street Trust’s Program Impact Manager, to share lessons, strategize, and field a few audience questions about getting yes on innovative policy fixes and funding mechanisms, including the challenges of passing new taxes and fees for transportation.
Following Rep. Kraft’s rousing presenting (yes, there were whoops of glee about transportation funding mechanisms), Moderator Andrew Theen, Politics and Government Editor at Oregon Public Broadcasting, invited key Oregon stakeholders from across modes and jurisdictions including cities, regions, ports, active transportation, and electric cars, to talk about their priorites for a statewide package in 2025. He tasked panelists with describing a functioning transportation system and… how then explaining how we should pay for it.
Good governance models, equitable engagement, and cross-sector collaboration emerged as a top solutions to navigating sometimes competing priorities in an increasingly challenging fiscal landscape. We heard from Metro Councilor Ashton Simpson about the importance of funding basics like sidewalks and trails, while The Street Trust’s Sarah Iannarone talked about fully funding safety programs and infrastructure such as Safe Routes to School and Great Streets for all Oregonians. Miles Pengilly of TriMet and the Oregon Transit Association made the economic development case for increasing funding for transit in communities statewide and Beaverton City Councilor Kevin Teater insisted that the current state highway fund distribution formula also known as “the 50-30-20 split” with the State receiving 50%, Counties receiving 30%, and the balance going to Cities 20%, must be maintained across new revenue streams so that cities and counties - whose budgets are also facing fiscal cliffs - can maintain their basic operations and maintenance. Emerald Bogue, Port of Portland, highlighted the importance of keeping freight moving for the regional economy, but also called for a strategic approach to the sometime daunting work of transitioning off the fossil-fuel based funding system to a road user charge (aka VMT fee) based-system. Bill Meyer, Oregon Electric Vehicle Association reminded us of the importance of electricfying our passenger fleet, but also gave a nod to bicycles as the original low-carbon mode. He emphasized the need to invest in safe infrastracture to separate modes of various weights and sizes.
Overall the messages were clear: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and don’t let cynicism foster inertia. Our transition off the gas tax won’t happen overnight, but with a clear plan and coordinated effort we can get a foundational transportation package built and passed into law in 2025. Once on solid footing, we can keep advancing the plan each biennium until the transition is complete.
By Friday, our hearts and notebooks were full but our brains were growing a bit tired, so we headed out into the field for active learning and R&R via mobile workshops and study tours around the Metro region including a bike tour of PBOT’s Zero-Emission Delivery Zone with B-Line Urban Delivery, a transit tour to Tigard’s Power to the Pedal e-bike share pilot, a forest bathing walk with Alta Planning + Design, and a behind the scenes visit to TriMet’s zero-emission bus operations facility on Powell Blvd. And - in our longstanding trasition - the event wrapped up with the Annual OATS Bike Ride led by PBOT and Kittelson, exploring Portland’s newest projects and neighborhood greenways.
The Street Trust’s Commitment to Safe Routes for All
You may have noticed that each year, The Street Trust remains laser focused on ensuring complete streets and safe routes for all Oregonians. That’s why we design our annual OATS program with a unique Safe Routes track which includes dedicated Safe Routes to Schools (SRTS) meeting space and sessions each day of the conference, a networking reception for SRTS practitioners, and the Safe Routes Annual Meeting. The Safe Routes breakout sessions at the #OATS24 were packed to capacity with topics covering suburban and rural programs, program innovations, equity tools, funding opportunities, and more.
On Friday, three-dozen practitioners came together from across Oregon gathered at their annual meeting to build community, expand networks, and exchange lessons gleaned from their hard work throughout the previous year. They had the chance to submit their burning topics to be discussed including tips for getting buy-in from school districts, creating and supporting high school programs, and the always popular walking school buses!
Safe Routes practitioners are often the only people working on active transportation in their schools so bringing this learning community together to share knowledge and grow relationships reverberates across Oregon, supporting strong and healthy schools for students, families, and staff in the years ahead.
To stay up to date with Oregon Safe Routes to Schools sign up for their mailing list at oregonsaferoutes.org.
There may not be a “U” in OATS but there is no OATS without YOU - thank you!
If you’ve read this far, you probably understand the significant impact that the 2024 Oregon Active Transportation Summit had in Moving Oregon Forward toward a better transportation package in 2025. Now ask yourself: What if we had not convened this year? What if there could be no OATS in 2025? Each year, The Street Trust board and staff of rise to challenge and muster the resources for this event so you never have to answer those questions.
Here’s #OATS24 by the numbers:
Hundreds of attendees take time out of their busy schedules and money out of their budgets to participate - thank you for leaving your desks to join us in person in Portland this year! Over 300 participants traveled from around the country representing 25 sectors including biggies like engineering, government, and transportation, but also many complementary sectors such as construction, manufacturing, and real estate.
We had a robust 3 days of programming featuring 90 presenters made possible by 1000s of hours put in by event staff, expert presenters and moderators, community partners, volunteers, and our Steering Committee who work year-round to design, develop, implement, and improve this critical community event - thank you for your generous contribution to community and movement building!
For the over $75,000 generously contributed by our sponsors - we are grateful. Sponsorships keep OATS ticket costs below market rate for attendees and plenty of scholarships available year after year.
Together, we are growing our collective influence and impact, steering policies, programs, and investments toward the complete, safe, low-carbon, multimodal transportation system that we know contributes to equity in access, opportunity, health, and prosperity for people and communities across Oregon.
In the year ahead, we must work together to ensure that Oregon’s 2025 Transportation Package prioritizes investments in safety, accessibility, equity, and climate justice for all Oregonians regardless of mode or zip code. Our intensive statewide information sharing will help move the needle in a just, people-centered direction. It is our responsibility to uplift to decision-makers the lessons we learned at this year’s OATS and translate them into initiatives that prioritize complete and safe streets for all users.
Want to see more 2024 OATS photos? Visit our online gallery!
(Please note: OATS photos © 2024 by The Street Trust is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0 - please credit our work and use for the common good - thank you!)
Thank you to the #OATS24 Steering Committee: Adam Argo, Alan Thompson, Andrea Breault, Annadiana Johnson, Anouksha Gardner, Cameron Bennett. Clint Culpepper, Dave Roth, Emily Mannisto-Meyers, Eric Fosgard, Jordan Del Valle Tonoian, Lisa Strader, Marne Duke, Mary Lee Turner, Max Nonnamaker, Michael Walker, Nick Gross, Phillip Ross, Rachel Haukkala, Renata Tirta, Reza Farhoodi, Sarah Pullman, Shane Rhodes, Suzanne Carlson
