The Structure of Russian History: Interpretive Essays 0987654321, 0987654322, 9780987654328

Table of contents :
Front Cover
About Island Press
Subscribe
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Why Transportation Planning and Engineering Need a Paradigm Shift
Chapter 2: The Evolution of Approaches to Transportation Engineering and Planning
Chapter 3: Addressing the Legacy of Racist Transportation and Housing Policy
Chapter 4: Getting Out of Our Silos
Chapter 5: The Community Solutions–Based Approach in Practice
Chapter 6: Building Communities of People’s Dreams
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Index

Citation preview

ROADWAYS for PEOPLE Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering

LY N N P E T E R S O N with Elizabeth Doerr

Foreword by Janette Sadik-Khan

Island Press’s mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems. Click here to get our newsletter for the latest news on authors, events, and free book giveaways.

Roadways for People

Roadways for People Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering

Lynn Peterson

With Elizabeth Doerr

© 2022 Lynn Peterson All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932265 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: Community benefits agreement, community engagement, community solutions–based approach, context-sensitive design (CSD), context-sensitive solutions (CSS), demand management, gentrification, least-cost planning, performance-based Practical Design, plangineer, racial equity, transportation engineering, transportation planning, urban renewal

In loving memory of John Fregonese

Stand in the place where you live Now face north Think about direction Wonder why you haven’t before Now stand in the place where you work Now face west Think about the place where you live Wonder why you haven’t before —R.E.M., “Stand”

Contents

Foreword by Janette Sadik-Khan xi

Preface xvii Acknowledgments xxv Chapter 1: Why Transportation Planning and



Engineering Need a Paradigm Shift 1



Transportation Engineering and Planning

27



Transportation and Housing Policy

63

Chapter 2: The Evolution of Approaches to Chapter 3: Addressing the Legacy of Racist Chapter 4: Getting Out of Our Silos

97



121

Chapter 5: The Community Solutions–Based Approach in Practice

Chapter 6: Building Communities of People’s Dreams

191

Notes

201

About the Author

229

Bibliography Index



217 231

Foreword

By Janette Sadik-Khan

T

he year 2020 said the quiet parts about transportation out loud: transportation policy is health, economic, environmental, and equity policy. The pandemic, economic shocks, and racial justice protests that convulsed the United States exposed long-standing structural inequalities and challenged cities to do better. While millions of office workers transitioned to Zooming from kitchen tables, workers in the face-to-face economy still had to travel long distances, often by public transportation, to reach jobs in medical offices and in warehouses and grocery stores so food and supply chains didn’t break. Many public transportation operators slashed service in the face of a nationwide 79 percent drop in passengers, squeezing transit-dependent workers and leaving swaths of cities without reliable and affordable access to shopping, COVID-19 testing, or health care. While the pandemic was a once-in-a-century development, the inequality of transportation access was anything but. In American cities from New York to Chicago to Houston to Los Angeles, non-White and less affluent neighborhoods have historically been more likely to have the fewest transportation choices; more likely to have mobility obstacles to reaching jobs, schools, and opportunities; and more likely to be exposed to pollution and the danger of vehicles speeding on uncrossable roads. Government policy for many years has reinforced this, building highways through historically Black and Brown neighborhoods, displacing communities and cutting them off from one another. In the wake of the events of 2020, transportation leaders must view their obligation to meet the mobility needs of their cities within this greater context, with a duty to identify and reverse historical patterns of transportation disinvestment and injustice. What is accepted and what is ignored in the physical design of cities reinforces (and to some extent defines) the spectrum of opportunities xi

xii    Foreword

in the lives of the multitudes who live in cities. A multimillion-dollar bridge allowing office workers to drive five miles downtown is meaningless for a carless resident trying to reach her job at the supermarket two neighborhoods in the opposite direction—a trip that may be an unwalkable, unbikeable, two-bus odyssey. A city where almost every trip, whether to work, school, or shopping or to see family, can’t be completed without a car commits residents to the cost of vehicle ownership and reinforces the lack of community and physical activity. City planners must also recognize that the process is the project. It isn’t a necessary evil or a means to an end. Good projects can fail when community residents distrust the people who proposed them or feel their input was ignored. In many cities, the review process for public projects is fraught with fights over agency—who ultimately does and doesn’t have the right to make decisions for a community. In the archetypal public meeting room, be it an elementary school assembly room or a public meeting hall, there’s a cadre of public officials armed with PowerPoint presentations, flip charts, and artistic renderings that depict happy people enjoying the proposed project. Officials invoke a litany of statistics and assertions that this proposal—a new residential development, a library or halfway house, a minor traffic change—is the best solution, perhaps the only one, and that any alternative would come only with delay and great expense. Observing this from below the dais are community members who do not recognize these presenters and do not understand how the proposal at issue came to top the agenda while long-standing neighborhood concerns are ignored. It’s likely that the most important community voices aren’t even in the room: Who even knows the meeting is happening, and who has time to travel across town on a school or work night to wait patiently for a chance to make a few seconds of comment about something that seems like a done deal? I titled my book for the conflict sparked when these two misaligned forces meet Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution. Too often, planners plan too big, starting with a too-large proposal and viewing public outreach as a perfunctory step, assuming that community residents will oppose any proposal and not doing enough to address skepticism. On the other side are neighborhoods that think too small,

Foreword  

  xiii

reflexively rejecting even modest changes to the status quo and then looking for reasons to affirm their decision. Both cases are symptomatic of long-term disengagement and a lack of shared vision and common language. The lesson from this isn’t to do nothing, for planners to ignore local concerns, or for residents to oppose projects whenever they feel slighted. The lesson is to begin the process by building a relationship, by listening and communicating to build trust and shared purpose. This process doesn’t have to begin with a big transportation idea but can start with a simple question: What is the problem in your neighborhood that you want to solve? For idealistic planners committed to using their power to help improve the lives of city residents, it’s not enough to have their heart in the right place or to resolve to cut red tape. Any commitment to action is primarily a commitment to community openness, transparency, and reciprocity—to learn from the expertise of the people for whom they are working. Residents in a neighborhood know their communities best, and while they may not have all the answers, if you help, you may be able to help them make the best decisions. As New York City’s transportation commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in my work with mayors around the world through Bloomberg Associates, and as chair of the largest consortium of transportation leaders through the National Association of City Transportation Officials, I have seen too many good projects suffer from a lack of community connection with the resulting product. Meanwhile, bad projects—like wasteful highway construction and archaic roadway rehabilitations—are rubber-stamped, eating up the vast majority of scarce resources while reinforcing traffic congestion and car domination of most city space. We broke that cycle in New York City, creating many projects across the city quickly by using provisional materials such as paint, planters, and stone blocks left over from bridge projects. Offering residents projects that they could see, touch, and feel using only easy-to-remove materials reduced anxiety and won us the leeway to try out plazas and bike lanes on a demonstration basis. Our outreach teams reversed the traditional community meeting model, facilitating tabletop discussions where stakeholders could speak face-to-face with city officials instead

xiv    Foreword

of being lectured to. This also allowed everyone in the room to be heard, not just those with the strongest opinions and the loudest voices. The data and operation of our initial projects in New York City neighborhoods helped convince communities to build these projects with permanent materials such as pavers, benches, trees, and barrier protection—and inspired other neighborhood residents to seek similar transformations. After all, who wants to be left out of a valued community benefit that they see other neighborhoods enjoying? This virtuous cycle has brought more than seventy plazas to all five city boroughs, including opening Broadway through Times Square to pedestrians, creating nearly four hundred miles of bike lanes and the nation’s largest bike-share system, implementing seven rapid bus routes, and building the safest streets in a century, with the fewest traffic deaths. This doesn’t mean there was unanimous support and that everyone was happy with the changes, though broad majorities supported them. But it revealed that most people were united in their dislike of the status quo and that if you give people a choice, they will choose better streets. Deferring to community knowledge doesn’t mean granting veto power to obstructionists. Reflexive not-in-my-backyard attitudes have stymied plans to address traffic congestion, traffic safety, and environmental racism. Many project opponents claim that projects would actually worsen or cause the very problems that they are designed to solve—affordable housing would bring undesirable people to neighborhoods, bike lanes would prompt pollution by reducing car lanes. While agreement is difficult to achieve, governments can’t just give up in the face of misinformation or unsupported fears, and they must enlist communities in a bias toward action. The greatest community power isn’t the ability to say no and halt an unwanted project. It is the power to say yes that is the highest of civic virtues. It is the power of communities to apply their insights to frame the problem and then move toward designing and developing the solution. It’s the power of shared ownership when the project is complete and neighbors recognize it as a product of their efforts. It is the power of understanding what the possibilities are and knowing what to ask for that transforms neighborhoods and the people who live within them.

Foreword  

  xv

On the other side of the room, the highest civic virtue for city planners isn’t to deliver a perfect proposal or to succeed in steering a worthy project to completion over community opposition. The greatest civic virtue for planners is to expand the scope of the street—what both residents and city officials alike conceive as possible. In recent years, there’s been a revolution in cities to reclaim roadways from cars to allow people to walk and bike and to clear the way for buses, using designs in use in cities such as New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, but also increasingly in cardominated metropolises such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Austin, and Salt Lake City. There is still a long way to go before American cities can truly become walkable, bikeable, and transit friendly again, but there have never been more powerful examples to argue for their expansion. We’re also seeing more examples than ever of converting legacy infrastructure and reallocating public space to connect communities—a twenty-seven-mile greenway in progress in Detroit, the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, the surge of investment along Atlanta’s BeltLine, an entire bridge across the Willamette River in Portland devoted to transit, walkers, and bike riders. We must now bring the same principles of transformative design for our cities toward reimagining community engagement based on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and rebuilding of trust. There are few authorities as equipped to achieve this as Lynn Peterson. This book distills her thirty-year career, her personal journey, and the power of examples from transportation professionals and public servants across the country working toward a community solutions–based approach. This expertise spans decades and also her roles in city, metro, county, state, and national positions of influence to make transportation work for the sake of people. If planners dare to change their cities, and if they intend to fulfill their promises to reverse structural inequalities, then the public’s projects and processes must be brought in line with principles of collaboration, justice, and equity. They can start not with a big idea but with a question and with the deep experience reflected in these pages.

Preface

W

ho do you consider to be within your close circle of trusted friends, family, and colleagues? For many of us, that circle has probably changed as we’ve grown up. We begin our childhood with circles of parents, family, friends—typically the community in which our parents raise us. Then, in school, our circle expands a bit more to include classmates and teachers. When we enter the workforce, our circle includes colleagues, supervisors, and mentors. Our personal adult circles include friends and our children’s friends and their families. In those early days, our close circle is largely out of our control. And often it’s within the close circle of childhood that we learn the cultural norms of our community. It’s where we develop place-specific and culturally specific language based on where we live, who our parents are, and the community within which we are raised. It is the foundation on which we build our worldview. But as we grow up, we begin to have more control over those circles. We have opportunities to expand our lens in either work or higher education. What we know about the world evolves. And in our professions, even though we might seem to have control over our circles, that evolution still takes place within the confines of a profession combined with lived experiences. I believe that even though we have control over our circles and our learning as we grow older, we often let the environments we put ourselves into do the work for us. I think we can do more to break out of what the cultural norms have taught us and do things differently in our professions. This is something I’ve realized throughout my profession and continue to grow into. My lived experience while growing up centered on small-city life near a large, diverse public university and dairy farms in rural Wisconsin. It was a place where the number of generations of farmers in one’s family was valued as highly as pursuit of a secondary education. xvii

xviii    Preface

The generations of farmers in your family acknowledged the intrinsic merits of working with the land. It was the land ethic and the family of public servants I grew up with, in fact, that led me to civil engineering. I chose the career at the ripe old age of twelve because it sounded cool to build things. As I grew up and started my career, the way I saw my work was influenced by Wisconsin land conservation values, guided by Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, specifically these words from A Sand County Almanac: A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.1

However, as I pursued my career, I found that my chosen profession seemed to disregard the idea of a land ethic in deference to gold standard engineering guidelines that tended to remain static and relied on numbers and assumptions. And the performance metrics used to measure narrowly defined outcomes did not always consider the people, the land, and the context. Engineers like to solve problems. We are presumably given tools to help solve those problems. Many of those tools are mathematical. Many of them simply involve defining the outcome we want and then working backward to find out how to get that outcome. The problem is that we each have an understanding in our head of what we think the problem is. And we define that from our own lived experience rather than the experiences of the people whose problem we want to solve. At the beginning of my career, I didn’t often question the idea of these guidelines despite feeling conflicted by the approach. In the mid1990s, when I was confronted with a particularly contentious highway project from Madison, Wisconsin to the Wisconsin Dells (which I discuss more in chapter 2) that seemed to upend land conservation efforts and conscious development practices and severely impact the region’s farmers’ businesses and way of life, I couldn’t continue in that mode.

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  xix

I didn’t yet have the framework or terminology to make it better, but I knew enough that I didn’t want to be a part of the problem. But then, in 1997, I heard Walter Kulash speak at the third annual RailVolution conference in St. Louis. He was a consultant traffic engineer for the advocacy coalition working to decrease the impacts of the project (the very one I had left) on farming, environment, and urban sprawl. Having seen the same problems that drove me to decline the project, Kulash seemingly hit on a different approach that I hadn’t yet understood. His presentation, “Alternatives to Roadways as Usual,” described how he looked beyond the initial state proposal to expand the roadway and design it to a more modern highway design speed of 75 miles per hour (with the intent to post the speed at 55 or 60 mph) and instead found a more community-inclusive approach that created a solution that almost everyone could be happy with while achieving the intended goal of creating a safer roadway. He showed that the process of understanding the safety problem went beyond the assumption that design speed must be exactly the same for every similar roadway type, no matter the context. Unfortunately, the State Department of Transportation didn’t take his recommendations and instead proceeded with its plan. I’ll go into more detail about this project in chapter 2. Hearing his perspectives, though, was illuminating for me. I was fairly fresh in my career, and the context-sensitive approach he spoke about, quite frankly, blew my mind. Before seeing Kulash’s presentation, I knew there should be other ways to achieve engineering and community outcomes at the same time, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. Part of that was because my engineering education didn’t prepare me to think outside of the stated guidelines. For example, I was taught as a young engineer how to determine the speed to be displayed on an advisory sign for a curve. In what is called the “ball-bank indicator test,” a technician drives through the curve with a device on the dashboard that indicates “comfortable” or “uncomfortable” in relation to speed, friction of pavement and tires, and the level of comfort a passenger would experience at certain speeds and turns. The test requires driving along the roadway segment several times at increasing speeds to determine the most “comfortable” and safe speed for a sedan.

xx    Preface

Until recently, the definition of “comfortable” relied on a really old assumption related to the friction between a macadam road and a Ford Model T tire, the driver’s height above the roadway (it is much lower now), and the wheel spacing of the vehicle. Additionally, although the transportation field is working to modernize the caution signs, we’re doing so on the basis of very outdated assumptions. The risk is that when people no longer find the signs useful, they will stop paying attention. More important, the lag in challenging the effectiveness of the highway signs highlights how one assumption that was not updated or challenged for more than sixty years can affect the user’s perception of usefulness of the information being provided, in this case the posted speed. It made me wonder: How many other assumptions need to be challenged annually on the basis of new research? This is how I realized that my engineering education was only the beginning of a journey of learning. I’ve come to see that having a professional license does not mean that you know all or you know better. It says that you know a good amount about the fundamentals of materials science, physics, and math. And I worry that in our field of perceived concreteness of facts, we aren’t expanding our knowledge from our real-world applications sufficiently and updating old assumptions fast enough. Only in the past fifteen years has the field started collecting and researching transportation safety data. Earlier interpretations of data seemed to assume that all roads should be high-speed, and that meant the higher the speed of a roadway, the less access and the fewer multimodal transportation options it should have in order to be defined as safe. While it is true that higher speeds are not safe for multimodal environments, the premise fails to bring in the context. This assumption would be applied to a vibrant downtown main street in the same way it would be to a six-lane highway. The nuance was ignored. However, more recently, organizations such as the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), and the Institute of

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Transportation Engineers (ITE) have studied and researched safety information and how to make decisions that are community led. However, engineering professionals aren’t consistently being trained to use the new data. While some training is taking place inside professional organizations, the information is dispersed among reports by the Transportation Research Board’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program and papers by the ITE. Entry-level engineers are still being trained by existing staff relying on sixty- to seventy-year-old assumptions and ways of doing business. We will never be able to apply or think through new methodologies and their applications if we don’t understand the foundational ways to make decisions as individual engineers or as a community. On top of the limits to our training that have led to professional silos, transportation professionals also find themselves in racial and economic silos. To be frank, planners and transportation engineers do not accurately represent the communities they serve. Given that 87 percent of planners2 and 80.3 percent of civil engineers3 in the United States are White (according to the 2013 Census), their lived experiences do not give most of them the tools to accurately understand and define solutions for Black and Brown communities. While my lived experience taught me about the land ethic in the context of a White rural farming community, I started to realize I had large gaps in my understanding of communities of people who didn’t look like me. As a White woman, I’ve never experienced the systemic racism inherent in the planning process. My family was never redlined out of neighborhoods by city zoning, realtors, or deeds to properties not allowing a sale to anyone of color. My family was never rejected outright for a loan because of the color of our skin. And my family never experienced racial bias in education or in hiring practices. Nor have I ever experienced racial profiling by a police officer or feared for my life when being pulled over. When we moved from Madison, Wisconsin (population 250,000 at the time), to Portland, Oregon (over a million people in the Metro region), we realized we were not moving to a more diverse community; rather, it was less so. Portland is one of the Whitest big cities in America.4 We missed the diversity of discussions and the diversity within

xxii    Preface

our friend group. We later moved to Lake Oswego in the Portland region. At the time, we didn’t know about the racist roots on which the city was founded—it was an “exclusive” high-end community that disallowed the sale of land to any person of color through limited golf course access, restricted lake access, and private land deeds. I also didn’t know or understand Oregon’s founding on White supremacist values, with the exclusion of Black people written into the original state constitution.5 I learned all of that when I was elected to the Lake Oswego City Council with a mission to bring more diversity to the city through affordable housing for students, people who worked in the community but couldn’t live there, and families that wished for their kids to attend the Lake Oswego school system but couldn’t afford to own or rent a house there. That turned out to be an uphill battle. It’s one I have never stopped fighting, but my realization of inequities grew deeper and deeper as I waded into the issues related to contracting with businesses owned by people of color, the barriers to involvement at every level of government, and the barriers to success that banks, schools, and health-care systems put up on the basis of self-fulfilling assumptions about the ability of a person of color to succeed. Because I’m White, I didn’t experience the relentless daily onslaught of racism—on both small and large scales—that people of color who lived in the region did. I had to see it in action through the eyes of the people with whom I worked. And because I’m White, I know I’m never going to fully understand it. It’s a gap in my knowledge and experience that I must always acknowledge in my work and daily life. For this reason, diverse representation in the field is essential to ensure that transportation professionals have the lived experiences of the communities they serve. But above that, the field as a whole needs to integrate equity and inclusion as a part of practice by utilizing a racial equity framework when considering projects, during the process, and as they engage with the community. This involves deep listening to what a community needs, particularly communities that are majority Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Listening involves actually hearing what community members’ challenges are and what they want and need for a livable, vibrant community. What we should

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not do is tell them what they need purely on the basis of technical knowledge. To do this, modern engineers, planners, and transportation professionals—who are mostly White—have a responsibility to learn, understand, and reckon with their roles as White people making decisions for diverse communities. And from that learning, they need to work differently from the way they might have been trained in school. All of this requires a substantial paradigm shift in the way we do our work. Historical racism in planning and an increasing number of environmental crises—devastating wildfires, frequent and forceful hurricanes, COVID-19—have shown us in stark detail the need to do things differently. But we don’t have to start from scratch. We can build on what we already know, tapping into people and professions to collaborate with, and we can continue to learn and grow. The education I received in school was only the beginning of a journey of learning. The professional license is the beginning of the process to become exceptional in our career. We need to recognize that we are all on a journey of learning. If your mindset is that you always want to learn more and challenge assumptions, then you will grow in your ability to increase your curiosity about what factors drive things in each community—from historical places and events to people who are thought leaders in their community, to how what you say and how you say it will be perceived on the basis of community cultural norms. This book is written in the spirit of that lifelong journey of growth that we are all on.

Acknowledgments

I

would not have been able to complete the task of writing a book without a great many people acting as guiding stars. An amazing number of people contributed to the lessons learned that I have cataloged throughout this book. There are people whom I have watched from afar and learned a better way to do this important work. And there are people who contributed directly to this book. So many angels have graced my life who were willing to share their lived experience, push me, provide another perspective, and bring me along on their journey. One person with whom I wish I could share this book is the late John Fregonese. His excitement in building communities through community engagement was a most inspiring thing to witness. He has inspired thought leaders, elected officials, citizens, public servants, and consultants to see how they could play vital roles in shaping their communities as a team, leaning on one another for lived experience and professional expertise. In my work in Oregon and Washington, I have worked with a great many people who do the hard work on the ground and from whom I continue to learn every day. In Oregon, those people are Rukayiah Adams, Tammy Baney, Keith Bartholomew, Margi Bradway, Karen Buehrig, April Christensen, Andrew Cotugno, Grace Crunican, Dick Feeney, Patty Fink, the late John Fregonese, Elissa Gertler, Cam Gilmour, Rick Gustafson, Judie Hammerstad, Fred Hansen, Sue Kiel, Wayne Kittelson, Kim Knox, Neil MacFarlane, Paul Morris, Brian Newman, Bob Stacey, and Beth Wemple. In Washington, those people are Nancy Boyd, Alison Camden, Megan Cotton, Lars Erickson, Bobby Forch, Hilary Franz, Ollie Garret, Regina Glenn, Ron Judd, Linea Laird, John Milton, Amy Scarton, Joby Shimomura, Katy Taylor, and Todd Trepanier. And nationwide, they are Gabe Klein, Janette Sadik-Khan, and xxv

xxvi    Acknowledgments

Jeffrey Tumlin. An extra thank-you to Janette for contributing the foreword to this book and for inspiring city after city (and now state after state) to take on the challenges of a growing nation with vision, courage, and the knowledge that transportation decisions are to be made with community in mind and with data to back them up. A great many people gave life to this book by showcasing examples around the country that push the boundaries. They are guided by doing what is right for the people in the communities they live and work in, and they are showing how we can do this work in a better and more inclusive way. These people sat for interviews, and many of their voices are heard throughout this book: Carlos Braceras of the Utah Department of Transportation, Brian Ray, Beth Osborne of Transportation for America, Nick Stamatiadis of the University of Kentucky, Lucy Gibson of Toole Design, Ed Sniffen of the Hawaii Department of Transportation, Roger Millar of the Washington State Department of Transportation, Amanda Leahy of Kittelson & Associates, Hillary Isebrands of the Federal Highway Administration, Susie Hufstader of Fehr & Peers, and Dara Baldwin of the Center for Disability Rights. I am so grateful to Walter Kulash, not only for sitting for an interview for this book but also for inspiring me to think outside the outdated guidelines I was taught in engineering school. My coauthor, Elizabeth Doerr, and I were keen to bring in examples that showcased how transportation professionals and advocates were doing the work around the country, and an incredible cadre of people helped us do that. I have immense appreciation for Kris Strickler from the Oregon Department of Transportation, who sat for interviews and provided honest and open feedback. His commitment to doing what is right and helping to turn Portland’s I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project around is admirable. I am grateful that he is at the helm of the organization and that he was willing to talk about such a touchy local subject with us. At Oregon Metro, I am grateful for the contributions of Tyler Frisbee, Sebrina Owens-Wilson, and Reed Broderson. I am proud of their work and the racial equity framework within Metro, and the elements discussed in chapter 3 showcase the best of what a government organization can be. Thank you to Tyler and Sebrina for also reading iterations of the chapter as we drafted.

Acknowledgments     xxvii

At Eagle County government in Colorado, I am so grateful to Angelo Fernandez, Morgan Beryl, and Brandon Williams for showcasing the importance of collaboration among colleagues to do the best that we can. Angelo and Brandon reviewed and provided feedback on drafts of chapter 4 and helped make it better. Although Angelo and Morgan are no longer with Eagle County, they no doubt are bringing their amazing spirit of collaboration to their colleagues across the country. In Baltimore, Veronica McBeth, who worked with us throughout the writing of the book, knew exactly which project to showcase in chapter 5, and we are so grateful for her contributions. Thank you to Odessa Phillip and Baltimore City Council president Nick Mosby for sharing their insights. For the Livable Claiborne Communities example in New Orleans, I am grateful to Yolanda Takesian for spending so much time in interviews and reviewing various drafts of chapter 5. Thank you to all of the people who contributed to the chapter, including Bill Gilchrist, formerly with the City of New Orleans; Austin Allen of DesignJones; Vaughn Fauria of NewCorp; and Judith Williams Dangerfield of the Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation and Metro-Source. I owe a huge additional debt of gratitude to Veronica McBeth. She brought her experience as a planner and her work in environmental justice as it relates to transportation to our book and provided feedback and read drafts along the way, as well as contributing to the background information on the B&P Tunnel Project. I could not be more thankful for her insights and the time she spent to make this book the best it can be. A big thank-you to Alyssa Dennis for the illustrations. I had a vision of how I wanted this book to look and feel, and Alyssa nailed it. I also want to thank Abigail Doerr for being an amazing transportation advocate, running for office, and introducing me to her fabulous sister, Elizabeth Doerr, who cowrote this book with me. Elizabeth Doerr was essential to making this book a reality. I am indebted to her as a cocreator in this endeavor. Elizabeth’s skill, teamwork, patience, community engagement background, curiosity, empathy for creating a safe and livable community for everyone, and attention to detail have added another dimension to this book.

xxviii    Acknowledgments

I want to thank Governors John Kitzhaber of Oregon and Jay Inslee of Washington for their vision of working on problems from the system-wide perspective—for pushing those they worked with to strive toward long-term outcomes that would not be realized during their tenures and to work upstream on what created the issues downstream in climate change, education, public safety, and, of course, land use and transportation. My husband, Mark Peterson, makes this journey through life extraordinarily meaningful. He walks the dogs, cooks, plans vacations, and helps make every vision around the house come to life. Thirty years and counting, thank you for being my teammate for life. Thank you to my mom, Lois Kiefer, who supported her two girls in every endeavor and demonstrated to us what it means to be a strong, independent woman. And to my sister, Jennifer Jankastle, and her three wonderful kids, Jake, Katherine, and Sarah. They are the best cheerleading section a sister and aunt could have. And to my father, Thomas Heine, who demonstrated through his life how to advocate for those less advantaged. And, of course, I thank all of the transportation planners, engineers, landscape architects, and transportation professionals who are asking questions that are outside the box, who are questioning old ways of doing things. I believe in our profession and what we can do because of all of you who are working to make transportation solutions for people a reality across the country and world.

Chapter 1

Why Transportation Planning and Engineering Need a Paradigm Shift

I

At its best, transportation makes the American dream possible. Getting people and goods to where they need to be. Directly and indirectly creating good paying jobs. At its worst, misguided policies and missed opportunities can reinforce racial, economic and environmental injustice—dividing or isolating neighborhoods, undermining government’s basic role to empower everyone to thrive. And now comes a historic opportunity. This administration can deliver policies and resources that will create jobs, rise to the climate challenge, and equitably serve all Americans. —Pete Buttigieg, US secretary of transportation1

n my more than thirty years in the transportation business, I’ve seen road projects go sideways or die. It always feels disappointing and frustrating. But I’ve learned from every one of those failures how not to do things, how to work with communities, and how to collaborate better. This learning, though, has also made each subsequent failure of a project that much more painful. It’s harder because I’ve seen how we can do it better. 1

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There is one project—which is ongoing as I write this—that is more important to the residents of the Portland, Oregon, region and to me than many of the others I’ve worked on because it exemplifies how important it is to consider racial equity, community, and collaboration in transportation. It also shows that doing it right can be challenging, but it also holds so much possibility for restoring trust as well as helping to stitch our communities back together. The Rose Quarter Project (officially the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project) in Portland continues to be a roller-coaster, but I feel that ultimately it will go in the right direction.2 The Rose Quarter neighborhood sits to the north of and across the Willamette River from downtown Portland (see figure 1-1). It is the location of what is left of the Lower Albina neighborhood, a once vibrant multicultural center of Black Portland (see chapter 3 for more history). The Rose Quarter sits on Interstate 5 smack-dab in the middle of two highway interchanges between I-84 (which runs east–west) and I-405 (the highway to the east of downtown)—which is a two-lane bottleneck that is flanked by three lanes to the south and three lanes to the north. The building of I-5 in 1964 displaced thousands of Black residents from the Albina neighborhood.3 Block after block of homes and businesses were torn down to make way for the interstate and the venues that would serve the city, such as a coliseum, the Portland Trail Blazers basketball stadium, a convention center, the Portland Public Schools Administrative Building and Maintenance Yards, a hospital, and the first enclosed mall on the West Coast. Upon its completion in 1964, The I-5 corridor became the primary way to get through the city and for commuters to get into and out of the city. As more people moved to the region and traffic increased significantly, particularly from commuters just to the north of the city in Washington State, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) recognized the need to address congestion at this bottleneck. Meanwhile, local government agencies such as the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) and Oregon Metro (known as Metro), along with community organizations, were working to identify solutions that would reconnect the street grid and plan for street-level development that would offer economic wealth-building opportunities for members

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Figure 1-1  The Portland, Oregon, Rose Quarter Project. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

of the Black community who were affected by the previous development. Metro, the only directly elected regional governing body in the country, oversees the functions of various parks, venues, and, of course, transportation plans and policies within the greater Portland, Oregon, metropolitan region. (I am currently the Metro Council president.) While ODOT was required to hold community meetings, the information gathered from those public meetings with local entities and thought leaders was not used to understand the nature of the challenges people in the community experienced along the corridor. As a result, the department narrowly identified the problem: congestion on the interstate between three closely spaced urban interchanges. For that narrowly defined problem, it submitted a vague proposal to the state legislature in 2017 to smooth out the traffic flow by reducing collisions caused by speed and by merge and weave movements. This

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proposal was approved as part of HB 2017—a $450 million funding package for the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project.4 PBOT, Metro, and local community organizations knew the package wouldn’t be enough to include the projects important to the community. However, no specific details were made available until 2019, when ODOT submitted its Environmental Assessment (EA) to the Federal Highway Administration. We found out that the requested funding did not even include the expected escalation in labor and materials prices from the year the bill was passed to the expected construction date of 2023 (similar to cost-of-living adjustments), which ended up being between $715 million and $875 million.5 Taking the time to include a well-thought-out cost estimate is critical to building trust. Not only was the ODOT project underfunded; it did not include anything that the community had wanted.6 Instead of attempting to smooth existing traffic flow by increasing the number of through lanes, which would have been outlandishly expensive, ODOT proposed a more practical and less expensive auxiliary lane connecting the three interchanges. (This is a Practical Design approach, which I introduce in chapter 2.) This narrow response to an existing problem (which can be seen as a good thing) didn’t include community engagement, nor did it address the community’s issues. Unfortunately, the solution would have been detrimental to the surrounding community because it required widening the roadway, which would impact the surrounding neighborhood, including a school. The proposal angered a lot of people in Portland because the design considered only the safety and access of drivers on the interstate, not the livability and safety of the nearby neighborhoods. Because of ODOT’s lack of a participatory process and the assumptions it made purely on the basis of technical engineering, its proposal ran counter to the community vision that was already in development through the Albina Vision Trust (AVT).7 AVT is a nonprofit dedicated to reviving and reenvisioning the Albina neighborhood with a focus on “honoring the neighborhood’s past by transforming what exists today into a socially and economically inclusive community of residents, businesses, artists, makers, and visitors.”8 The community vision included the following elements that were not contained in the ODOT project:

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• A reconnection of the neighborhood to the Willamette River by creating a large urban park and habitat restoration along the river • A reconnection of the original street grid that existed prior to the building of the freeways • A more reliable and safe multimodal environment within the interchange influence area (the community affected by the traffic coming on and off the freeway) • An interchange design to be wheelchair accessible and safely navigable by pedestrians and cyclists (i.e., not an “island”) • A lid or highway cover over I-5 that would accommodate four to five stories of buildings to help reactivate the economic vitality of the area to benefit the local neighborhood, not just the city writ large • Solution of air quality issues for the school located near the freeway • Construction of the lid or highway cover within a public-private partnership, with the goal of creating intergenerational wealthbuilding opportunities If the ODOT project team had done a more thorough Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), instead of the much simpler EA, by including community outreach and scenarios developed through consulting with entities outside the agency, it would have been able to understand that its definition of “impacts” was from the department’s perspective only and not anyone else’s, including other professionals working in areas that intersect with transportation. (ODOT claimed that a full EIS was not necessary because the project would be constructed on land owned by the state and federal governments and therefore would have no significant impacts.) Had ODOT gone through a robust community engagement process, it would have heard about the impacts on generations of people who live along the I-5 corridor and those who see the interstate footprint as a barrier to safe mobility. In response to the criticism, ODOT agreed to create jobs for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community members in construction of the project. Of course, job creation for BIPOC community members is not in itself a complete or thorough racial equity approach. ODOT’s narrow focus on transportation improvements was

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unfortunately echoed by state legislators. “If Portland wants to put lids and all that kind of stuff on freeways, the state’s job is to make sure whatever we do allows that to happen, but we’re not paying for it,” said Senator Lee Beyer, chairman of the Joint Transportation Committee, to Oregon Public Broadcasting in January 2020. “That’s a local decision, local desire. . . . It’s not part of the state highway system.”9 For the past several years, local community leaders and advocates have been trying to get ODOT to listen to them by asking to be part of the decision-making process and to address the specific restorative justice and non-transportation project ideas put forth by the Albina Vision Trust. Local entities (PBOT, Metro, and local community organizations) also knew more about what the local community wanted and needed and were not going to let the project happen as ODOT proposed it, so they told the agency to go back and complete the EIS it should have done in the first place. While ODOT initially refused, intense political and community pressure forced it to take action. It established an Executive Steering Committee (ESC) to redefine the values, goals, and outcomes of the project as well as to review an Independent Cover Assessment and make recommendations based on what it found. The ESC was composed of representatives from labor, the National Association of Minority Contractors (NAMC), the City of Portland, AVT, the Oregon Transportation Commission, ODOT, TriMet (the regional transportation agency), the local community, and Metro (which I represented).10 After a bumpy process, in the fall of 2021, the Oregon Transportation Commission granted conditional approval for a Hybrid Option 3 project based on the work of an Independent Cover Assessment and the recommendation of the ESC and the governor that would create a larger than originally proposed lid or highway cover that would allow for development on top of the freeway and restore the street grid. The changes increased the project cost by $730 million (to $1.18 billion).11 This puts ODOT at more financial and political risk because lawmakers will see this budget ballooning to three times the original proposal. Through all of this, though, I still remain optimistic. The project is moving forward and there is a lot of hope, particularly with ODOT’s current leadership, that even with all the missteps, there can be some course correction and the community can get what it needs, which I’ll

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go into in more detail later in this chapter. But what we also can gain from the challenges and missteps is insight into what not to do and why. The Rose Quarter Project is an example of how engineers and planners tell community members what they need rather than asking them what kind of community they want to live in and how they can work together to get there. This is especially true of communities that are majority Black, Latino, Indigenous, or Asian Pacific Islander in a profession largely run by White men. As a starting point, transportation planners and engineers should seek to understand the existing conditions that people are experiencing. ODOT might have thought it was doing that when considering the traffic implications, but it didn’t consider the implications for the people who lived there and how they wanted their community restored. The people in the community are central to our work, and we must ensure that they are at the center of the process. When we do that, there is so much opportunity in how our profession can positively impact our communities. Inspiring leaders in our profession, such as Carlos Braceras, executive director of the Utah Department of Transportation, believe strongly in this as well. “If you care about doing something that makes a difference for people, I can’t think of a better profession,” he says. At the end of the day, our purpose is to improve the quality of life through transportation. When you start to understand the ‘why,’ it allows you to take off the restraints and allows you to better understand what a community is looking for.” We need to find ways to take off the restraints that our professional training has created and engage with communities to find out what residents want and need.

The Limits of Traditional Guidelines for Transportation Planning and Engineering The Rose Quarter example shows the problem with the historical focus of transportation planning and engineering on building infrastructure to get people from point A to point B as quickly and safely as possible, regardless of what is destroyed in the process. My engineering

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education was in materials science; I was trained to know when materials would fail, not how to build community. And in that way, my training focused on roadways so that they worked for cars rather than the people in those cars and in the communities alongside the roadway. For decades, this car-only approach has wreaked havoc on communities by focusing investments on affluent suburbs, leaving fewer resources for needed transportation improvements elsewhere. “Seventy years of a car-only approach—not car-centric, car-only— is actually not just non-driver hostile; it’s driver hostile,” says Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “No one benefits. It has all these negative effects in that it cuts everyone’s opportunity to participate in the economy and essential services. It [causes] incredibly negative public health and environmental damage. And it actually undercuts economic development.” Pollution-related illnesses (e.g., asthma, lung cancer) are higher in lower-income communities that reside along heavy-traffic corridors. And multimodal transit solutions without an equity approach have also perpetuated gentrification, thus pushing people of color and people who are lower income and transit dependent out of their neighborhoods. Ultimately, this car-only approach has led to the construction of freeways and roadways that have torn apart and devalued communities, especially Black and Brown communities;12 destroyed and devalued farmland;13 and depleted much of the planet’s natural landscapes and habitat.14 The destruction or displacement of communities has not always been immediate or obvious. Transportation projects have separated residents from jobs, services, family members, food sources, and economic opportunities, and sometimes they have ultimately made the communities unlivable or unaffordable. As the Rose Quarter Project shows, process is everything. If those with the power—the lead engineer and the team at the top—look at a problem through a narrowly defined lens, don’t actually listen to the people who will be impacted, and don’t collaborate meaningfully with other professionals in the field, they lose the trust of the people whose problem they are ultimately trying to solve. It is an example of a career-long frustration in which I see engineers

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and planners in decision-making roles going through the motions of connecting, collaborating, and listening but then ultimately following outdated guidelines. And it’s an example that shows we need a wholesale reframing of the process to be more collaborative. Early in my career, I felt that dissonance when I saw how the framework I was taught in engineering school was applied in the real world. In engineering school, I learned about rational decision-making, which is based on these four major metrics for success in a transportation project: • • • •

design a safe project, for as many vehicles as you can at the highest speed you can, with an on-time project delivery, and under budget.

But these metrics don’t consider everything else involved in a transportation project: the land, the people, community cohesion, quality of life—the list goes on. It’s also a linear process that assumes there won’t be pushback on the original design. It’s a process that encourages us to make assumptions about a solution before we even know what the problem is. It’s a process that doesn’t involve community engagement. And it’s a process that assumes we can make decisions within our professional silos without engaging in deeper consultation with other professionals in the field. I started my career in that linear mindset, and the failed projects and pushback from community led me to my own personal paradigm shift, which is why I now call myself a “plangineer.” While there are many professionals involved in transportation engineering and design, there’s always been a tension of sorts between the planners and the engineers, which is counterproductive. When I realized that my engineering degree hadn’t equipped me with all I needed to know, I got a degree in urban and regional planning. It is why, even now as an elected official, I call myself a plangineer because I can work to see all sides of a problem. There is a real need to be able to see the macro perspective of the environment, economy, and social justice issue, and place the problem, or project in a larger context.

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Moving Beyond the Limitations The solution, as I see it, is to change the process and the paradigm around transportation planning and transition to a more communityoriented approach, an approach that is rooted in racial equity, is guided by a process of community engagement, and involves deep collaboration with others in our field. The Need for a Racial Equity Approach Transportation engineers and planners must first understand the implications of past decisions that have marginalized Black and Brown communities. The Rose Quarter Project, for example, is within a community that has been historically marginalized, oppressed, and displaced. There must be an understanding not only of how a project could impact the community but also of how to help restore a community our profession had a hand in destroying. It’s our responsibility to ensure, at the very least, that we don’t perpetuate more harm; also, ideally, we should help to address the past harms caused. A racial equity approach (addressed in more detail in chapter 3) requires looking at the demographic disparities of safety in any transportation space—be it walking, biking, driving, or riding—and using that information to create transportation solutions that benefit people the most. In so many cases, Black and Brown communities are disproportionately impacted by unsafe transportation policies. In her book Right of Way, Angie Schmitt showcases how pedestrian deaths disproportionately occur within lower-income Black and Brown communities.15 This happens because of a lack of equity in planning in which prioritized projects tend to exclude the communities that aren’t often considered or consulted during the planning process. Another issue of equity in transportation involves traffic enforcement. Surveys by the Pew Research Center found that Black Americans are five times as likely as White Americans to report being unfairly pulled over by police in a traffic stop.16 And a 2020 report by researchers from Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania found that between 2015 and 2020, BIPOC people were exponentially more likely to be killed by police than White people (3 times more likely for Native

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Americans, 2.6 times more likely for Black people, and 1.3 times more likely for Hispanic people).17 And in many cases, encounters during traffic stops result in killings by police—in 2021 alone, 117 nonviolent traffic violations resulted in police killings.18 To use an equity approach, transportation engineers and planners should see how traffic policing is connected to transportation planning. So many roadways are designed to rely on monitoring and policing of human behavior rather than on creating a solution that helps physically slow traffic without punitive measures (e.g., putting in a roundabout instead of an open roadway monitored by only a speed limit). By not considering equity, we are ignoring huge sectors of our community and the transportation problems they face. This can perpetuate or repeat harms of the past, such as redlining and highway expansion through Black and Brown neighborhoods. Recently, I’ve also come to terms with my own unwitting complicity in creating gentrification in Black and low-income communities through transportation land use practices that I touted nationally. The Eastside Banfield Light Rail Project in Portland (which first received federal planning approval in 1980) now connects the greater Portland metropolitan region through five MAX (Metropolitan Area Express) lines and had some huge benefits for land use and environmental impact.19 But the long-term impacts of gentrification were intensified because we were focused only on building new affordable housing, not on preserving existing affordable housing. The investment in transportation improvements created an increase in land value—it does not matter if it is a highway interchange or a light-rail station; they all come with a trade-off. Learning about these complexities firsthand shifted my thinking from “either/or” (good land use and environmental policies or good racial justice policies) to “both/ and” solutions (we’re creating better land use and environmental policies by combining them with racial justice policies). The concept of environmental justice in transportation policy is how they come together. Additionally, those of us planning light-rail service weren’t effectively considering how this new and innovative public transit service should be serving lower-income communities who might need it most. The assumptions were that it was serving low-income households and would provide higher-density housing that was more affordable around

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the stations. Those assumptions are correct, generally speaking, but no one was working to find out what these communities really needed, including preservation of community, businesses, and existing affordable housing that would help address the downsides that can push lower-income people to places where reliable transit is less accessible. Jay Pitter, senior fellow at the Canadian Urban Institute, described this lack of racial equity framework in many transportation planning processes: “From funding, planning and infrastructure, to design and policing, many transit agencies essentially have built two systems with different standards for ‘choice’ and ‘dependent’ rights (that is to say White and Black).”20 In effect, by placing light rail in areas without regard to who would be using it or who would be impacted by the system, we created two systems. It is incumbent on professionals who are tasked with carrying out public projects, such as transportation, to consider equity at every turn. Chapter 3 provides additional context and details about how we can incorporate racial equity into our work. The Need for Better Community Engagement The racial equity lens is important, but it won’t mean anything unless the process is specifically geared toward working with the most marginalized people in the community. This involves deep community engagement. Telling communities about a perceived problem (which is how we tend to do things in our field), instead of asking them what the problem is for them, has resulted in a lot of unwanted projects and issues between communities and local and state governments, particularly in Black and Brown communities. Transportation engineers and planners often fall into a surface-level community engagement strategy or a process that involves some community members but usually works with people who already have advantages in society. For example, a freeway widening project designed to get more cars from the suburbs to downtown might be desired by suburban drivers, but it may create more pollution, more traffic, and potential destruction of a neighborhood along that traffic corridor. The most underserved communities—those most negatively

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affected by racist transportation policies—usually don’t have a seat at the planning table. When first designing the Rose Quarter Project, the ODOT planning team did all of their discovery work internally and didn’t reach out too far beyond ODOT walls to find out the problem. Very few people outside of the agency really knew what was happening until the project was released. By siloing themselves off from the community, the ODOT planners defined the problem and then created a solution in isolation. They could have avoided a lot of the blowback if they had collaborated effectively both with professionals outside the agency and with the community. As a plangineer, I see my role as making sure that the voices of those not in the decision-making room—community members who are not able to provide testimony or attend meetings or serve on a committee—are heard just as loudly as those in the room. We need to meet community members where they are and on their terms rather than defining those terms for them. As a privileged White person in this field, I constantly ask myself and my team, “Who else should be at the table?” Who is not at the table because they don’t have the political capital or power to even know that the discussion is happening? Who is not at the table because they’ve been systematically left out of decisionmaking processes for a lifetime? Who is not at the table because they don’t have the luxury of taking time out of work or caring for their kids to go to a community meeting? Who is not at the table because they don’t trust that their voice would actually be heard if they were there? A lack of understanding about how historical and systemic racism has left Black and Brown communities out of the conversation sets you, your project, and the community up for failure. This requires long-term and genuine engagement with communities. Transportation professionals need to connect with and build trust with the people and organizations that know how to bring all stakeholders to the table or that can advocate on behalf of those not at the table. In the Rose Quarter example, there were already organizations doing the community engagement work—particularly the Albina Vision Trust—so entities were already in place to help engage with the people

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who would be impacted most. AVT should have been involved in the planning process as a partner to ODOT from the very beginning so that it could help steer the process toward a solution created by and for community members. The challenges we’ve experienced in the project are, we hope, leading to a deeper community engagement process in partnership with AVT. These challenges serve as an example that we can and should do this work up front to avoid roller-coasters like the one we’ve been on with the Rose Quarter Project. And ultimately, it’s the right thing to do. It is our job—and our ethical prerogative—to create transportation solutions that benefit all people in a community. When we don’t create the space for this to happen, we risk doing more harm than good. Leaving community members out of the decision-making process is no better than the practices that created segregation. Chapter 5 will go more deeply into the community engagement process as an essential part of the work we do. The Need to Understand the Definition of “Community” One way we may be led astray is if we don’t really think about or understand the definition of “community.” I understand this to some extent because “community” can have many definitions and can feel very intangible. But I think it helps to put thought into that definition to help guide the process involved. Community engagement requires honoring and understanding the specific nature of the community in which the project is taking place. That specific place has a history and a culture that is unique, and to take any real steps toward finding solutions, we need to understand a community in all its many nuances. Depending on the context, the terms “community” and “community engagement” come with different meanings. Sometimes these terms are charged, and sometimes they’re used as kind of a catchall. But I want to be clear about what we mean by “community engagement” in this context. “Communities are networks of people who share responsibilities for contributing to the outcomes that affect the group as a whole,” wrote Kip Holley in the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’s guide “The Principles for Equitable and Inclusive Civic

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Engagement.”21 In other words, communities are people who are willing to offer and deliver support to one another. As simple as that sounds, David M. Chavis and Kien Lee described community as “both a feeling and a set of relationships among people” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.22 One of the major points Chavis and Lee also made is that communities aren’t places; they are people. Even though a community might be concentrated in a specific location (e.g., a neighborhood), it’s defined more by the connections people have. They feel connected, have a sense of belonging, and care for one another. People can also be a part of multiple communities. We all contain multitudes, and that is seen in how people can be a part of many communities at once, such as a neighborhood, a house of worship, a Facebook group, and so on. As I think about these definitions in the context of my work, one of the biggest takeaways is that a community is not a monolith. Within any group of people, there will inevitably be a diverse array of perspectives and desires. There certainly will be shared values, but there will be differences in interpretation of language and words because the people in the community will not have the same lived and learned experiences. The broader the boundaries of said community gets, the wider the range of perspectives there will be. The definition of a community is messy and will never be perfect. And as with everything else in this book, we need to continuously reevaluate our assumptions about how people define their own communities. For the purposes of this book and our work in transportation planning and engineering, I use the following working definition, which should be helpful to you in starting to define the context of the place you are working in and the people you are working with. A community is defined through quantitative and qualitative ways that include the people, their relationships, their cultures, how they organize themselves and why, their sense of place, and culture and spiritual places that define them. We start there, with the community to guide the process. The Need for Collaboration with Other Professionals Another thing that keeps us from effectively carrying out community engagement is that we don’t collaborate well with other professionals.

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We often work with people from a great many fields and areas of expertise—planners, engineers, environmental scientists, architects, economists, and so forth—but we don’t generally do a great job of creating team-oriented processes that foster deeper listening. Many of those professionals have nuanced and important viewpoints not just on the technical side of the solutions but also on the community side. For example, community liaisons, public health professionals, and social service providers could have a strong sense of community needs, yet they are rarely consulted as part of a transportation project. By siloing ourselves off from other professionals and doing our work in isolation from one another, we are setting ourselves up to not see the full extent of the problem, because all of our work is interconnected. This isn’t unique to local or regional projects; it happens at the national level as well. Part of the problem is that we’re not always taught to collaborate when we’re coming up in our fields, even when we might think we were taught to do so. As I look back, the “collaboration” I was taught felt more as if I was required to have a conversation with another professional, such as an environmental scientist or a planner, to check a box on a list of tasks required by the transportation agency. I would give the planners a couple of months to help us determine the land use permits we would need. Or I would have community engagement specialists set up the required minimum of community engagement meetings appropriate for the size of the project. I would ask the environmental planners about, say, any identified wetlands on the site or how many acres would be taken for the project in the expanded right-of-way and about federal and state mitigation requirements for those acres. But I never told them what we were trying to achieve with the project except, perhaps, an increase in safety for vehicle users at the intersection. I also didn’t look into working with professionals who might not be directly related to transportation but whose work could be interconnected (e.g., someone from public health or human services). We also weren’t necessarily required to integrate all their suggestions or ideas. The fact that they were a part of the process was enough to check the box. We engineers love our checklists; they allow us to feel secure in delivering a project on time and on budget, which reduces financial and political risk. But there was no requirement to include feedback or

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even document it. Planners get into this mode as well. They forget that a decision to proceed with a project does not mean that the conversation is over; in fact, it has just begun, and it needs to continue through the hardest part—the implementation. True and deep collaboration provides an opportunity to see a problem or challenge from multiple professional perspectives. If everyone at the decision-making table looks at or defines a problem with the same training, everyone is approaching the problem with the same lens. Rather, we need multiple perspectives, fresh eyes, and a diverse range of expertise to be creative about what a solution could look like. An engineer always brings an important perspective to safety, but someone else might help see that the root of the problem might not even involve construction; it could involve a technological or communications solution. But we wouldn’t be able to see outside our professional silos without a collaborative approach. To truly engage with communities and other professionals, we need to make sure we’re actively listening to our colleagues and not bringing in our own biases. Engaging in deeper collaboration with colleagues who might see a problem from a different perspective helps us develop a wider-angle lens for our internal cameras. This helps us move away from the specific users of the transportation system—or those who we think are the users—and zoom out to be able to define the community characteristics, values, and cultural norms. Part of this comes with community engagement; the other simply asks us to start by listening to our colleagues who have a deeper perspective on those elements. For the Rose Quarter Project, ODOT didn’t do much to consult outside its own agency. If the team had consulted with colleagues from the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), or the Oregon Department of Education (ODE), they likely would’ve received insight about the potential health impact of polluted air on people in the community, particularly students and staff of the school near the highway. If they had consulted with Oregon Housing and Community Services or the Oregon Employment Department, they would’ve received insight on how the project could impact affordable housing and other services and the potential for economic revitalization for the community in

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that neighborhood. They also would’ve received insights into which community-based organizations and community leaders to consult with to carry out the community engagement process. Earlier conversations and collaboration with colleagues in those agencies would have helped provide them with a wider-angle perspective even before beginning the community engagement process. Additionally, it could start by simply rethinking the perspective from which we’re seeing the roads we’re building—looking from the inside out to get a sense of who is impacted the most and how they’re impacted by transportation projects. We should approach our work as a community member but also think more broadly about other community members, which can be done in very tactile ways, such as going out and seeing how people are using a particular space. “One thing that always comes to mind with human-centered design,” says Amanda Leahy, an associate planner with the Oakland, California, office of Kittelson & Associates, “is those little goat tracks that show desire lines. That’s a way you know engineering has failed, when people figure out their own way because the infrastructure doesn’t follow the travel pattern. That happens so regularly. You can see so many examples throughout the city. I think it’s about time that people learned to really observe the people who make those trips—every day and every week—and ask them, “What do you want to see here?” This look into desire lines—which are often dirt paths created by people choosing routes outside of the designated concrete sidewalks or pathways—can be a great way to start thinking beyond our transportation biases (figure 1-2). One of my mentors, Andy Cotugno, former director of planning at Oregon Metro, asked me what my perspective was when I thought about a road. Was I sitting in the road looking ahead as if driving or biking, or was I looking at the road from the land adjacent to it? As a recovering transportation engineer, the answer was pretty obvious: I was in the road as a user (i.e., a driver/biker/walker). But what does the world look like if I shift ninety degrees so I am looking at the road from an adjacent property? It means I am thinking about access. I am thinking about how I would like to access and use the road to my economic advantage. If I am a developer, I want a driveway.

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Figure 1-2  Desire lines, or “goat tracks,” show how people are using a space and how the original design of the space has failed. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

If I am a renter, I may want a sidewalk or less noise and air pollution. If I am a school principal, I may want a better buffer between the sidewalk and the street. If I am a pastor and my parking lot is across a busy street from my church, I may want a slower speed limit so that I can ensure that my parishioners are safe when crossing the street. These people are all users of a transport system, but in the larger community, they play a role and have a perspective on the other needs a community has for its transportation system. These are all useful tools when thinking about collaboration and the values and different angles our colleagues can bring to a project solution. Chapter 4 will go into greater detail on what deep collaboration can look like.

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Taking a Community Solutions–Based Approach Better transportation solutions require a culture and paradigm shift among those carrying out transportation solutions. If enough professionals challenge old ways of doing things, a larger-scale shift in our professional approach can happen. I believe that, while the system change can move at a glacial pace, transportation professionals have individual agency to accelerate a larger cultural shift. That shift involves moving to transportation planning, design, and implementation that addresses racial equity, collaboration, and community engagement. These come together in what I call the community solutions–based approach. The community solutions–based approach moves away from the narrow and limiting metrics of traditional transportation design and focuses on the process and metrics that involve ongoing feedback and learning loops at every step of the way through deep, regular, and meaningful community engagement. The approach is also guided by an overarching framework of racial equity—in which we seek to solve problems for the most historically marginalized members of the community—and collaboration—in which we work as a multidisciplinary team of transportation experts to solve community problems. I’m not reinventing the wheel here. There are amazing examples of the community solutions–based approach all around the country and world, but it has yet to come together in a specific methodology or approach widely adopted across professions making transportation decisions. I’m proposing this inclusive approach that seeks to solve problems— both big and small—experienced by as many users of a transportation system as possible, but especially the users who have historically been harmed by transportation decisions. An inclusive approach does not overlook the environmental or land use issues; rather, it centers those issues on the communities that are most impacted by transportation decisions. It addresses the “3Es” of sustainable development—economy, equity, and environment—holistically. “[The use of the 3Es] posits that a decision to promote economic development should not lead to a decrease in the quality of the environment or social equity,” wrote researchers Ishak Mohammed and

Transportation Planning and Engineering Need a Paradigm Shift    21

Habib M. Alshuwaikhat (from Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals’s Department of City and Regional Planning) and Yusuf A. Adenle (from Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Department of Building and Real Estate) in a 2016 Sustainability journal article. “Rather, the decision or action should be capable of promoting all the 3Es. In other words, conventional economic imperative to maximize economic development should make adequate provision for the protection of the environment and promote social equity by minimizing human suffering and deprivation.”23 To do this, I’ll first explore the concepts that go into the approach— racial equity, collaboration, and community engagement—in more depth. I’ll showcase examples from around the United States to help illustrate best practices. Seeing a range of examples is key because what’s also clear is that no one community is the same. What can be replicated, however—with an understanding of the nuances of each project—is the process. After establishing the foundation of the concepts of equity and collaboration, I will take a deep dive into the community solutions–based process, which is the community engagement process. The moment is ripe for a culture shift because movement is already happening. Professionals are questioning old assumptions and, in many cases, creating new approaches in different disciplines: progressive city governments, community development groups, complete streets advocacy groups, new urbanist designers, nongovernmental organizations, the retail industry, and, increasingly, the transportation planning field. Now, state departments of transportation and communities are asking their planners and engineers to build road networks that are safer, more livable, and welcoming to everyone. They’re asking for safer streets for pedestrians, bikers, public transit riders, and drivers alike. And they’re asking for alternative and accessible modes of transportation that don’t push people out of their neighborhoods. Some state DOTs have instituted complete streets policies to ensure that transportation planners and engineers design and maintain the roadways with all users in mind—including bicyclists, bus riders, and pedestrians of all ages and abilities. Cities across the nation have been actively setting policies and programs to have more inclusivity for modes and

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people’s needs. The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) is working to change the conversation about how to transform cities with transportation investments. It gave planners and engineers the tools to be innovative around meeting accessibility, mobility, economic vitality, health, and safety needs. In that optimistic mode, I also think there is great hope for the Rose Quarter Project. Certainly, challenges remain, but I’m hopeful that we will arrive at the right place. In 2019, Kris Strickler was named ODOT director by the Oregon Transportation Commission and committed to reenvisioning the path forward for the project and the department. He was influenced by what Roger Millar, current Washington State secretary of transportation, once told him: “Those things that you don’t do with people, they believe that you’re doing to them.” Strickler sees this project as an opportunity to help move the agency forward and to show how technical expertise doesn’t have to conflict with community needs. But it takes moving beyond design-anddefend mode and actually hearing what the community has to say. “There’s a big difference between listening and hearing,” Strickler says. He believes listening can fall into the ever-present project checklist, whereas hearing involves understanding people’s values, needs, and feelings about their community and incorporating them into the solution. “I think as we hear better, we should employ that mindset that an engineer can solve anything. . . . If we apply that sense of engineering hubris to the things that we are actually hearing, I think we could come back with better outcomes. Community outcomes that speak to the way people feel.” And like Strickler, though there has been a lot of conflict and heartache along the way, I also feel confident that a lot of good will come out of what has already happened. First, it’s not too late to find a solution with which all stakeholders can be happy. And we’ve already seen a lot of movement in the right direction. Additionally, this project will not be the last for ODOT and for many of the communities in Portland, and even though there have been challenges, the process has offered a pathway to reframing our approach as a profession.

Transportation Planning and Engineering Need a Paradigm Shift    23

Strickler believes that this project is an example of the “art of the possible.” “It’s a constant evolution and improvement, and you get there only by having the dialogue,” he says, noting that all that has happened in the Rose Quarter Project is part of that dialogue. “I know that we won’t always get everything right. I also know that part of having a vulnerable conversation is acknowledging past harms . . . [which] is the fastest way to acknowledge that we see the problem in the same frame [as those who were harmed] and get to a solution. “As I look to the future,” Strickler continues, “I see significant opportunity to work with those who have been historically harmed to bring opportunities for change.” It’s this hope and potential for the future that makes me see a possible culture shift toward a community solutions–based approach. But, of course, changing an agency’s culture can be like turning a ship. And in many cases, that ship doesn’t want to turn. Even though the training of planners, engineers, and many other transportation professionals is moving in a more progressive and inclusive direction, the traditional professional guidelines and perceived standards—especially within engineering—still exist, and they exist in the mindsets of the senior-level engineers overseeing projects. So, the question remains: What can one professional do in an agency or institution that isn’t quite on board yet? I’ll address that in this book, but I think one person or a small team of professionals who know they can use a community solutions–based approach can have an impact even if the larger environment is indifferent or resistant to it. We can take cues and advice from high-level innovators who are working to improve practice and policy—innovators including Janette Sadik-Khan, former transportation commissioner for New York City; Gabe Klein, former transportation director in Washington, DC, and Chicago; Carlos Braceras, executive director of the Utah Department of Transportation; Ed Sniffen, deputy director of the Hawaii Department of Transportation; and Roger Millar, secretary of transportation in Washington State. The latter three were all interviewed for this book. All of these people are innovators because they seek outcomes, not solutions, first. And they are willing to try and fail. The thing is

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that they succeed more than they fail because they do their homework and don’t make too many assumptions without double-triple-quadruple challenging their own and others’ assumptions. True, they are in leadership roles and have a great deal of power to help create culture change. But even they recognize the value of having individual project leads take an inclusive approach even when their agency doesn’t always do so. This book will explore the approach of people such as these innovators as well as transportation professionals at all levels who are making waves in the industry and people who are centering racial equity in their work. These examples will also help you recognize the possibilities of innovation and, I hope, empower you to work with the professionals and community members around you to create transportation solutions that benefit the whole community. There is a real possibility that this collective approach you’re about to embark upon—or are already taking—can transform communities by creating transportation solutions that serve people rather than cars. Indeed, this approach takes a certain amount of moral and ethical leadership. The profession you chose involves more than building big, audacious structures, like the longest floating bridge or the deepest bored tunnel; it is about building communities where people can live, work, and play with ease. It is about restoring communities that have been displaced and torn apart because of systemic racism. It is about combating systemic racism within our standard ways of practice by going against perceived norms that are rooted in White culture. It is about creating healthier communities. It is about preserving the planet. There are ways we can do this through tapping into our training and experience in our chosen professions. But it also requires getting outside our perceived comfort zones. Getting out of our professional silos. And getting out into the community. This book cannot give you all the answers about how to do the work, but I hope that after reading it, you’ll have a better idea of more inclusive processes and what questions to ask, of whom to ask them, and who to get involved in your projects. No project looks the same as another, so I can’t map out a prescriptive approach for you to do your work. But I can provide some insight into ways you can approach it.

Transportation Planning and Engineering Need a Paradigm Shift    25

Whether you’re an engineer or planner or accountant or environmental scientist or elected official or advocate, I hope this book will help you to observe your surroundings and work to understand the root of a community’s transportation problems. Transportation is a means by which we connect to one another and to our community. The health, safety, and resiliency of our communities depends on your ability to grow and adapt. The ability of our cities and towns to work for all their people depends on your ability to look outside your own profession and lived experiences. Although I’m still engaged in a lifelong learning process, I’ve listened to and learned from a great many people. I’ve learned to ask a lot of questions and do my research when I don’t know the answers, and I’ve especially learned to interact with and learn from members of the community, the users of the systems. This book is a culmination of those lessons—and some that I’m learning even as I write.

Chapter 2

The Evolution of Approaches to Transportation Engineering and Planning

I

The road isn’t there for any purpose without people, and we can’t have communities without roads or transportation. —Brian Ray, transportation engineer

n November 2021, the United States Senate passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that will fund improvements to high-speed internet access, roads, bridges, airports, high-speed rail, power grid resiliency, and water and sewer systems. And it advanced policy for multimodal systems and cleaning of the energy grid to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, it did not advance many of the policies that we have found as a nation to create projects that benefit more people through inclusive design.1 As with many policies of the past, there is an overarching focus on the large transportation systems meant to get people through communities rather than on the communities themselves. As the Interstate Highway System was being built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, each major metropolitan area decided it did not want the highway to stop at the “edge” of the urban area but rather to bring travelers and commuters right downtown. The design of the highways was then standardized to be the same inside as it was outside the urban 27

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area. This expectation of standardization (e.g., placing wide freeways in the middle of the city), no matter the context or need, has resulted in the dislocation of communities across the country, especially lowerincome communities and communities of color (see chapter 3). Vehicle miles traveled increased, along with fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the cost of household transportation. This system also decreased the ability of local governments to fund their transport systems because investments were made at the state level to build, operate, and maintain a growing national system. State control also limited the input and power that local communities had over these roadways. This naturally led to a disconnection between the communities that lived along those roadways and the state departments of transportation (DOTs) that managed and funded the building and maintenance of said roadways. This was reflected in the way transportation engineers were trained. The transportation engineers who were tasked with the structural elements of building the interstate system were largely trained in engineering programs that focused exclusively on technical engineering, with no regard for the community or the people living near the structures that were built. They believed that the system needed to stay the same, regardless of the region or state, and that the only users who needed to be accommodated were those traveling long distances. This was still true when I was educated as an engineer in the 1990s. Outside the classroom, there were professionals thinking beyond these outdated guidelines, but I wasn’t aware of them. It took working on an ill-conceived project in my first job out of engineering school for me to start to think past what I learned in school. In 1992, as a traffic engineer with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT), I was tasked with analyzing the safety of a corridor from Madison to the Wisconsin Dells on State Highway 12 by documenting the fatalities that had occurred over the previous ten years. In the name of safety for travelers to a popular vacation destination, the Wisconsin Dells—approximately fifty miles northwest of Madison—the state secretary of transportation at the time, Charles “Chuck” Thompson, announced that WisDOT was moving forward with a project on State Highway 12, a winding two-lane country road

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Figure 2-1  State Highway 12 is a two-lane road from Madison, Wisconsin, to the Wisconsin Dells through Sauk City. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

from Madison through Sauk City to the Wisconsin Dells (figure 2-1). The road served agricultural lands in the area. The announcement came out of the blue. The decision was not part of a standard project selection process; essentially, it was personally and politically motivated. Secretary Thompson was a former business owner from the Wisconsin Dells and wanted another highway for people from Madison to get to the Dells, so he earmarked this as a priority project. Even by the acceptable process of the time, which was narrowly focused and required little collaboration, this decision stood apart because of the political and personal motivation of the secretary. The announcement was unpopular with local farmers, who were worried about how the wider footprint would impact their homes,

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Figure 2-2  Wisconsin’s State Highway 12 serves an agricultural community. This illustration, from before the project, shows the farmland and farming communities along the roadside. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

barns, access points to fields, and productive farmland, which was their primary source of income (figure 2-2). Every farm along the fifty-fivemile stretch soon displayed a homemade plywood sign in the front yard calling WisDOT “the devil.” The secretary justified the earmark with a safety concern based on fatalities on the highway. At that time, the response to a safety issue for all state DOTs was to widen and straighten the highway to get rid of the curves and to provide passing opportunities and a wide area open at the edges to allow safe space for vehicles that accidentally leave the roadway at high speeds (figure 2-3). So, I was tasked with doing the fatality study of the corridor to justify the project. What I recall is that at that time, the study revealed that the fatality rates weren’t any higher than those on other roadways in the state, and just over

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Figure 2-3  The proposed State Highway 12 project would have done considerable damage to the Wisconsin farm community that the road served. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

half were related to drivers under the influence (DUIs). Many of the other fatalities were caused by drivers running stop signs on the local roads at intersections with the highway or taking chances in passing large and slow-moving agricultural vehicles. Essentially, it seemed to me that the circumstances didn’t warrant a major reconfiguring of the highway footprint. Having been raised with a conservation ethic, in which one would strive to understand the system as a whole rather than focusing on a narrowly defined issue, I asked “upstream” questions about whether a faster, straighter highway that cut through farmland was the only solution to the safety problem. Since there was no one but the farmers challenging the impact and I didn’t know how to find an alternative that would satisfy both community members and the DOT, I decided that I needed not just to leave the project but to leave the DOT and

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get a degree in urban and regional planning to find out how better to address this type of problem. The experience revealed to me that my training certainly prepared me to analyze construction materials for strength and longevity and the best use of those construction materials in a bridge or roadway or culvert. However, I was not at all prepared for the dynamics with the community. The dissonance I felt came from a gap between my training and what actually happened in the real world. And I wasn’t completely comfortable in proceeding with my career while ignoring this gap. In general, the pace of change has been slow for accepted guidelines, based on safety and available funding, to address equity, health, the urban and rural economies, and the environment, especially in engineering. But this is changing; most of the change has occurred since the turn of the millennium, after a half century of driver-only, budgetconscious planning. I believe it’s important to reflect on that evolution of conscious planning and engineering. There are three concepts that show how engineers, planners, and other transportation professionals have challenged the typical guidelines: context-sensitive design, performance-based Practical Design, and demand management. Interestingly, these concepts emerged in parallel around the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, each responding to different needs. One concept that would have helped me navigate the State Highway 12 project, had I known about it then, is context-sensitive design.

The Emergence of Context-Sensitive Design In the late 1990s, “context-sensitive design” (CSD)—a term that is often used interchangeably with “context-sensitive solutions” (CSS)— emerged as a response to the fifty-plus years of massive budgets and roadbuilding that left communities out of the process, particularly in rural downtowns and urbanizing arterial settings. The idea that context mattered was only subtly dealt with in state design guidelines prior to the emergence of CSD. But speed still ruled the playbook, and cities asked for help in managing speed in relation to pedestrian safety as well as parking requirements in small and large downtowns.

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Context-sensitive design was born of communities asking for the following: • To use the right-of-way (ROW) or roadway space to accommodate more modes of transport in their downtowns • To not expand the ROW because they loved their historic downtowns and wanted to protect them for the small businesses that served the community • To add new elements that accentuated the design of their downtowns, such as flagpoles, lampposts, safe crossings, and lots of parking in front of businesses • To avoid highway bypasses because they required routing traffic around downtowns and decreasing the number of businesses by promoting interchanges where Costco and Walmart stores locate • To have greater levels of access to their land in downtowns, which meant more driveways per block, slower speeds, and more signalized intersections The Federal Highway Administration defines the concept as follows: “Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that involves all stakeholders to provide a transportation facility that fits its physical setting and preserves scenic, aesthetic, historic and environmental resources, while maintaining safety and mobility. . . . CSS is an approach that addresses the total context within which a transportation facility is planned, implemented, maintained and operated.”2 CSD and CSS originally emerged from a 1998 conference called “Thinking Beyond the Pavement,” which took a more systems-thinking approach to highway design.3 The conference was convened by the Maryland Department of Transportation, the Maryland State Highway Administration, the Federal Highway Administration, and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). They brought together 325 participants from twentynine states in a comprehensive workshop that resulted in process frameworks in the form of a resource paper for implementing CSD nationwide, which the Transportation Research Board published in March 2002.4

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The paper indicated a national shift to CSD, outlined the principles and potential for institutionalizing the CSD framework, and laid out the planning tools necessary to utilize CSD, such as traffic calming, aesthetic design treatment, cultural resource management, visual resource management, public participation, and flexibility in design. Additionally, the publication acknowledged the need for further research utilizing CSD by including draft research statements that focused on areas such as roadside design’s effect on drivers, be it through stress or perceptual selection and memory; street tree research synthesis; the visual impact of transportation projects; and the importance of and measurement of aesthetics related to transportation projects. The approach was also a movement for professionals in the field to get out of their silos, bringing transportation professionals from many areas of expertise together to collaborate. This unique cross-sectoral collaboration marked a wider acceptance of CSD. Brian Ray, an engineer and colleague who began his career in transportation engineering at the same time I did, says the principles of excellence in “thinking beyond the pavement” were about both process and product. This was revolutionary in a sense; I had been taught in engineering school that our ultimate focus was on the product, which would be a “safe” roadway or structure that was delivered on time and under budget. There was very little focus on the process, especially when it didn’t involve the engineering part of things. Ray explains that engineers need to ask themselves these questions about the projects they’re undertaking: “How do I go out and understand the issues leading to the need for this project? How do I get out and understand what those community needs are? How can I best share with them about the transportation need? How do I engage stakeholders so that they can provide insight and feedback throughout the whole process?” These questions help lead us to take steps to learn more about the context and the people who would be affected by a project. With the WisDOT example, I could have stepped outside the bounds of the highway and talked with farmers whose land was along the highway, and with town councils and mayors whose downtowns would be affected, and asked what they wanted from any kind of transportation improvement project. I could have talked with them about what the

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state wanted, and I could have engaged in a productive conversation about how their goals and the state goals could align. Answers to such questions would then inform the questions an engineer would ask about the product, which Ray says would include the following: “How do I identify products that are appropriate for that location? How do I identify products that are clean and easy for the constituents to understand so they know what we’re trying to show them? How do I ultimately get to products that lead to that intersection, that roadway, that corridor, whatever it might be, in such a way that the products address the transportation need but within the context of the project location or community need?” For Highway 12, I could have found ways to bring the transportation design ideas and scenarios to community members to get their feedback and enable them to learn how the scenarios might affect them. The goal would be to collectively come to a compromise, but that has to be done through providing a space for engagement and learning. This concept of seeing our roadways within a community or natural environment rather than a means to get through a community might seem obvious now. So does getting input from the people whose problem you’re trying to solve. But in the late 1990s, when I was working on that WisDOT project, there were no widely held concepts like CSD in transportation engineering that I could look to for guidance. CSD is more commonly practiced today, but in the late 1990s it was a completely new concept, especially in transportation engineering. Courses in transportation engineering continued to emphasize the more traditional standards regarding traffic flow theory and urban roadway design. Since that time, roundabout theory, and multimodal quality-of-service performance metrics, which are more aligned with CSD, have become more common. And today, CSD is still not taught in a very robust way in engineering school, except at the University of Kentucky. Around the same time that CSD was beginning to be utilized by planners and engineers across the country, a parallel movement was happening around smart design in urban city centers. CSD focused more on rural highways and suburbanizing corridors, like the one I was tasked to analyze in Wisconsin; it wasn’t a concept focused on urban centers. Leaders, planners, and engineers from cities were starting to

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discuss complete streets concepts,5 in which the safety of all users, not just drivers, is considered in the design of streets and a complete road grid. In response, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) was formed in 1996 to work with member cities as a counterpart to state transportation officials associated with AASHTO. NACTO guidelines are essentially a subset of AASHTO guidelines for design of an urban roadway; they refer only to design and do not articulate the vision, values, goals, and outcomes of the process, as CSD does. Essentially, the NACTO guidelines are AASHTO guidelines (laid out in detail in the Green Book), but they do a better job of technically showing the flexibility that a design engineer has. NACTO sought to create a set of best practices and guidelines to guide transportation professionals and agencies on practices that better met urban needs, as compared with state highways. State departments of transportation began to slowly integrate these concepts to change their project delivery processes or guidelines. NACTO guidelines were first adopted by a state DOT in 2013, when Washington State got on board with the concept.6 While the emergence of NACTO and the concepts it supports isn’t specifically connected to CSD, during that period of time there was a broader movement across the profession to rethink the guidelines for transportation planning and engineering. The way we had been doing things wasn’t working for communities, so a different approach was required. Some states acknowledged the need to take this approach with the emergence of CSD. After the 1998 “Thinking Beyond the Pavement” conference, CSD was adopted by five pilot states (Minnesota, Maryland, Connecticut, Kentucky, and Utah).7 But before NACTO or even the wide-scale adoption of CSD, there were people like Walter Kulash. Kulash was a consultant at the community planning and design firm Glatting Jackson when I heard him speak in the late 1990s about an alternative design for the Wisconsin highway project that I had left. He had been hired by the local chapter of the Sierra Club and other local environmental interests to analyze alternative approaches to the design of the proposed improvements for Highway 12, the very same project that had pushed me to think differently about my work as an engineer.8

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Figure 2-4  Instead of widening the road, Walter Kulash’s alternative State Highway 12 proposal sought to address the safety problem by including a median ditch and reducing the curvature and footprint of the roadway. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

Kulash pushed back against the recommendation of the WisDOT engineers to expand the roadway to a divided four-lane highway, arguing that existing and forecasted traffic volumes did not require it. Kulash kept asking “Why?” He proposed a design option that WisDOT used for the safe travel of the Amish in Wisconsin, providing a “lane” for horse-and-buggy travel that doubled as a wide gravel shoulder (figure 2-4). He also separated the two through lanes to decrease the number of head-on collisions. Kulash didn’t stop there. He addressed the land use issues raised by the farmers by considering the impact to agricultural lands and including an expansion of access that would facilitate the urban-suburban development of the farmlands outside of Madison. He challenged the need for four lanes that WisDOT had proposed

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in the original design. The four lanes were initially deemed necessary by WisDOT to allow for projected travel demand and to allow for passing opportunities around the slow-moving agricultural equipment. Back then, forecasts were made on the basis of straight-line growth— whatever the rate of development and traffic volume was in the past, it was assumed that the growth would increase steadily and in the same way beyond that. There was no demand management conversation and no discussion about whether the community wanted this growth in the future. Kulash pointed out that if the four lanes were built, the land uses along the corridor would change and rural residential sprawl would become an issue. If the DOT wanted to support the counties and townships in their work to keep the area rural, then a divided two-lane roadway was all that would be needed to accommodate the demand and safety issues as long as wide gravel shoulders were created so that farm equipment did not get in the way. He also questioned the belief that the new design should accommodate higher speeds than those posted, which was standard practice at the time. So, his plan decreased the curvature and footprint of the roadway expansion by reducing the design speed from 70–75 miles per hour to 60 mph and suggested it should be a two-lane roadway with wide shoulders. All of this cumulatively would reduce the amount of land needed to accommodate the footprint of the highway because the width, the curvature, and the need for runoff space for each side would be less. It also minimized the need for stormwater management and resources to construct the new highway, which would ultimately make the project less impactful on the farmland and less expensive. Despite all of Kulash’s recommendations, WisDOT proceeded with the project as planned: it built a divided four-lane highway for a speed of 70 mph, to the detriment of farmers along that corridor. WisDOT did this because the governor, the secretary of transportation, and the businesses in the Wisconsin Dells thought it was important to access the Madison market. This approach reminds me of what a colleague, Margi Bradway, has said: “The pull for a ribbon cutting is strong. The desire to get the project done overcomes the desire to have the project done right.” Even though the state refused to test Kulash’s recommendation

Approaches to Transportation Engineering and Planning    39

against its performance metrics or those of the community, his approach to the project was one of many in the mid-1990s that showcased the progression of roadway design and planning to consider the surrounding communities. During this time, communities started to question the community public health, social cohesion, economic, and environmental impacts of these large road projects. People are generally not against roadways; rather, they’re against the impact of a design if it does not take into account issues other than level of service, safety of vehicular drivers, and on-time and on-budget measures. Simply put, communities don’t really care about the engineering standards we’re trained in if they are hurt by them. Kulash understood this and was one of the pioneers who was not content to be held to only four metrics of success. His metrics include making street or transportation projects meet the accessibility and safety needs of all users and land uses (urban, rural, suburban), and in integrating these needs and goals, Kulash was practicing CSD.9 Now in partial retirement—while keeping himself in the field freelancing with the Southern Environmental Law Center—Walter Kulash believes strongly in the need for engineers to put context at the center of their work. While you can now find a definition of CSD on many state DOT websites, it’s not necessarily mandatory standard practice in a lot of states. To that point, nor are NACTO guidelines. All of these are merely suggestions that some states support more than others. For all of these concepts in the world of transportation, there are no set standards, just widely accepted concepts couched under guidelines. Some guidelines are more accepted than others in certain professions, such as those I learned in engineering school that favored designing for faster speeds on wide-open highways. Because that is what is taught in many engineering schools, it can be hard for engineers to push back against what they perceive as the standards within their profession. But good designers build in more flexibility around the guidelines over the course of their careers by utilizing their experience and becoming more comfortable with the research regarding what works. CSD guidelines are not standardized in engineering practice, but they exist for those who want to think outside of what was traditionally learned in engineering school. Additionally, AASHTO and NACTO

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are very clear that they provide guidelines and not standards (even though many engineers and planners see them as standards). Although CSD was a cross-sectoral movement, it was led primarily by planners and advocates who wanted to see better land use practice on the rural and suburbanizing roadways they were working on. State DOTs and their engineers were involved, but CSD wasn’t widely adopted by the agencies that carry out most transportation projects across the country. A few states, though, have integrated CSD principles in some form into their planning processes, including New Jersey,10 New York,11 Washington,12 Minnesota,13 Kentucky,14 Utah,15 and Maryland.16 Several of those states were also involved in pilot programs after the “Thinking Beyond the Pavement” conference,17 and many of them still include these principles as part of their approach. While these states seem to be very aligned with CSD’s principles and values, their inclusion on the ground relies heavily on the project lead. Project leads, especially in progressive agencies, do have a bit more license for flexibility, but in state agencies, where standard practices aren’t necessarily challenged, it can be difficult to go outside the boundaries of one’s training. And though CSD was a novel way to approach rural and suburbanizing roadway design, it didn’t really give a greater license for flexibility from a state agency standpoint. The movement that really did that—which was also happening more or less in parallel to CSD at the state DOT level—would come to be called performance-based Practical Design. Whereas CSD came about through preservation of rural main streets and communities championed by planners and advocates, performance-based Practical Design came out of the need to slim budgets while still meeting a wider range of needs within states and communities from state transportation offices.

Performance-Based Practical Design Performance-based Practical Design was first adopted in 2005 by the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) to complete already established priority transportation projects—in this case, mostly roadway repair and updating—within financial constraints posed by

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shrinking state budgets.18 Note that the methodology is interchangeably called performance-based Practical Design, Practical Design, Practical Solutions, or Practical Improvements. All of these essentially mean the same thing: attempting to save money on one project by designing for a more focused set of outcomes and performance metrics than what the initial scope would have laid out without blindly applying maximum guidelines to every part of the design. The objective was to save money on an individual project that could be invested across the system. For consistency, I’ll use the term “Practical Design” most often. The decades-long lag time between design and implementation of highway projects poses a challenge to all projects’ budgeting—increases in costs of materials, changes in political expectations, decreases in purchasing power of the gas tax. This is true for projects across the United States, certainly not just in Missouri. Projects are often added to the state priority list decades before they come up for implementation. In the interim, the surrounding communities and their needs may have changed, and they may push back against a project. At times, budgetary constraints lead to changes in the project at the time of implementation. At the time the guidelines were adopted in Missouri, MoDOT’s chief engineer, Kevin Keith, saw that the reduced state budget and state roadbuilding guidelines were at odds and didn’t match up with existing needs of the communities. “The question then became, ‘How can we deliver a highway system that meets the needs of taxpayers and still fits within a sharply reduced budget?,’” said Keith in Public Roads in 2010.19 “Soon MoDOT developed the concept of practical design: Building good projects everywhere—rather than perfect projects somewhere—will yield a great transportation system in the end.” Keith was saying that as engineers, we can be overly focused on making one technically perfect roadway, and in that mode we can sometimes go overboard by delivering much more than what the community needs at that time. In the more traditional mode of planning and engineering, state guidelines often say that whenever we “improve” a roadway segment, for example, on interstate projects, we will also need to add twelve-foot shoulders both inside and outside the road for improved safety for cars and trucks

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needing to stop, such as for a breakdown, being pulled over for speeding, or just slightly running off the road with distracted driving. But MoDOT’s more practical approach allowed for a bit more flexibility to design within the specific project’s need rather than bringing the scope beyond that. For example, think about a rural roadway with a bridge improvement project. The entire corridor that this bridge sits in has six-foot-wide shoulders for its entire length. There are no expected improvement projects on the existing corridor on either side of the bridge, and there have been no safety issues related to shoulder width. However, traditional guidelines tell you that the maximum shoulder width should be twelve feet. Would you really need to add the cost of an additional twelve feet of bridge deck for the length of the bridge? Your engineer’s judgment should prompt you to ask, “Does the standard or guideline apply to the unique circumstances I am seeing and hearing from the community?” Kevin Keith of MoDOT saw these contradictions between the actual need and the design guidelines, and it became clear to him that a “good” transportation system is one in which the engineers have greater flexibility to look beyond widening and straightening a road. Nikiforos Stamatiadis, professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Engineering, has also worked with the State of Kentucky to adopt Practical Design concurrently with the work being done at MoDOT. Stamatiadis and his colleagues in Kentucky wrote and published the first guidelines and principles for Practical Design in 2008.20 He continues to be one of the national thought leaders on Practical Design, and he has actively worked to bring the concept into the University of Kentucky’s curriculum (currently, the university seems to be the only school to integrate the concept thoroughly into engineering school curricula). The 2008 report that Stamatiadis coauthored states: The most critical component of Practical Solutions in planning and design is the definition and clarification of the initial project concept (its specific goals and objectives), since it will be the corner stone of the project and used to significantly reduce the cost and impact of a project. A fundamental issue that must be addressed from the outset is the reexamination of how design element guide-

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lines are viewed. In order to achieve a practical design they cannot be viewed [as] minimum thresholds or that always increasing their magnitude results in a better quality project.21

“We don’t always need to go to the extreme so we can create the best project for one location while at the same time we are leaving everything outside unaccomplished and leaving everything behind,” Stamatiadis says. “It was sort of a forcing of us to do things more community based and addressing the context issues of the roadway, and at the same time balancing the financial constraints that a lot of the agencies had and still are having.” Whereas CSD, as I discussed previously, created a shift among transportation professionals to look at the context of a project and ask whether these grand, open highways were actually needed, Practical Design focused on what was actually needed to solve the problem from a practical and contextual standpoint. Because of the emphasis on cost-effectiveness that could help address state budget issues, Practical Design gave engineers a bit more freedom within their work at DOTs. “Practical Design allowed engineers to use their judgment and utilize the entire spectrum of the value ranges that the guidelines provided for,” says Stamatiadis. “The guidelines still indicated that we need to build a shoulder, but now we are thinking ‘What is the vehicle that I want to accommodate?’ and then designing with that in mind . . . in a practical manner.” This did lead to some DOTs loosening the guidelines with the goal of cost-effectiveness and better community-focused projects. It has helped us move a bit further beyond the approach on which the previous half-century of “one way of doing it” was based. They did this by providing the designer with more flexibility based on actual on-theground conditions and the needs of the multitude of users of that roadway. This can be accomplished whether you are scoping a project for the first time or using someone else’s twenty-year-old scope definition. The traditional design guidelines had been narrowly reinterpreted by the states from AASHTO guidelines (the Green Book) to reduce a perception of liability: if designers were allowed to design on their own, it would increase risk and the engineer and the state would not be able to defend themselves in court. The problem with this assumption

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is that if you blindly follow a guideline without acknowledging the on-the-ground context and the needs of the users, it doesn’t necessarily decrease your liability risk. It also puts you in a position to add unnecessary elements to a project that cost more money and could have detrimental impacts on land use and community livability. Using Practical Design for projects that were scoped twenty or thirty years prior is also important because there was likely a reason that the project wasn’t carried out earlier. Usually the projects that were considered “perfect” from that traditional design standpoint were too big or too complicated to fund at the time. But when the designer is given the flexibility to look at the problem without using the “perfect” engineering scenario and to narrow the scope, a project that was not previously prioritized could proceed faster and save lives more immediately. Washington State secretary of transportation Roger Millar used a specific example he had seen in Tennessee, where the state DOT is required to balance the budget every year. In one project, the issue was a mountain highway road where cars kept running off the side of the roadway because there was no barrier between the road and the adjacent cliff. “The first things the engineers did was ask, ‘What are all the problems in this place?,’” Millar said. They were leading with the question, with the goal of meeting all of the modern design guidelines according to perceptions about how any highway should function, not how this highway should function. With that perception of expectation of what their job was, their solutions were flattening, straightening, and widening the highway, which would have been a $100 million project. When they were urged by the DOT to look just at the specific issue—keeping cars on the road—the solution was fairly simple and quick: put up a guardrail. Part of this approach is realizing the following when making a segment of road seemingly “perfect” according to the guidelines: • You could make the “perfect road” in the wrong spot for the wrong reasons. • You could make something perfect in one spot and leave the rest of the system unsafe.

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• You could make something perfect in one spot and end up actually creating a more dangerous situation. Additionally, if it was a $100 million project, it would potentially take years to get it funded, and there would continue to be the safety risk of cars falling off the roadway. A quote from John Tongue, MD, former chair of the Oregon Transportation Safety Commission, at a meeting I attended in the late 1990s comes to mind in this context: “You can’t design your way out of bad behavior.” This was the first time I realized we need to look more closely at why there are collisions and fatalities on our roads and to look at the practical solutions to prevent those collisions and fatalities from happening. Cost-conscious states such as Tennessee that had to be careful about budgets realized they could have engineers and designers look more closely at the current context and allow for projects to be scaled back to address the actual existing problem. Some states saw Practical Design as a way to meet multiple needs, such as designing safe complete streets for multimodal use in communities that were clamoring for better safety guidelines for all modes. But also, it was seen as a way to reduce overdesigning or not actually creating safe roads based on modern research. When some state DOTs decided to embrace Practical Design, it meant grappling with some upstream issues, such as how a project was scoped in the past and by whom. They have had to learn how to approach the original stakeholders with the idea that there would be a conversation with the community to find just the right set of solutions. And they have had to work to revise the design guidelines and project delivery process to allow for the design planners and engineers to have flexibility to achieve the desired outcomes in a more cost-efficient way. In many states, there can be many layers of design review by a hierarchy of engineers, and any engineer who does not agree with a more innovative way of solving a traffic flow issue can prevent the design from moving forward. Practical Design created a way for planners and engineers to document the context, the unique circumstances, and community desires

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and align those with the rationale behind the proposed solution. That helped prevent one dissenting engineer from holding up a project. In reality, the state agency lawyers will always tell you that you’re liable if you don’t make a strong justification for either using the traditional narrowly defined guidelines or using an alternative solution. Therefore, the liability is not reduced by blindly following guidelines; rather, it’s reduced by clearly articulating the thought process behind a decision, whether it’s more traditional or more aligned with Practical Design. Pennsylvania is another state that embraced Practical Design as a viable model for transportation planning and design; it came upon the idea of a Practical Design model prior to MoDOT’s coining of the term—for the same reasons, though: the need to slash state budgets. Because of a budget crisis, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) worked to identify ways to complete longneeded transportation projects but to give designers increased flexibility in the design guidelines, and to do it within a reasonable budget. This led to the Smart Transportation program, launched in 2009,22 which was guided by Practical Design methods and presented an opportunity to reenvision a project on US Route 202 in Pennsylvania that had been scoped decades prior. The Pennsylvania and New Jersey DOTs’ “Smart Transportation Guidebook” says, “Smart Transportation recommends a new approach to roadway planning and design, in which transportation investments are tailored to the specific needs of each project. The different contexts—financial, community, land use, transportation, and environmental—determine the design of the solution. The best transportation solution arises from a process in which a multi-disciplinary team, considering a wide range of solutions, works closely with community.”23 It goes on to summarize the principles: • • • • • •

Tailor solutions to the context. Tailor the approach. Plan all projects in collaboration with the community. Plan for alternative transportation modes. Use sound professional judgment. Scale the solution to the size of the problem.24

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The Smart Transportation program opened up the design guidelines and made them more flexible, which also added the context of the roadway segment and the type of roadway to the mix so that it would be easier to understand context and apply a range of acceptable designs to meet a wider range of needs. In doing this, it incorporated CSD discussions into the design process and started framing the development of Practical Solutions and Practical Design into the design guidelines. Let’s go back a bit to 2005—before the Smart Transportation program—when PennDOT first began to rethink previous plans on a nine-mile expressway bypass around Philadelphia on US 202 that had an estimated price tag of $465 million. Beyond the cost, there was concern about negative impacts in the communities of Montgomeryville and Doylestown, through which the bypass would be built. These were fairly affluent suburbs and had political power and means to hire lawyers to push back. The concerns were heard, and with the state’s focus on concepts of Practical Design, a door was opened to a new proposal. “What happened is we somehow got them to say that [they hadn’t] looked at any alternatives except a highway,” says Lucy Gibson, who was hired by one of the towns fighting the expansion. “We asked, what about looking at a two-lane road alternative? It provides some extra capacity, but it’s not going to induce more traffic and then just force the next hand of the section that has to be a highway.” In the end, with a Practical Design approach, Gibson and the town that hired her had their alternative accepted—the bypass was a twolane parkway design with medians, roundabouts, and a parallel paved bike and pedestrian trail (figure 2-5). The cost of the parkway ended up being only $200 million, less than half the cost of the original proposal.25 The parkway opened in 2012 to great community fanfare. Because Practical Design offers a fairly easy-to-digest framework for engineers and planners, it can both be used on an individual project basis and adopted as the overarching agency guidelines. One challenge, though, is that even though many state DOTs are adopting this model, it’s not mandated. Missouri,26 Utah,27 and Washington28 mandate the use of Practical Design on various levels. Outside of that, states such as Colorado,29 Hawaii,30 and Kentucky (which has continued to use Practical Design principles and practices from 2008)31 encourage its

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Figure 2-5  The Pennsylvania US Route 202 Practical Design outcome was a much less expensive multimodal parkway. It was lauded by the community for helping maintain the livability standards of the surrounding area. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

use without a full mandate, and Oregon32 allows it to be used on a voluntary basis by project managers. On a cautionary note, some states have found that when there is no consistent training in best practices to identify how to analyze risk, Practical Design can be misinterpreted as pure cost cutting at the project level. If seen in that way, what the community wanted gets cut because it is not deemed as cost-efficient within the four performance metrics I noted in chapter 1: reduction of delay, reduction in vehicular users’ deaths, and on-time and on-budget implementation (the Rose Quarter Project, discussed in chapter 1, is a great example of this). Additionally, some engineers get this confused with Value Engineering (VE). “Practical solutions should not be confused with or viewed

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as Value Engineering, which is typically applied as a cost-cutting approach to a project that has been designed with the aim of reducing the cost of the accepted design and its various features,” wrote Stamatiadis and his colleague Don Hartman in the Transportation Research Record. “Practical solutions aim to develop appropriate and contextual solutions for projects that consider and balance the various project requirements.”33 The reason Practical Design was being implemented was to find ways to use limited resources to be able to achieve a system-wide benefit not only to the users of the roadway but also to the community it runs through. But that can get lost when the concept gets watered down. It is still up to a project lead to use performance-based Practical Design in every state. The other challenge is that it takes a lot of energy and time to take a project that did not go through a well-vetted scoping process with the community and start looking for the range of issues in a corridor or intersection or interchange. That’s where another concept, demand management, can help in thinking about broader, agency-level transportation planning. Transportation demand management is a way to think about how DOTs across the country can start to be proactive about managing demand in more creative ways.

Demand Management The concept of demand management emerged primarily through the use of bike, walk, transit, high-occupancy transit and high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, and high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, which would help address traffic congestion that seemed to persist in urban areas no matter how many lanes were put in. The idea has been to move more people, not vehicles, to help solve an issue without having to do major roadwork.34 On freeways, HOV lanes began to be adopted as early as the 1970s, but they became utilized much more from the mid-1980s and into the 1990s.35 Then, in 1998, San Diego, California, became the first area to convert carpool lanes into HOT lanes on its I-15 corridor, where it implemented dynamic pricing based on peak travel times. The emergence

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of utilizing HOV and HOT lanes shows that there are more strategic ways to look at our corridors through the lens of demand management. CSD and Practical Design contain great tools for understanding the lay of the land and finding the design flexibility to make a construction project happen on the ground at a project design level once there is consensus about the purpose of the project. They are also often used in tandem with demand management to utilize existing space in the roadway right-of-way more efficiently for the short, medium, and long term. For example, an added-capacity project, especially in an urban area, must consider alternative ways for people to move around—by time of day and mode of transport—so that the entirety of peak hour demand is not drive-alone trips. To avoid overbuilding one facility for one mode for the next fifty to seventy-five years, demand management strategies must be considered and funded as part of the overall transportation improvements. The success of Practical Design and context-sensitive design depends on professionals working collaboratively with cities, counties, transit districts, and others to determine how people want to move, not assuming that drivers want to use their vehicle for every trip. That is where demand management comes in. You may be asked to add a bike lane to an existing road through community engagement. The decision to widen the road, use the existing shoulder, or use the space of an existing lane and redistribute it to add a bike lane are all choices. But the use of a shoulder or redistribution of existing space means we need to see people’s demand for travel as the goal and not assume demand is for vehicular travel for all trips at all times. What modes to prioritize, especially during peak times, is also a policy choice to be made by policy decision-makers. The Federal Highway Administration defines transportation demand management (TDM) as a way to deal with traffic congestion by “providing travelers, regardless of whether they drive alone or not, with informed choices of travel route, time, and location—not just travel mode.”36 Strategies include ride-sharing options, restrictions for air quality mitigation, development mitigation, and increased multimodal transportation solutions. The FHWA further notes that “TDM can be effectively integrated into the planning processes at all levels using an

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objectives-driven, performance-based approach that includes a process for setting specific, measurable objectives.”37 The approach is meant to react flexibly to an increase in traffic. Rather than assuming that an increase in traffic would require additional highway lanes (which has proven only to induce more traffic rather than decrease it38), it provides alternative ways for people to travel. In a sense, transportation planners have the power to shift people’s travel habits through solutions that provide more options. The concept of demand management is not a new one, and methodologies have been used in various forms concurrently with CSD and Practical Design. While demand management does involve some elements of CSD and Practical Design, the focus is a bit more zoomed out and helps us look at a larger scope of the issue. Rather than looking at one specific project and related solutions, it involves looking at how to reframe the system. Least-Cost Planning One tool related to TDM that some DOTs have been using since the mid-1990s is least-cost planning (LCP). Drawn from the utility sector’s efforts to reduce energy costs in the 1970s, LCP is a set of principles that give planners and engineers a structure for transparent decision-making in weighing the costs and benefits of a project, both financially and to the value of the community. It also provides a framework for a more varied set of solutions that aren’t restricted to the roadway in question (e.g., moving beyond a solution to widen a highway). While some of the concepts and goals are similar to Practical Design, it’s important to know the distinction between the two. Leastcost planning is a planning tool that helps identify a set of projects and programs; Practical Design is a design tool that helps during the design phase of projects laid out during planning. A 1995 report published by the FHWA that examined LCP as an emerging transportation concept explained the principles as follows: • An emphasis on developing system-level plans (e.g., regional or MPO [metropolitan planning organization] level plans) to explore policies that can only be fully evaluated at that level

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• Consideration of all alternatives, including demand management approaches • Explicit accounting for uncertainty in the estimation of benefits and costs • Public involvement in the decision-making process • Coordination among jurisdictions • Monitoring and updating plans to reflect new information about demand for different for [sic] facilities and the cost-effectiveness of different approaches.39 The report noted that these principles paralleled with existing regulations for MPOs to consider when making their metropolitan transportation plans. What LCP essentially does is provide a framework to conduct more comprehensive cost-benefit analyses. But it’s different from a simple economic analysis that would take place in the private sector, which would consider benefits solely as they relate to profits. Rather, benefits in LCP analyses in the public sector include social benefits. The FHWA report gave the following examples of what this could look like in transportation: “Benefits might be the decreased travel costs to commuters that result from a new HOV lane; decreased air pollution for people living and working near highways; or a feeling of stewardship enjoyed by some people when the government enacts policies to discourage sprawl and increase transit ridership.”40 The problem this helps to address is in the way regional transportation plans are developed. Typically it takes years, sometimes decades, before a project is added to the implementation list, and there are baked-in assumptions that meet the values and goals of the time when the project was added to the list. These previously scoped projects came out of a state highway planning process that reacted to the projected or forecasted demand for travel. Those plans lacked a system-level approach based on added value to society that considered environmental, societal, and economic outcomes rather than focusing on intersectionby-intersection solutions. LCP offered a way to consider more broadly how and why people travel and the impacts of the demand for travel by different modes. It

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also provided a way to look at the value of the project or plan to the community at the time the project will be implemented. By “value” I don’t mean just cost savings but also an intrinsic and social value to the community based on land use, conservation, and racial equity. By nature, tools such as Practical Design offer a way to look at a transportation problem by dealing with the very specific issue at hand, but there aren’t necessarily built-in metrics to measure the “value” to a community. Community engagement is technically required for any project, but Practical Design alone doesn’t really provide a framework for community participation in a project, and it doesn’t offer a broader perspective. On the other hand, CSD offers more in terms of engaging with the community, but similar to Practical Design, it looks more closely at the specific location of the project rather than the system as a whole. Both are handy tools within the concept of LCP, but alone they don’t address the system-level planning component. For that, LCP does offer the following three major benefits: • A framework to evaluate and discuss with the community a range of outcomes using scenario planning • A fuller spectrum of scenarios including demand management techniques (which CSD and Practical Design could be a part of ) • Help in reducing later risk for a project because trade-offs are discussed openly and a fuller range of solutions are evaluated Oregon gives an example of how LCP as a demand management tool from the planning level led to an approach that looked at modeling data and creating solutions that managed demand. In the early 1990s, Oregon was the first in the nation to use scenario modeling for transportation and land use planning by using an LCP demand management approach that led to innovative solutions around land use and transportation planning called Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality (LUTRAQ).41 Scenario modeling involves looking at alternative futures and testing ways to meet the purpose and need with different combinations of investments. In 1988, plans were being laid by the Oregon Department of

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Transportation to build a new freeway in Washington County—an area of approximately one hundred square miles in the west Portland metropolitan region. At the time, the county was one of the fastestgrowing suburban parts of the metro region, where the farm and vineyard land just west of the city of Portland was starting to be enveloped by urban sprawl. The freeway, called the Westside Bypass, was a plan that dated back to the mid-twentieth century, when all state DOTs included projects with growth projections based solely on car-oriented, straight-line growth patterns that were typical of the time. However, with such rapid growth in the region, farmers, vintners, and environmentalists were concerned that a brand-new highway would only temporarily relieve the traffic issues while also taking up valuable land. Additionally, community members were particularly concerned about air quality and loss of the sense of community as new development was implemented.42 In response, in 1995, the farmers, vintners, and environmentalists worked with 1000 Friends of Oregon with foundation grant money to conduct a study that looked at the issue from the LCP perspective. (I began working at 1000 Friends of Oregon soon after the LUTRAQ study was completed.) This was a first-of-its-kind demand management scenario modeling process that sought to challenge the existing assumption that demand had to be met by highway improvements only. Use of performance metrics back then was rudimentary, but generally the metrics included data regarding automobile ownership, percentage of trips taken by each mode of transportation (mode share), trips per household, vehicle miles traveled, and congestion. This led to the creation of recommendations that reduced long-distance trips while also decreasing air pollutants and increasing accessibility to places by all modes by focusing on high-density nodal development connected by high-capacity transit (development around bus and transit stations in a high-density mixed-use environment). LUTRAQ’s methodology showed that through strategic transportation planning, demand could be managed around transportation corridors and accessibility to jobs increased by doing the following: • Providing a higher level of service for transit users, whether higher speed or more frequent service

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• Improving local road connectivity • Increasing density in downtowns and light-rail stations throughout the region with mixed-use development • Increasing parking costs for drivers • Decreasing transit costs for users Rather than channeling all travelers to the previously proposed freeway, planners could create multiple options. In the end, the LUTRAQ scenario included a combination of improvements to the existing highways, improved transit, market strategies, and higher-density mixed-use development that was more amenable to the local community than a highways-only scenario. This would have the result of decreasing work trips in a single-occupant vehicle by 22.5 percent; increasing transit, biking, and walking trips by 27 percent; decreasing congestion by 18 percent; increasing accessibility to jobs by 21 percent; and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 7.9 percent.43 To transform that vision into reality, LUTRAQ proposed the following three principles for public action: • Land-use plans should direct higher intensity development to locations well-served by transit and should ensure that development is designed for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders, as well as auto drivers. • The transportation system should serve and reinforce the nature of that development. • Market strategies should further support that development by correcting some of the current distortions in the pricing of the transportation system and other public facilities.44

It further asked that local agencies and communities define these alternative scenarios rather than the state DOT, which was less keyed in to local needs. In the end, ODOT adopted the LUTRAQ alternative as the negotiated least-cost plan, which would provide enhanced bus service, a new east–west light-rail line, spot capacity improvements to the existing highway network (instead of creating an entire new lane, including less land use intensive improvements to a congestion spot,

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such as an auxiliary lane to allow for merge and weave, or extending an off-ramp farther back), and increased connectivity of local roads throughout the county as well as land use densification for light-rail stations and business districts. It also started to model the effect of pricing to park and the incentive of providing free monthly transit passes through places of employment. The LUTRAQ projects, programs, and land use changes were ultimately incorporated into the fifty-year regional transportation and land use plan. Over the past twenty years, many of these have been completed and have surpassed expectations on both the land use development and transportation sides. It serves as an important example of how a region can use an LCP model to reenvision outdated demand assumptions on a regional planning scale. Moreover, CSD and Practical Design can be included at each stage of the planning process that follows the regional LUTRAQ scenario. In fact, improvements to existing highways within the West Side of the region have used Practical Design to accommodate increased travel demand by providing drivers with information on travel times by routes, improving use of frontage roads, constructing auxiliary lanes between specific interchanges, and restriping lanes to reduce congestion caused by merge and weave movement. This project also led to a wider-scale adoption of LCP by ODOT. Having learned lessons from LUTRAQ, the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) adopted a policy in 1999 called 1G.1-Major Improvements, which recommended that all other transportation options (e.g., transit, pedestrian, biking) be explored before the state considers adding vehicular capacity, including protecting the existing system, improving efficiency of the existing system, adding capacity to the existing system, and, finally, adding new facilities to the system.45 However, ODOT did not provide guidance to project leads or teams on how to implement this policy until it was directed to do so by the state legislature. In 2009, the Oregon state legislature directed ODOT to develop an LCP methodology to complete a cost-benefit analysis for short- and long-term planning called Mosaic.46 The intent was to allow ODOT project managers to create a structure for proactively engaging toward a least-cost project. This tool was developed for use by the director of

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the agency as needed; it was not required by the legislature for every project or projects over a certain dollar threshold. As explained by ODOT, the goals of the Mosaic methodology included the following: • Enable fair comparison of different kinds of transportation solutions, including both projects and programs • Evaluate their impacts in monetary terms where possible • Include items that cannot be monetized in the analysis • Use available data and tools wherever possible • Make Mosaic flexible so that it can be used in different contexts47 Mosaic methodology included performance metrics for the following outcomes: accessibility, equity, mobility, economic vitality, funding of the transportation system/finance, quality of life and livability, environmental stewardship, land use and growth management, and safety and security. Each of these elements held indicators that would guide the decision-making. For example, “economic vitality” included identifying economic impacts related to such options as more efficient transportation services to analyze changes in productivity from increased connectivity and changes in the total value of exports and imports. This structure lays out a way to start conversations with communities about what they value and how to weigh different regional plans or projects. Essentially, Mosaic brings demand management (by way of LCP) into the planning policy of an agency. In addition to Oregon, the states of Washington, Virginia, and Vermont48 have included some elements of LCP in their planning for prioritization of projects and use the methodology in project scoping and development. In most cases (as with all of the tools I’ve mentioned in this chapter), LCP isn’t mandated; rather, it is suggested. LCP shows demand management from a larger-scale planning level. Integrated corridor management has a similar approach but focuses on the project level. Integrated Corridor Management The FHWA defines integrated corridor management (ICM) as “the coordination of individual network operations between adjacent

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facilities that creates an interconnected system capable of cross-network travel management.”49 This definition also has a more expansive definition of the “corridor” that a project manager is assigned to for an improvement project. In other words, it’s not just the roadway in question; it is “a combination of discrete, adjacent surface transportation networks (e.g., freeway, arterial, transit networks) that link the same major origins and destinations. It is defined operationally rather than geographically or organizationally.”50 The purpose of ICM is to help transportation managers see potential solutions in an entire system rather than along the corridor that seems to be experiencing the problem. For example, if a highway is experiencing high volumes of traffic, the ICM approach would see the adjacent streets and transit corridors, as well as different modes of transportation, as options for creating a transportation solution based on efficient use of existing capacity within the system, not on just one roadway. The four major elements of ICM include demand management through HOV and HOT lanes, ride-sharing, telework, and congestion pricing; load balancing through parallel roadway facilities and transit capacity; reduction of the delay caused by an event through better response times and information provided to users of the system; and capital improvements, which include improved data collection, analysis, and sharing between transportation providers. A project that showed how this works was an eighteen-month FHWA demonstration project carried out in Dallas, Texas, between 2013 and 2014 that showcased how corridors can be managed as a system, no matter the owner, rather than individual assets. ICM can also provide real-time information to travelers; reduce travel delay in all modes; decrease fuel consumption, emissions, and incidents; improve reliability and predictability of the system; and optimize existing transportation systems, giving a longer life to past investments.51 The Texas project targeted the Interstate 75 corridor because of its congestion levels and its parallel roadway and light rail. The consensus vision was to “operate the US-75 Corridor in a true multimodal, integrated, efficient, and safe fashion where the focus is on the transportation customer.”52 To that end, the FHWA looked at a series of demand management

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strategies, including the number of HOV and HOT lanes, speed on the main line, speed on frontage roads, park-and-ride utilization, light-rail utilization, and weather events. The earlier modeling results estimated an annual savings in travel time of approximately 740,000 person-hours, improvement in reliability of travel time, annual savings of about one million gallons of fuel, and a 9,400-ton reduction in mobile emissions. The analysis also found that arterials parallel to the freeway were able to handle higher traffic volumes as diversion routes, with these improvements showing as much as a 20.4:1 benefit-to-cost ratio.53 Obviously, shifting to parallel routes has to be done carefully. The arterials have to be able to handle the multimodal demand for movement, accessibility, and safety. It is important to note that these improvements were all achieved without widening a road or implementing a major construction project. The outcomes from ICM’s demand management approach show that you don’t always have to assume a building project will solve the problem. You can find capacity within the system that’s already there. Since the FHWA’s demonstration project in Dallas and its subsequent ICM implementation guide, published in 2015, the concept is being more widely used in high-volume traffic areas across the country.54 What demand management (whether in the form of least-cost planning or integrated corridor management) shows is the movement that has been made within our field to think beyond the guidelines that we’re still being taught in school. And if there are ways to reduce the growing demand for travel by one mode or one highway, an agency can apply least-cost alternatives first to see whether the more costly addition of capacity is necessary in the medium to long term. This frees up the agency to look at more pressing issues of immediate safety concerns, maintenance and operation needs, and growing areas.

Where We Are Today The emergence of these concepts over the past couple of decades shows that there is momentum to think outside the box of traditional guidelines. It shows that there are people who are thinking more about context and actual impact on the community. But challenges remain. First, context-sensitive design, demand management, and Practical

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Design aren’t typically state-required ways of doing business; rather, they are suggestions for the engineers and planners working on a project to use at their discretion. Their adoption as state policy typically needs to come from the top—DOT heads, legislature, governor—and could be further strengthened by permanent changes in federal regulations within the FHWA via the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Until that happens, it is important for individual transportation planners and engineers to know that these policies and concepts exist and there is support for them. Organizations such as the National Association of City Transportation Officials and, more recently, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, on a national level, are providing resources to transportation professionals seeking work outside the perceived guidelines. Some other associations, such as the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the American Planning Association, are helping to provide guidance on alternative performance metrics. Outside of associations, though, other organizations, particularly nonprofits (which I’ll be referencing throughout this book), are providing resources to help us think differently about how we do our work. Examples include Smart Growth America, Transportation for America, PolicyLink, and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Second, even though there has been momentum to prioritize environmental impact, leading to creative solutions such as multimodal transit design, transportation planning and engineering still does not prioritize racial and social equity (see chapter 3). I’ve often worked with transportation planners and engineers who do not understand the systemic racism inherent in decision-making in government institutions, and therefore do not understand how a racial equity approach would change the outcome, or who don’t approach their work through an environmental lens. I argue that if we don’t include both, we are not doing our job. What these nonlinear, interconnected movements within our field show is that the ideas, tools, and project examples are out there. There is a need to bring these ideas together, and we all have an important part to play in this. When you analyze how many people live and work along these

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urban corridors in our metropolitan areas, you’ll find that there are far more people impacted by health effects of transportation emissions and destruction of community economic vitality and community cohesion than there are vehicles on the roadway over the course of the day. The question is, who is benefiting from the investment, and how can we minimize or reduce the impacts to the many while benefiting those who need it most? No matter what profession you represent, a community solutions– based approach brings context and budget and conservation and equity under one umbrella. For many of my colleagues who had traditional engineering training, as I did, reframing the approach we were taught in school can certainly be overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. What I believe is that engineers, planners, architects, landscape architects, elected officials, and community members already have the data and the skills they need to find and implement better solutions for their communities. It’s a matter of joining forces in true collaboration with one another, especially with our community members. Together, we have the ability to provide project alternatives in connection with community needs from engagement efforts and to make effective mitigation efforts when necessary and applicable. A community solutions–based approach means that you need to be curious and collaborative and not start with a fixed solution that you are trying to improve on the basis of a very thin public input process. A community solutions–based approach means that you need to start from a consensus vision of what the community wants and needs, not just what one local elected official or one business wants and needs— and then work with the community to determine how a transportation investment moves the entirety of the community in that direction while simultaneously meeting a state or federal goal. People have gotten hung up on terms such as “context sensitive” and “practical” when instead we should focus on meeting a list of community-wide, consensus-based outcomes, not just traffic outcomes. The community solutions–based approach described in this book helps show how you can do this using racial equity, collaboration, and community engagement.

Chapter 3

Addressing the Legacy of Racist Transportation and Housing Policy

The origin story for transportation planning in this country stems from the exploited forced labor of Black bodies and the refusal to acknowledge Black people as human beings in this country . . . and all of our country’s highways are built above sacred Native American burial grounds. . . . So as we have this discussion about what it means to remove, redesign, or replace that infrastructure, we have to have a real conversation . . . about how even that work is harmful, disrespectful, and contributes to the legacy of racism. —Destiny Thomas, speaking at Smart Growth America’s 2021 Equity Summit1

B

lack residents in Oregon’s largest county, Multnomah County, are almost twice as likely as their White counterparts to die as a result of a traffic accident, according to a 2021 report.2 The report goes on to explicitly link these results to both the discriminatory policies and the history of systemic racism in the city of Portland and the state of Oregon.3 The exclusion of Black people was written into the state constitution when Oregon was founded in 1859.4 It was 63

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not repealed until 1926, and racist language stayed in the constitution until 2002.5 And, like most major metropolitan regions in the United States, Portland was subject to major segregationist tactics as it developed, including highway expansion and redlining. This racist legacy continues to affect Black and Brown communities in how the city is organized and who can travel through it easily and safely. “We must remember that because of our history, [even a simple question]—like whether to repair or rebuild infrastructure at the end of its useful life—becomes a discussion about racial equity,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America.6 Transportation planners and engineers need to understand and acknowledge the legacy of racism in our fields and address the harms that continue to be caused when we don’t lead with a racial equity framework. Acknowledging the Portland region’s history of racism—both the overt segregation tactics and the less obvious ways communities of color are overlooked in planning a city—was at the heart of a $5 billion transportation ballot measure the Oregon Metro Council (Metro, of which I am currently president), put to voters in 2020.7 The measure, called Get Moving 2020, had the lofty goal of not only making important improvements to the transportation system but also making significant transportation investments in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities throughout the Portland metropolitan region. The Portland metropolitan region is made up of five counties, three in Oregon (Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington Counties) and two in southern Washington State (Clark and Skamania Counties); as a whole, the region has a population of around 2.5 million. Metro’s jurisdiction is within the three Oregon counties in the Portland metropolitan region, which accounts for just over 43 percent of the state’s population. The region is predominantly White, at 72 percent (this percentage is lower in Multnomah and Washington Counties, where the city of Portland resides, at 65.7 percent and 60.8 percent, respectively).8 The 2020 Census found that while Oregon remains predominantly White, the Portland metropolitan region became even more diverse in previous years. The census reported the Hispanic population at 13.9 percent, the Asian population at 4.5 percent, the Black

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population at 1.9 percent, the Native American population at 1 percent, and the population of people who identify as two or more races at 6 percent.9 While Metro doesn’t oversee transit service (there is a regional transit service provider, TriMet), we work on transportation planning and policy and do all federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) work for large, high-capacity transit projects in the region. As an organization, our commitment to a racial equity framework was laid out in Metro’s “Strategic Plan to Advance Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” in 2017.10 This expansive transportation measure, placed on the ballot in 2020, was designed to address past harms by focusing on safety, accessibility, affordability, and health for people of color in the region. Later in the chapter, I’ll go into some of the proposals laid out in the measure. While the 2020 ballot measure failed, it’s not the end of this work. Timing was working against the measure: because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no traffic congestion to address; there were increased worries about the future of transportation and how it relates to employment; and there was opposition to the taxing structure. We had worked to engage a diverse coalition of stakeholders that represented communities of color, unions, business groups, and environmental groups. The coalition helped us look at problems of the past and channel solutions for the future through this project. The diverse coalition we built was one of the greatest successes of the initiative. While, of course, we wanted the transportation projects associated with the ballot initiative to be carried out (and we expect they will be in some form), the process was a way for us as a government agency to strengthen and deepen relationships with everyone involved in the project. Metro’s Transportation Funding Task Force, composed of thirtyfour representatives—from community-based organizations, labor groups, advocacy groups, the business community, and local and regional governments—worked together to advise Metro on the transportation corridors to prioritize, the types of projects to include in the proposal, and the funding mechanisms to employ.11 This task force model was a new approach for us. Typically, transportation decisions are made by the Joint Policy Advisory Committee

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on Transportation,12 which is primarily made up of elected officials and department heads from the region. It is not representative of many of the communities that it serves. Get Moving 2020 sought to change that structure so that community leaders could bring in people who were not at the table—namely, people of color—and challenge the White-dominant norms that are common when government agencies are involved. From the standpoint of process, the project was a success in that it brought a broad set of representatives from around the region together to create a path forward. We aren’t certain yet if this will go to the voters with another ballot measure, but our federal congressional delegation took notice of the priorities and included earmarks in national policy funding to, at the very least, focus on high-priority projects that can be accomplished quickly (e.g., safety improvements to 82nd Avenue—a former state highway long plagued by traffic accidents that largely impact people of color). We are also working to bring along elected officials who weren’t a part of the earlier process to show them how and why to lead with racial equity. A racial equity approach requires understanding the history of the community and seeking fairness in mobility and accessibility for all community members. This comes from deeply listening to the challenges the residents face and understanding how these relate to transportation, directly and indirectly. A central goal of transportation equity is to facilitate social and economic opportunities by providing access to affordable and reliable transportation based on the needs of the populations being served, particularly populations that are traditionally underserved. “Many want to have this discussion without referring to our original sin because we weren’t around for it,” Beth Osborne said. “But continuing to maintain highways that divide communities, particularly communities of color, is not a benign discussion. It is not a simple repair project. Continuing to value the time of the people passing through a community over those who live there continues the history of racism, whether those of us working now were part of the earlier decisions or not.” The past “sins,” as Osborne calls them, are what we sought to address in Portland with the Get Moving 2020 initiative. They came from

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either overtly or unintentionally leaving out the people who would experience the most negative impact from the projects. Government agencies are still set up under White-dominant standards, whether we know it or not. This top-down, hierarchical way of doing our work reinforces the racism already inherent in the system. So, by changing the feedback structure for Get Moving 2020 to a more inclusive one, specifically through the task force, we were able to challenge the way we’ve always done things and gain much better information to solve problems the community is actually experiencing. “It doesn’t undo centuries of racism and enslavement,” says Tyler Frisbee, deputy director of government affairs and policy development at Metro. “But I think part of acknowledging our role is that we have to try to make amends to give this generation the economic mobility and the social mobility that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents should have already had.” We acknowledged this by changing the structure of the feedback model and also by looking at and analyzing the data we already had through a racial equity lens. “The data tell you only what you ask,” says Frisbee. So, we asked questions such as these: Are people of color being hit more frequently? Do people of color face more significant danger in certain places? How long are commutes for people of color in specific neighborhoods? One starting point is to understand how our professions had a hand in creating some of these past harms and why it is our responsibility to address them through our work today.

Racist Zoning and Regulatory Practices Richard Rothstein details in his 2017 book, The Color of Law, how during the period of World War I the federal government’s Town Planning Division—then led by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.—collaborated with the National Conference on City Planning and the National Association of Real Estate Boards to promote segregationist policies.13 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointment of segregationists to the National Land Use Planning Committee helped to make the way for racial zoning practices in the 1920s and 1930s that were already underway at a local level. In 1911 in Baltimore, Maryland, the city council passed the first

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ordinance restricting one racial group from buying property on a block where another racial group already lived.14 This practice then took hold all over the South.15 Even though the United States Supreme Court deemed racial segregation unconstitutional in 1917 with the Buchanan v. Warley decision,16 the US government, which included local and regional jurisdictions, continued with its segregationist tactics either by ignoring the decision or by using underhanded tactics. Redlining was one such tactic. To help stimulate a recovery in the wake of the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s administration created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), which was designed to support borrowers who couldn’t afford to make payments on interest-only mortgages.17 The HOLC helped many middle- and working-class people secure one of the most important financial assets to help build generational wealth: homes.18 But this benefit was largely extended only to White people. In partnership with local real estate agents, the HOLC drew up maps for most of the major metropolitan areas around the United States that color-coded levels of mortgage lending risk from green (“best”) and blue (“still desirable”) to yellow (“definitely declining”) and red (“hazardous”). The yellow and red zones were deemed too high-risk for mortgage lending in most cities. The language used in these designations was explicitly about race. The yellow and red areas were predominantly communities of color or immigrant communities. In Portland, the Lower Albina neighborhood, where the majority of the city’s Black population lived, was redlined (see chapter 1). The “clarifying remarks” in the original map noted: “This area constitutes Portland’s ‘Melting Pot’ and is the nearest approach to a ‘slum district’ in the city. Three-quarters of the negro population of the city reside here and in addition there are some 300 Orientals, 1000 Southern Europeans and Russians.”19 (See figure 3-1.) This determination as a “slum” was entirely subjective on the part of the White assessors. The Albina neighborhood was a thriving community. (See figure 3-2.) By rejecting mortgage loans for Black and Brown people, the federal government—in partnership with local and regional governments and mortgage companies—helped to create the enormous wealth gap

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Figure 3-1  The shaded area marks the redlined Lower Albina neighborhood within a New Deal–era redlined map. This neighborhood has transformed over the decades since redlining, being the site of large-scale developments including freeway construction, three large event spaces, and a large hospital. It is also currently the site where the Rose Quarter Project (discussed in chapter 1) is taking place, and it continues to be a center of discussion about how transportation and urban development projects can address past harms. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

between White households and Black and Brown households that we see today.20 This practice did not allow communities of color to build generational wealth, which is often built on owning property or land or building a business. Thriving Black neighborhoods such as Albina in Portland and Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma—often called “Black Wall Street”21— were built in spite of these challenges.22 But many of these neighborhoods were eventually destroyed by development or highway expansions, often in the name of “urban renewal”

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Figure 3-2  The Hill Block building, at North Russell Street and North Williams Avenue in Portland, Oregon, sat at the center of the Albina neighborhood until the mid-1960s. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

(figure 3-3). In some cases, as with Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, the destruction was more violent. An angry White mob destroyed more than 1,400 homes and businesses and killed approximately three hundred Black people—spurred by hatred and rage-filled jealousy of Black success.23

Urban Renewal and Highway Planning In the middle of the twentieth century, the US government pushed forward to connect the states by the Interstate Highway System. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act committed the federal government to pay for up to 90 percent of highway construction costs across America, which resulted in sixty-four thousand miles of interstate and other freeway expansion.24

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Figure 3-3  This view of the Lower Albina neighborhood (then the proposed site for the Memorial Coliseum) was taken in 1955. The majority of the houses in the foreground of this picture were demolished by 1960 to make way for urban renewal projects. (Thomas Robinson/Historic Photo Archive)

In many cities, “blighted” areas were razed to make way for the new infrastructure. These were often the same areas in which local, state, and federal government (by way of programs such as the HOLC’s redlined maps) had continuously disinvested. The government created “a new language of urban decline: a discourse of blight,” wrote Wendell E. Pritchett in a 2003 Yale Law & Policy Review article.25 “A vague, amorphous term, blight was a rhetorical device that enabled renewal advocates to reorganize property ownership by declaring certain real estate dangerous to the future of the city,” he continued. To make their case, “advocates contrasted the existing, deteriorated state of urban areas with the modern, efficient city that would replace them.”26 This allowed cities to purchase the land from private owners for pennies on the dollar or use eminent domain to evict residents, who

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Figure 3-4a This photo shows the Lower Albina neighborhood in 1963, during the construction of Interstate 5. The construction destroyed 1,100 homes in the neighborhood. (City of Portland [OR] Archives, A2005-001.187)

were largely Black and Brown, from their property in the name of renewal. James Baldwin—a writer and social activist who gave voice to the early civil rights movement in the United States—famously said that “urban renewal means Negro removal,”27 which became a rallying cry for urban renewal protests during that period. But despite the considerable resistance by Black communities, urban renewal moved forward. To this day, the term “blight” in an urban setting is racially loaded.28 The Albina neighborhood in Portland, where by 1958, 73 percent of Portland’s Black population lived,29 was destroyed between the late 1950s and the 1970s to make way for the Memorial Coliseum, the Portland Public Schools Administrative Building and Maintenance Yards, a professional basketball stadium next door to the coliseum, a hospital, the first enclosed mall on the West Coast, and a convention center, as well as Interstate 5, which now runs down the entire West Coast

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Figure 3-4b This photo of Interstate 5—taken in 1964 upon the completion of construction—shows how what was once a neighborhood turned into a busy traffic corridor. (City of Portland [OR] Archives, A2004-001.1013)

(figures 3-4a and 3-4b). Four hundred fifty homes were destroyed for the coliseum and another 1,100 for Interstate 5.30 Emanuel Hospital received federal funding to expand even though it would destroy nearly three hundred homes.31 Residents of those homes were given only ninety days to move and a fraction of what was fair for moving costs.32 The corner of North Russell Street and North Williams Avenue was transformed from the vibrant center of downtown Albina to a razed, desolate landscape that is now little more than a heavily cartrafficked corridor (figure 3-5). In a 2017 presentation for the Diverse and Empowered Employees of Portland (DEEP),33 Walidah Imarisha, assistant professor in the Black Studies Department and director of the Center for Black Studies at Portland State University, spoke about a young woman she had heard from whose grandfather grew up in Albina. He took her to

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Figure 3-5  The same location at North Russell Street and North Williams Avenue (see figure 3-2) where the iconic Hill Block building once stood is today nothing but a grassy expanse, never utilized after the buildings were destroyed to build Emanual Hospital in the early 1970s. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

the city’s major arena, home of the Portland Trail Blazers, next to the Memorial Coliseum, brought her to the concession stands and other spots where sports fans now gather, and pointed out where his friends’ and families’ houses once stood. “The very lived reality,” Imarisha emphasized, “was that under that concrete was the heart of the Black community [of Portland].”34

Gentrification and Dislocation The displacement—or, as Imarisha calls it, “dislocation”—didn’t end there. Portland grew and changed, and many of the neighborhoods experienced increased development pressure, which led to gentrification, some of which displaced Black and Brown residents.

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In the 1990s, small businesses—mostly White owned—started to pop up on Alberta Street in Northeast Portland. This historically Black neighborhood had been impacted by the urban renewal process of highway expansion by traffic being rerouted around the neighborhood, which caused an economic decline similar to that in Lower Albina.35 In the 1990s, after years of disinvestment, the Black population of Alberta Street had declined significantly and was being replaced by young White people of the “creative class” who were flocking to Portland. This was a part of the trend that Richard Florida detailed in his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which showcased how so many local economic policies during the 1990s and beyond were focused on attracting people in creative industries who would then drive economic growth.36 In a 2005 Willamette Week article, Zach Dundas noted, “Portland is kicking butt, attracting hordes of college-educated 24- to 35-year-olds at a time when that group is shrinking nationally.”37 And these “hordes” moving to Portland were specifically Whiter, wealthier people driving up housing prices and development demand, which displaced some residents in places such as the historically Black community of Alberta.38 Thomas Robinson, a Portland photo archivist,39 discussed what happened after one shop opened in the summer of 1997: “Shops catering to nearby Whites sprouted up on Alberta [Street], on Mississippi [Avenue], and then upscale restaurants offering cocktails, soon art galleries. . . . Within a decade almost all the Black-owned stores would succumb to the high rents and gentrification.”40 “There is nothing inherently wrong with change,” Robinson continued. “But what about the community that lives there? What started as filling vacant properties turned into a predatory gold rush. The new investors were not interested in serving the community. They wanted to attract other people to come in and replace the community. They wanted a class change. In Portland, as far as Black people are concerned, urban renewal consistently has meant displacing Black families, destroying their homes, and evicting their businesses. Gentrification is the practice of replacing them with businesses and housing that are designed to serve more upscale Portland residents.”41 While community improvements can ultimately be a positive force

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to reinvest in a neighborhood, without considerable effort and regulation, existing residents may be displaced. The same is true of transportation initiatives in urban or suburban centers. Investment, encouragement, and resources need to be put in place to help people stay when new transit and economic projects and opportunities happen in Black and Brown communities. In Baltimore, Maryland, a city that is majority Black, historical disparities in health-care access, economic opportunity, and transportation access are still evident. Lawrence Brown, a Morgan State University health policy professor, laid out in a Baltimore Sun article titled “Two Baltimores: The White L vs. the Black Butterfly” the advantages to the White community in the L-shaped part of the city that is geographically closer and more accessible to the economic center of the city (figure 3-6). People living in the “White L” area, which remains predominantly White, have better access to high-quality food, receive more mortgages, and have access to the city’s free bus service, the Charm City Circulator.42 Those in the “Black Butterfly” area live in food deserts with little access to high-quality food, have lower access to mortgages, and have access only to the paid transit system (see chapter 5 for an example project from Baltimore). The historical racist policies are still very much with us, and they must be taken into account in all of our projects, big and small.

Get Moving 2020 and Leading with an Equity Framework While the projects included in the Get Moving 2020 ballot initiative weren’t all focused on neighborhoods where redlining, urban renewal displacement, and gentrification occurred, the plan acknowledges and sees the racist legacy as part of how the Portland metropolitan region is organized today. It also sought to learn from past harms and create processes that actively worked to not repeat mistakes of the past. Part of the approach came out of Metro’s “Strategic Plan to Advance Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” which states that “by addressing the barriers experienced by people of color, we will effectively also identify solutions and remove barriers for other disadvantaged groups.”43

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Figure 3-6  Baltimore City’s “Black Butterfly” and “White L” sections show that the racial segregation that occurred during the redlining era of the 1930s is still maintained today. City services are also segregated: those in the “White L” (inside the outline here) continue to be closer to resources such as high-quality food and the free transit system, whereas those in the “Black Butterfly” (outside of the “L”) are cut off from a lot of important city services and resources. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

“Our equity strategy is focused on leading with race,” says Sebrina Owens-Wilson, Metro’s regional impact program manager, who was one of the primary authors of the racial equity analysis of the investment corridors for the project.44 “It comes down to the fact that race is still the single biggest predictor of social and economic outcomes.” One way that we lead with discussions about race is by using targeted universalism, a concept developed by john a. powell (who doesn’t capitalize his name) of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.45 The approach is a practical one based on the principle that when you specifically support an issue that affects the group that is the most marginalized, the solutions will benefit not only that group but society as a whole.

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“When we look at institutions like our school system,” says OwensWilson, “if we address the barriers a Black boy is facing, the statistics of high expulsion rates and the academic achievement gap, we’re going to improve conditions for everybody.” Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and chief executive officer of PolicyLink, uses a specific transportation example, describing policies we might see as targeted universalism as “the curb-cut effect.”46 The concept is that curb cuts, meant to create wheelchair accessibility to sidewalks, ultimately benefit many people, including those with strollers and kids on bikes. Using a racial equity framework doesn’t mean we’re leaving out all other vulnerable populations; rather, we’re approaching the work from an intersectional standpoint. We naturally must listen to community advocates for other marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities and immigrants, when it comes to transportation, and leading with racial equity helps us see the problems (and potential solutions) from an intersectional point of view. For example, the data show that people of color are much more reliant on public transit in our region, but they are less likely to have adequate transit access—meaning they don’t have services close to them that are easily accessible by public transit or walking. For example, 12 percent of the population along the 82nd Avenue corridor in Northeast Portland (one of the most diverse areas in the city—I’ll discuss it in more detail later in the chapter) does not have a personal vehicle, compared with the regional average of 9 percent.47 For that, those who use transit in the corridor are a higher percentage (10.4 percent) than the regional average (7.9 percent). However, the Walk Score48 is 5 (out of 100), which indicates that the neighborhood is very car dependent, requiring a car to complete most errands. Additionally, a 2013 study by Brian S. McKenzie of the US Census Bureau found that between 2005 and 2009, neighborhoods in Portland with a high concentration of Latino residents experienced a 28 percent decrease in transit route choices.49 Improvements in public transportation for those communities of color through the Get Moving 2020 initiative will also positively affect other marginalized groups, such as the elderly, who are also much more likely to be hit and killed on our roadways.

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The Transportation Funding Task Force took this approach in reviewing needs in the entire Portland metropolitan region. They reviewed the general data about the concentration of people of color in the region and traffic safety issues to recommend thirteen corridors to prioritize. For each of those corridors, Metro then conducted deeper analyses of the data to identify specific needs from a racial equity standpoint.50 Over half of the corridor investment areas (60 percent) were predominantly populated by people of color. Additionally, improvement investments (e.g., transit signal updates and new bus lanes) were weighted toward areas where people of color lived.51 One of the corridors that showcases this racial equity approach is in the Jade District in East Portland, the most diverse neighborhood in the city.52 The neighborhood is home to many Latino residents and is also an important cultural hub for the region’s Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community.53 It is one of the major neighborhoods included in the 82nd Avenue corridor priority area, a fiveand-a-half-mile major roadway that connects Clackamas Town Center (in Clackamas County, southeast of Portland) to Portland International Airport (northeast of the city center) and runs through the Jade District as well as several other East Portland neighborhoods (see figure 3-7).54 For most of its existence, 82nd Avenue was a state highway under Oregon Department of Transportation control. It is also one of the most dangerous thoroughfares in the city and has long been a priority for improvements, which is why it was a major component of the Get Moving 2020 initiative. In November 2021, 82nd Avenue was finally transferred to the City of Portland, which will greatly help to push forward the improvement proposals laid out in the Get Moving 2020 equity analysis, such as new sidewalks, safe marked street crossings, miles of improved bikeways, new streetlights, new transit signals, and new bus lanes.55 For our proposal for the 82nd Avenue corridor, where a large number of Portland’s AAPI residents live, we worked closely with the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) using data that show a disproportionate number of transportation and safety issues compared with the rest of the city.56 The fact that some of the most dangerous corridors are in neighborhoods predominantly made up of people of color is not surprising, nor is it a coincidence.

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Figure 3-7  This map shows the corridor prioritization area for the 82nd Avenue corridor. The Jade District—in the middle of this corridor—is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Portland. Percentages in the legend represent people of color. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

Destiny Thomas of Thrivance Group believes that the progressiveon-the-surface policies are often specifically designed, usually unintentionally, to make things easier and better for White people to the detriment of other communities. “When we think about racism and systemic racism, we think about hyper-conservative, White supremacy,” Thomas said during a 2020 talk with Oregon Walks.57 “The conversation we’re not having, though, is that White progressivism and these notions of self-righteous innovation and sustainability . . . [are] also co-conspiring in the creation of this dynamic that erases people from processes and imposes interventions that may have long-term, unintended effects.” Neighborhoods such as the Jade District have been overlooked and undervalued for far too long. For decades, so many of the investments

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that earned Portland its reputation as a “green” city (e.g., light rail and bike paths) have been concentrated in the Whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. One recent example is Portland’s Neighborhood Greenway program, which is designed to create safe bikeable and walkable boulevards throughout the city that include signage and traffic-calming elements such as roundabouts.58 While the Whiter, wealthier neighborhoods were becoming safer as a result of these improvements, the Black and Brown outer Portland neighborhoods, such as the Jade District and the communities along 82nd Avenue, continued to experience some of the highest traffic accident rates in the city.59 So Metro, along with important advocates such as APANO, looked at the decades of underinvestment contributing to the high rates of traffic accidents among people of color. This was done specifically through corridor profiles that looked at the data from those neighborhoods through a lens of racial equity. “The corridor profiles were created to inform the implementation phase by serving as a baseline analysis for the equity concerns the implementation would need to navigate to ensure BIPOC [communities] along the corridor shared in the benefits of projects and investment,” says Owens-Wilson. Because many residents in these communities had reason to distrust government, we had to do a lot of work to show that we were trustworthy. Part of that was first using the data that were already available to us and analyzing the data through a racial equity lens. “Our fixation with data is very rooted in the dominant White culture. Yet we’ve had this data at our fingertips all along and we’ve never looked at it,” says Tyler Frisbee. “Very few government agencies were doing specific racial equity analysis around transportation.  .  .  . This work enabled a dominant-culture agency to access that information. From the study, we knew from an outcomes perspective the things we needed to invest in, in order to improve the quality of life for BIPOC communities.” For each of the corridors in which projects were proposed for Get Moving 2020, a racial equity analysis was conducted that looked at indicators in four areas: demographics, mobility, housing, and displacement risk.60 The demographics were an important starting point to prioritize

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corridors with greater concentrations of people of color. We knew from the data that traffic safety is much lower in Black and Brown neighborhoods, and we needed a correction in the investments of these areas. That’s why all of the corridors that the Transportation Funding Task Force recommended were known to be areas with large populations of people of color and places that experienced higher-than-average numbers of traffic accidents. The 82nd Avenue corridor as a whole (which includes the Jade District and several other neighborhoods) has a total of 33 percent residents of color; median incomes are lower than the regional average, at $49,900, and poverty rates are higher, at 18 percent.61 By looking at mobility, we can understand whether community members predominantly use public transport or personal vehicles and to what degree, and this helps us know what types of projects to prioritize. For the 82nd Avenue corridor, the analysis found that while residents had slightly higher access to transit, they were also much more likely to be transit dependent, with lower-than-average car ownership rates. Additionally, commute times to work were quite high, with 40 percent taking over thirty minutes. The reliance on transit shows that improvements to public transit (specifically the reliability and safety of the bus system) should be central to the improvements, which would include one to three miles of new bus lanes. In addition to transit reliance, the Walk Score measurement of the neighborhood was considerably low—meaning that getting around on foot and accessing resources by walking was extremely difficult and unsafe. For this area, where residents had less access to personal vehicles, the planning team recognized the need to add five to ten miles of new sidewalks, thirty-nine to sixty-five safe marked crossings, nine to seventeen miles of improved bikeways, and 620 to 1,040 new streetlights to the list of priorities.62 All of this would help improve pedestrian safety, which had long been a grave concern for the area. One of the major concerns we hear from the community about any transportation project is the potential for gentrification and a related increase in housing costs if transportation access is improved. Assessing affordable housing as part of the equity analysis is critical to understanding how communities will be impacted by transportation projects. The 82nd Avenue corridor is a high-poverty area, and while rents are slightly lower than the median for the region, the cost

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burden is much higher because 56 percent of residents are paying over 30 percent of their household income for rent (this is even higher in some neighborhoods in the corridor).63 What this means is that many people are already on the brink of getting pushed out of the neighborhood if rents increase by even a small amount. So, we needed to ask the historical community what they wanted from affordable housing and programs and projects tangential to the transportation project we could put in place to maintain housing affordability. That was where our connections to community-based organizations such as APANO were essential. They ran the major community development initiatives in the Jade District and reflected back to us that while improved residential housing is great, they were most concerned that development would push out the shops and services that residents utilized. This indicated a need to invest in partnerships with community-based organizations like APANO that could help ensure local and historical businesses were able to stay and serve the community. And last, understanding displacement indicators—such as the change in home prices and changes in percentages of people of color in the area—helped us understand whether displacement had occurred and, at the very least, to mitigate future displacement that might be caused by corridor improvements. The 82nd Avenue corridor saw low levels of displacement among people of color between 2000 and 2017, which is a good indication that people have been able to remain in their neighborhoods. However, home prices are rising modestly.64 Understanding the potential for displacement due to development involves acknowledging how displacement has occurred in nearby neighborhoods and creating programs to do the work differently from the way we’ve done it in the past. In a 2021 Portland Mercury article, “How Northeast Portland’s Alberta St. Is Reclaiming Its Black Roots,” third-generation Black Portlander Kamelah Adams, who, as a kid, was used to seeing mostly Black faces as she walked down Alberta, was quoted as saying, “I didn’t feel welcome on Alberta Street when gentrification first started happening. I remember people gawking at us as if we didn’t belong there.”65 Avoiding or minimizing displacement requires programming beyond the transportation investments. This community development

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work, in partnership with local, culturally specific community organizations, is as much a part of the transportation project planning process as the planning of the roadway improvements. The information gathered through community engagement led to a series of commitments with the culturally specific community-based organizations involved in the process. These formal agreements committed the partners involved in implementation to allocate funding and resources to community development programs that would help offset any of the potential harms that could come from developing the area. In these community development discussions across all of the corridors, the racial equity team compiled a list of forty recommendations under seven themes: BIPOC and elders and youth of color benefits, anti-displacement and community stabilization, workforce and contracting equity, community engagement, community capacity building, transparency and measurement, and accountability and oversight.66 For each of the recommendation themes, we included desired outcomes that were created in partnership with the community. For example, for benefits to BIPOC community members, the outcomes were to increase transit access and increase safety in areas that had a high concentration of BIPOC people. An example of a community recommendation was to “utilize a localized, place-based approach to implementing project and programs, including (when possible) partnering with community-based organizations serving Black, Indigenous and people of color living in the vicinity of the work.” Metro then turned the recommendation into a commitment, stating: “Metro would require project delivery agencies and jurisdictions seeking program funding to meaningfully engage BIPOC communities and encourage partnership with [community-based organizations] serving BIPOC communities.”67 Commitments were laid out for all forty community recommendations. This is similar to what a Community Benefits Agreement (which I’ll discuss in detail in chapter 5) could look like to create a transparent, public process of making commitments to the community. Because the initiative wasn’t passed, these agreements haven’t been acted upon, but they will be part of whatever form the improvements to these corridors takes in the future.

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The other element that is essential to how we shaped the community engagement process through a racial equity framework was empowering and funding culturally specific community-based organizations to help us get feedback and insights from the community members they serve. In addition to having a diverse task force, we also created a community grant program that gave funding to five organizations (some of which were on the task force, such as APANO) to help them increase their staffing and provide capacity-building support on how to engage with government agencies. “Because governments are hard to work with and they’re inherently racist in [their processes], we need to help [these organizations] engage with them[/us] productively,” says Tyler Frisbee. The goal of these grants was to help these organizations build the skills and knowledge needed to submit a competitive bid in order to contract with Metro and other government agencies. These organizations submitted successful bids, and Metro hired them to conduct community outreach for this initiative. APANO was among these contracted organizations to work with the community in the Jade District to gain a deeper understanding of community needs. They conducted meetings in safe spaces for their members—the community centers with which they were already comfortable and familiar—in their own primary language, and at convenient times for people in the community. Metro staff did come to these meetings, mostly to serve as support and to answer questions and help manage logistic needs, but the meetings were driven by APANO. It was because of this format that we were able to get feedback that community members would likely not have felt comfortable sharing with a White government staff member who was not known to or familiar with the community. For example, community members shared their fear of needing to cross intersections at night, especially because the street lighting didn’t effectively illuminate their darker skin. The other piece of feedback, which I mentioned before, was fear of the loss of small businesses that had been in the community for years as prices went up, as well as the risk of being pushed out of the neighborhood because of rising rents. As a result, we created a list of priorities that included safe crossings, effective lighting at transit centers, and lighting across the system that

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worked better with darker skin. We also made sure that any project we embarked upon would put community programs in place, in partnership with organizations such as APANO, to minimize the risk of displacement. We also included programming priorities that, in alignment with the local housing authorities, would purchase existing affordable housing in the corridor prior to investment to decrease the impacts of gentrification. This would help maintain affordability of housing in that area as costs inevitably rose as a result of transportation investments. Because the corridor is such a high-priority area, even without funding from the ballot measure, some of the major safety improvements along the 82nd Avenue corridor are moving ahead, but very few of the transit components are doing so. While I acknowledge that there are always things we can improve upon in collaboration and inclusion, including more discussion about the taxing mechanism, leading with racial equity is now and always will be at the forefront of the work at Metro. It is not easy. There is tension between the expectations of those who understand and succeeded at the old way of doing business and those who are pushing for change and inclusion at the decision-making table. But it’s clear that the path forward must be focused on racial equity. “I think everyone recognizes the needs that the [Get Moving 2020] measure represents still exist and are only increasing,” says Tyler Frisbee. “If we as a region are going to stay competitive with other similarsized cities and regions around the country, we need to invest in our transportation system to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of the people who live and work here and who want to do business here. And we must do that in a way that supports and lifts up the needs of BIPOC communities and addresses the biggest issue of our time, climate change.” So, while the measure didn’t pass, the urgency and the need to lead with racial equity still exists. And Metro and our partners continue to push these priorities generated through the inclusive community engagement process from the ballot measure. “Metro and [the Portland Bureau of Transportation] are embarking upon a longer-term planning

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process which will encompass most—if not all—of the identified projects from Get Moving 2020,” says Frisbee. There’s considerable momentum to see these important projects through, and we are closer than we have been in three decades to being able to pursue state and federal funding with well-vetted projects that not only will help our people move safely around the region but also will provide better access to opportunities and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

How to Bring an Equity Framework to Your Work The information in this chapter is but the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to historical and systemic racism in transportation planning. Chapter 5, on community engagement, will include more detailed information about how to create an inclusive process that involves a racial equity framework, but these are the overarching ways we can develop that approach and bring it into our work. Acknowledge Our Role in Systemic Racism The first step is to know that we are part of a system that was set up to disadvantage people of color. We must have the humility to accept this fact and to be aware of it at every turn. Government actions—often by way of transportation practices—have led to direct and acute harm to communities of color for the majority of our country’s history. We must be aware, throughout the entire process, where we might unwittingly be causing harm because that’s how the system was designed. This requires self-awareness regarding your own privilege, especially if you are White. Specifically, as it relates to the traditional processes used in transportation planning and engineering, we must acknowledge that those come from a very White-dominant culture. Because we exist in that “norm” on a day-to-day basis, we’re never actively challenged to work in a different, perhaps less linear or concrete, way. But communities, especially lower-income communities and communities of color, aren’t going to feel as comfortable in that mode of working. In fact, they might even feel threatened by it. So it’s up to us to be more acutely

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aware of how we might be upholding White culture in the approach we’re taking. This can start with some very basic learning about racial equity and White privilege. Learning for Justice—a media and educational resource arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—offers a tool kit for understanding White privilege.68 But we need to go beyond reading and navigating privilege on a daily basis; we need to be aware, in every moment, of the space and power we take up because of our position with an agency. Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist69 is a great starting point to examine your own role in creating a more antiracist world, including within your industry. Speaking specifically to urbanism and transportation, Thrivance Group offers excellent resources70 regarding the role of our industry in perpetuating policies that hurt communities of color. Get to Know the Community As you develop a stronger sense of how our White-dominant culture upholds systems of oppression, it’s important to get to know the communities you’re working with. This hyperlocal process will bring in the voice of the community. You will need to learn the history of the community, specifically from the perspective of the people in the community who have been historically oppressed. And then overlay that history with how your community is organized today and think about how we, as transportation professionals, might still be causing harm through our projects, even if more subtly. While we might have a strong sense of our own community, it can be much more difficult to understand the essence of a community that is not our own. Additionally, we might not even know the whole story of our own community (for example, I was unaware of the history of Black exclusion laws in Lake Oswego, Oregon, until well after I moved there). This personal definition of a community, or biases, can seep into what we believe of other communities, as if they want or need the same things. These biases can be particularly dangerous when transportation professionals represent the dominant demographic—they’re middleincome White folks. As I’ve pointed out previously, the majority of the technical experts are indeed White, which means that they need to do a lot more work to understand the communities who are often

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overlooked and disenfranchised from any kind of regional or urban planning project. When asked what planners, engineers, and anyone coming in from outside the community should do when they come in for a project, Austin Allen, principal at New Orleans–based DesignJones and associate professor of practice at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture, said, “Know the place.” (Allen worked on a project in New Orleans that you’ll learn about in chapter 5.) It sounds simple, but it takes time and humility to do that in a way that really helps you build trust and truly understand what the community is saying. “That might be spending three to six months just hanging out or going back and forth on weekends,” Allen says. The time you spend helps you learn the nuances that are specific to that place and the people within it. Allen points to an example from the Claiborne Avenue project in New Orleans, looking at taking down a freeway overpass, which I go into more deeply in chapter 5. “People in New Orleans don’t use the term ‘median’; they call it ‘neutral ground,’” he says, “so if you say ‘median’ no one there knows what you’re talking about.” He noted that one planner he worked with would call the place under the bridge the “viaduct.” Having worked in Columbus, Ohio, where that term is used, Allen understood what they were talking about and advised them to stop using the term and call it the “bridge.” “While [people from the community] know what they’re saying, it’s alien,” he says. The language we use is so localized that if we show that we don’t know the terms and the concepts that are very specific to the people of a place, we’re showing that we haven’t done our homework, that we haven’t been out in the community, that we don’t know them. Language is a stepping-stone to getting to the heart of the values of the community. And knowing a community’s values is central to the principle of “knowing the community” and to achieving a democratic outcome. But first, you can also take a step back and get a broader sense of the history through resources such as Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, mentioned earlier. From there, learn specifically about how history has shaped your community. Engage with the local scholars and

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the community-based organizations that are telling this history and can provide insights that overlay national history with local history. Seek Out Equity Experts Before launching into any kind of equity-focused work, it’s important to seek out (and compensate) the experts in this field. I’m not an equity expert. I work to bring an equity lens to my work, but I am not the only person you should be listening to on this subject. There are many others out there whose lifework focuses on creating transportation and planning solutions that center Black and Brown people and their communities. For a national perspective, seek out the work of people and organizations that are on the vanguard of racial equity in transportation. Seek out organizations such as the Transportation Equity Network (TEN),71 a coalition of people and organizations committed to transportation equity; the Transportation Equity Caucus, a coalition working on the political advocacy side of the work, “promoting policies that ensure access, mobility, and opportunities for all”;72 and PolicyLink, a national research and advocacy institute working to advance racial justice work by “lifting up what works,”73 whose focus areas of creating an equitable economy, healthy communities of opportunity, and a just society all intersect with transportation. Additionally, you can seek out the work of people such as Destiny Thomas from Thrivance Group, who I mentioned earlier; Tamika Butler; Liz Ogbu; Steven Higashide at TransitCenter; Charles T. Brown at Equitable Cities, and Veronica Davis in Houston. They are all seasoned professionals in this field who research, write, speak, and consult about equity in transportation planning. And, most important, seek out the people in your area who are advocating for equity-driven solutions for their communities. These might not be specifically people who work on transportation policy, but they are experts in the communities they serve. They have a finger on the pulse of community desires and needs. Find those advocates and learn from the challenges that historically underrepresented people have in living in and getting around in their neighborhoods safely. Bring them into the collaboration, and compensate them accordingly for the work they do.

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Establish Inclusive Advisory Boards Once you have a stronger foundation of your local history, begin to translate that knowledge into tangible actions: set the table for potential projects by creating inclusive task forces that involve a diverse range of coalitions and well-resourced and well-supported advisory boards. With the Get Moving 2020 initiative, that took the form of the Transportation Funding Task Force, which, as I noted previously, advised Metro on everything from priority corridors to types of projects and funding mechanisms. This task force brought together coalitions that represented communities of color, labor, and climate advocates who would help carry out our work. One of the important aims of this task force—which did not include people who were steeped in transportation policy or the technical engineering aspects of planning—was to create mechanisms to empower them to be vocal and serve as experts on their community. “It’s really easy for a community leader who is an expert in their community to feel shut down by an engineer,” says Tyler Frisbee, noting how meetings often could devolve into jargon-heavy discussions. “We wanted to increase the capacity of the organizations we worked with so they could engage with us, but also long-term.” While the task force’s work ended once the initiative went to the ballot in the fall of 2020, the community grant program continues, and we’d like to see it grow to provide multiyear funding, which is more effective than the one-year funding we’re able to provide at the moment. Chapter 5 will cover more about the advisory boards, but I want to be clear that these groups should not just be there symbolically. They should be empowered, and resources should be put into their work to compensate them for their time and energy as well as to accommodate their specific needs (e.g., childcare, language services, meeting locations near public transit). These advisory groups play an important role in putting measures of accountability into the process. Create Accountability Mechanisms The advisory boards are an important part of holding the project team accountable to the process as well as following through on discussions with the community. The other mechanism that serves as an accountability measure is consistently and comprehensively documenting

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the process and the findings and continuously sharing those with the community. One thing that angered so many stakeholders in Portland’s I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project, discussed in chapter 1, was that ODOT was not forthcoming about the process—it hadn’t done a full Environmental Impact Statement and chose a seemingly quicker and less expensive option, doing a simpler environmental assessment.74 None of this information came out until the assessment was completed and ODOT had decided what the project would look like—the assumptions were made in a vacuum. ODOT released the results of its assessment in October 2020, stating that the project—as planned, it would require widening the freeways—would have little environmental impact; it did not acknowledge other impacts. The release of this assessment angered a lot of people who had been working to revive and reenvision the surrounding neighborhood, Albina—the historically Black neighborhood that had been displaced and harmed by decades of government policies. Many of the coalitions soon filed a federal lawsuit against the state because it had failed to follow the procedures deemed necessary by the federal government.75 So much of the anger and resentment and lawsuits could have been avoided if the process had been open and transparent and if other stakeholders had been afforded the opportunity to weigh in and had been listened to early and often. A lot of this took place because the process didn’t involve the community (the solution will be discussed in chapter 5); but also, the process wasn’t documented at all. Public documentation of the process and the feedback along the way is the basis for keeping project leaders accountable. By taking good notes and tracking responses, community members have a source to reference in asking officials about their progress. View Data through a Racial Equity Framework As Tyler Frisbee from Metro noted about Get Moving 2020, we already had a good amount of data that could be a starting point to prioritize certain areas that had the worst safety outcomes, but we weren’t necessarily using a racial equity framework when we analyzed it previously. You can start by finding out what information your organization already has access to. You can hire people and bring others into your

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project who specifically work with data from a racial equity framework. For example, we have a racial equity analyst on staff who does just that, Reed Broderson, who was also interviewed for this chapter. It’s essential, though, to make sure that you’re bringing that data back to community coalitions to help make meaning of it and to ensure you’re interpreting trends that match actual community interests and needs. Develop Project Goals around Racial Equity Once you’ve established a foundation of all of the foregoing elements and you’ve done your due diligence with community engagement (see chapter 5), you can develop project goals based on the racial equity framework. If some of the needs identified by the community can’t be addressed through a transportation solution, you can work with other agency departments or community coalitions to find solutions for what I call “transportation-plus” projects. These are essentially all of the community solutions that aren’t specifically in the transportation purview. They’re the community development projects that are put in place to help prevent displacement of current residents. They’re projects that a different jurisdiction would cover, such as sidewalk improvements (managed by the local department of transportation) alongside freeway improvement projects (managed by the state DOT). All of the commitments that Metro made in the agreement with local communities are included in these transportation-plus projects. Integrating these priorities that extend beyond the physical roadway is a tangible way to bring racial equity into a project; it acknowledges that a roadway improvement project isn’t just about the physical roadway but is also about the soul of the community, the people. And with all of those transportation-plus projects, follow-through is essential to continue to build trust and carry out the promises made to the community. By being open and transparent with strategies and goals, you’re helping to provide a detailed framework that documents the process and inputs. These are important not only to show your work but also to give community members and stakeholders information that can help them hold you accountable. This project goal development process is covered at length in chapter 5, on community engagement, because the community must be involved.

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Lead with Humility Through all of this, you must approach your work with humility and from a standpoint of curiosity and understanding. “Honest leadership in the form of leaders who can admit their own and their organization’s imperfections are key components,” stated Kip Holley in “The Principles for Equitable and Inclusive Civic Engagement.”76 He noted that some have called this “vulnerable leadership.” It all comes down to a healthy dose of humility and an awareness that we don’t have all the answers. As someone who was trained to see the engineer as the technical expert, humility was most certainly not a part of how I was taught to approach a subject I was well trained in. I think this is changing at many levels, but it does take a lot of practice. “When I started my career, we were the experts and we would parachute in on a project and we would tell them what we needed,” says Carlos Braceras, who is executive director of the Utah Department of Transportation and also an engineer. “We did some good things and we should not be embarrassed about what we did in the past, but we should build forward in how we do things. So, we should not presume to be the experts in what a community wants. We should first seek to figure it out, seek to understand their desires, what they’re trying to be, and then, through transportation, help facilitate achieving those.” Humility requires being honest about what we don’t know, being open to critiques and dialogue from our communities, and being very clear about what we are learning and need to learn in order to deliver transformative projects for communities. You can do that in the spirit of collaboration and understand more deeply how issues related to transportation planning and engineering affect people and communities today. Be open to seemingly non-engineering or non-transportation solutions to people’s transport concerns, such as the issue of affordable housing, which in the end involves access but also a need to retain community cohesiveness. It’s also important to note that having a racial equity framework not only is good for the people involved but also makes for good design solutions. If you don’t take equity into account, you are guaranteed to fail many underrepresented people in your community. And that will further sow distrust and disenfranchisement.

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The process to ensure that more voices are heard can only make your outcome better. There will always be competing interests, no matter how you engage with your community members. Your job, from whatever standpoint, is to hear those interests and concerns, to utilize your expertise in collaboration with other experts, and to engage in a transparent and inclusive process that has a higher likelihood of solving the most pressing transportation problems.

Chapter 4

Getting Out of Our Silos

I think what it comes down to is trust and building relationships and being very intentional about that. Whether you agree with each other or disagree, making sure you have that trust so that you can have those difficult conversations is really important. —Angelo Fernandez, chief culture officer, Eagle County, Colorado

E

agle County, Colorado, is perhaps what many people who haven’t been to Colorado think is Colorado: towering Rocky Mountain peaks topped with snow—the backdrop of an ultimate outdoor adventure at ski resorts such as Vail, Beaver Creek, and Avon. The dozen or so towns and unincorporated communities in Eagle County are spread across the approximately 1,700-square-mile region that sits almost 150 miles east of Denver. “The area here is kind of a hamlet structure that’s rather large with a lot of open space and [scattered] towns,” says Morgan Beryl, who at the time of her interview was the director of community development for Eagle County. “It’s pretty auto-dependent if you want to get between towns, and there’s some culture issues related to using public transportation.” 97

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Home prices close to the resorts are out of reach for most people who work at them, making commutes through the mountain roads to less expensive areas of the county necessary. Of the approximately fifty-five thousand residents of the county, 29 percent identify as Latino.1 The county is quite wealthy, with a median annual income of over $79,000. However, the number of Latino people in Eagle County living in poverty is double that of White residents who live in poverty in the region.2 The bus is the main public transit option in the region (figure 4-1). Vehicle ride-sharing is another option, and local bike-share programs help in getting to and from bus stops or ride-sharing locations.3 Most of the bus riders are lower income, with 52 percent of winter riders and 60 percent of summer riders earning below $30,000 per year, as Eagle County learned when it conducted a survey in 2018.4 Because the region is home to many popular ski resorts, the number of part-time residents (who are generally more high income) is higher in the winter—27 percent, versus 11 percent in the summer, which accounts for the difference in income percentages of riders between the two seasons.5 In a place such as Eagle County, where the travel mode of choice for the higher-income, White majority is the car, there is a risk that the needs of public transit users will be overlooked in favor of solutions that are more driver friendly. But Eagle County government, through the leadership of chief culture officer Angelo Fernandez, navigated these challenges through collaboration. Fernandez fostered a strong team environment between the county government’s nearly twentyfour departments, including transportation, housing, planning, public health, emergency management, and children, family, and adult services, which helped to develop and support creative solutions related to public transportation. The collaborative team approach helped to build trust internally and led to much more effective community engagement to understand the concerns of county residents and what needed to be done to address them. “The strings that pull through all of this is equity,” says Fernandez. “That leads us to ask, ‘Does everyone have the same access to opportunity?’” With that as the overarching value, the county prioritized looking into public transportation challenges faced by the Latino community, since they make up the majority of bus riders. The county found that much of its messaging around bus routes wasn’t getting to

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Figure 4-1  Eagle County, Colorado, is a car-dependent community. The primary form of public transportation is the bus system, which predominantly serves the Latino population and lower-income communities. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

the people who needed it the most. The three major towns in Eagle County—Vail, Avon, and Beaver Creek—have their own bus systems, on top of the regional system run by Eagle County (ECO Transit). Each system used different schedule technology that didn’t connect to the others. Many commuters needed to switch from one bus system to another, but even to find out the different schedules, they had to look at a different system map for each jurisdiction. At one time, the only way riders could get transit schedule information was in the form of a foldable PDF document that would be downloaded and printed. “I don’t know if you’ve ever read a PDF with snow blowing sideways,” says Brandon Williams, Eagle County’s innovation and strategy manager. “We just wanted to make it easier for riders.” Working with local transportation entities and the local nonprofit health-care system, Vail Health, Eagle County government developed the Transit Hub app, which pulls together schedule data from

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the county and local jurisdictions.6 The development was a true partnership between the local transportation service providers (including private transportation providers at the resorts, local government transportation providers, and Vail Health) and Eagle County government, specifically the public health, sustainability, and human services departments, since safe and easy access to work is critical for individual financial stability and health. Colleagues in the public health and human services departments were instrumental in providing feedback on what elements needed to be included in order to make it usable for more residents, noting the need for ease of use. “They wanted to make something that was largely visual based that could easily be translated across different languages,” Williams says. Ease of use also meant allowing users to quickly switch to their language of choice. The app is open-source, drawn from bus transportation data available to all, so it can be used on any platform (such as Google Maps) for easier access. The data can also be used off-line, which is particularly important in a place where Wi-Fi service can be spotty and many residents don’t have regular internet access at home. The rollout of Transit Hub was in 2020 (a soft launch in September and the first announcements in November), and despite the midpandemic launch, riders have responded very positively to the app. According to Williams, as of early 2022, Transit Hub had 9,000 active users, of whom 21 percent had created login accounts and were, as he describes them, “frequent flyers,” or people who save their trips in the app for future use. Considering that the population of working-age adults (between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five) is just over 35,000 people, the Transit Hub adoption rate is notable.7 “When you factor in [that] we are a tourist economy with a huge population of drivingrelated work, such as deliveries and construction and small communities where walking distance to work is common,” Williams says, “we are really stoked about 9,000 of the target service economy commuters in that population.” The success of the app can be attributed, at least in part, to Angelo Fernandez and the team environment he built during his ten years working for the county, between 2011 and 2021. Williams says of the experience, “I don’t know that I’ve ever worked with a team as creative and willing to say ‘I don’t know; let’s figure it out.’”

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Because Williams comes from the technology and innovation side of things (which I see as similar to product engineering, in which market feedback is a big part of the process), he’s likely more naturally inclined toward collaboration and getting consistent feedback from people in other fields than what I’ve experienced in the transportation engineering world. But I think the fact that collaboration within Eagle County extends beyond Williams’s work shows there’s great value in creating partnerships internally. And these internal partnerships create a pathway to better and deeper community outreach and engagement, which is where the really important feedback comes in. We can learn important lessons from the collaborative nature of Eagle County and how its internal partnerships lead to better overall community partnerships.

Connected Services, Trust, and Professional Ethics What I see in Fernandez’s approach are three overarching elements that make up the foundations of strong collaborations: connected services, trust, and strong roots in professional ethics. Fernandez sees a collaborative approach as empowering to the employees and essential to delivering solutions that will help a community thrive. A lot of this comes from building trust. “Trust is innovation,” he says. “You can say you have innovation as a value, but if every time everyone makes a mistake they get punitive repercussions, you’re punishing innovation. People won’t take risks anymore when they hear the word ‘collaboration.’” He has worked to establish teams that are rooted in these values and really work for the community. “What I think is unique and different about Eagle,” says Williams, “is that we’ve intentionally made decisions regarding leadership that are about leadership curation and mentorship.” And through that mentorship, teams have been able to become communities of collaborators who are willing to ask questions, identify solutions where they might not already be looking, and take risks by doing something in a way that might not be perceived as standard practice. “In all my experience working on innovation at the state and at Eagle County, the benefit of taking that research and development approach, to go small, continue to iterate and change . . . to design toward

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collaboration and engagement. . . . I’ve yet to run into a situation where that didn’t make a better outcome,” says Williams. And that willingness to test and iterate is the most successful, he believes, when done in partnership with colleagues in a team approach, as in the professional community cultivated by Angelo Fernandez’s leadership, which is now a part of how the agency functions. Through the connections he built within the agency, Williams knew he could reach out to other departments to find out how transportation affected community members as it related to their work. So much of that willingness to step outside our professional silos is about understanding how all government services are connected. Connected Services The collaborative process the Eagle County leadership team undertook recognizes that county services do not exist in a vacuum, so there shouldn’t be separate decision-making processes. They recognize that many minds with different perspectives need to come together to address the interconnected nature of transportation, housing, health, economics, and the environment. One way we can look at how an agency serves its community members is through the lens of public health, specifically the social determinants of health (SDOH). These are defined by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as “the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.”8 The major SDOH indicators are economic stability, education access and quality, health-care access and quality, neighborhood and the built environment, and social and community context. These community and societal support systems are indicators of an individual’s health. When taken as a whole, SDOH show a greater picture of the needs of the community. In a 2019 Vail Health report based on HHS’s Healthy People 2020, indicators showed that affordable housing, food, and public transportation received the lowest scores in terms of ease of availability.9 “Informants noted that there was a wide disparity between the ‘haves and have nots’ in their ability to access all three of these services,”10 and that lack of access affected both individual and community health.

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The report concluded that additional community resources were needed, specifically for affordable housing, behavioral health services, childcare, substance abuse services, and transportation.11 Government agencies need cross-agency partnerships to fill this gap throughout Eagle County. This holistic approach of health indicators tends to run counter to the way I’ve seen many transportation agencies work. In Portland’s I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project, which I discussed in chapter 1, the state department of transportation didn’t consult with other agencies at a deep level. But Eagle County is showing that we can do things differently. Connecting and improving services goes beyond collaborating with other government agencies. It requires looking at the major players and industries in the region that can also serve as partners. In Eagle County, over half of the jobs in the region are centered on tourism and outdoor recreation associated with the major ski resorts, with most jobs in hospitality, food service, retail construction, and arts, entertainment, and recreation.12 Eagle County’s 2019 business report indicated that the top employment zip code (81657, Vail) was about fifteen miles from the top zip code where workers lived (81632, Edwards).13 For someone who relies on public transportation, the commute could be upward of an hour and might involve a transfer and some walking. Add snowy winter weather and the commute could be even longer. A reliable form of transportation is essential for a person to get to work and earn money to live. And the ability to earn a living is tied to health because it ensures personal and physical well-being. Because the economic centers are so spread out in the county, it can be difficult to reach quality public health and human services by public transportation. Brandon Williams says that the resort communities that run their own transportation services recognize how important transportation is for their employees to get to work safely and efficiently. That’s why they were also partners in developing the Transit Hub app. From a very practical standpoint, these transportation systems needed to share the bus schedule data that could be put into the system. But also, having those connections gave Williams and his team a greater sense of what the issues were as they related to employment and transportation.

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The other major partner in Transit Hub is Vail Health, which provided the SDOH indicators. Vail Health has a strong sense of community and public health needs and understands how services can be combined successfully. “If you asked me the most innovative thing in Eagle County in the last four years that I’ve been there,” says Williams, “it’s a very nondigital innovation, which is the partnership with our local nonprofit hospital system, Vail Health.” One of the more innovative programs from the partnership is a mobile public health resource service provided by the county. The MIRA (Mobile Intercultural Resource Alliance) Bus is a forty-foot recreational vehicle that brings health resources to regions throughout the community that might be many miles from their basic services. The acronym, MIRA, was chosen intentionally because mira in Spanish means “vision” or “look.” It’s a resource that serves much of the Latino population. It remains in a community for a week at a time and is open during the evening, making it convenient for workers. Because the MIRA Bus serves communities on their own terms and in a very personal, one-on-one way, it has built great trust among people across the region. “We’ve been careful to make this a resource and not just a government brick building on wheels, and we’ve been intentional about telling people about free and easy-to-use services,” says Williams. It’s through the MIRA Bus that the county was able to distribute language- and culture-specific flyers to community members to ensure that they knew the Transit Hub app was free and knew how to access it. The MIRA Bus served as a way to get the information out, but also, because it’s a county service, the departments that oversee the mobile unit—public health and human services—have frequent close contact with community members. Their collaboration in the app development helped provide insights to make the solution more usable for the community by including elements that make the app most useful to them (e.g., the language component, off-line capacity, and general ease-of-use mechanisms). The insights helped Williams know what kinds of questions to ask when he and his colleagues went out riding the buses and talking to riders for in-person surveys about challenges in using the system. The successful outcome they achieved in Transit Hub was made possible only through that intra-agency collaboration.

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I believe that transportation professionals can learn a great deal from the public health sector’s SDOH approach because it acknowledges that every aspect of our lives is interconnected. Because of that, our government services should also be interconnected to more fully address community needs. In transportation planning, this comes out through building a set of transportation-plus priorities into all of our projects (chapter 5 goes into detail on how to do that). As I described in chapter 3, these are projects that might exist outside the roadway in question but are connected with the project because they help to address concerns specific not to the roadway but to the needs of the people living on that corridor. And at the very basic level, that should begin with internal collaboration among the people who work at government agencies and community partners. Trust For me, a successful collaboration leaves me feeling seen, heard, and respected. On a team level, we all trust and value the opinions of others, and I feel that we’re mission driven toward a higher goal that meets community needs rather than our individual needs and desires. And from a practical standpoint, I feel that my role is clear and I can have and openly share opinions about all aspects of the project. In 1998, I was working as a transportation advocate for 1000 Friends of Oregon, a nonprofit that protects and strengthens Oregon’s Statewide Land Use Planning Program. When Oregon Metro presented us with a draft Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), our organization, along with other interested nonprofits through the Coalition for a Livable Future,14 was invited to provide comments and feedback on the plan. The coalition is a partnership of over sixty organizations in the region, including community-based organizations, advocacy groups, labor groups, public health and health-care institutions, neighborhood associations, and others. We commented on the policies, programs, and projects that would meet the regional goals and values, from health to economy to environmental justice to affordability. While some of the specifics have been lost to time, what has stuck with me was that Metro staff assured us that they would give true consideration to our concerns.

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We expected that they would follow up to let us know why they had or had not integrated the concerns we laid out. The staff at Metro documented all the verbal and written comments in a spreadsheet that recorded each “ask” in one sentence: who asked for the change, whether it was incorporated into the document or not, why it was or was not incorporated, and, if necessary, the page in the document where the change could be found. Because of this process, we felt heard. The process also gave us the opportunity to articulate happiness or disappointment in a manner that allowed for a debate on the merits rather than an emotional response out of feeling ignored. Thanks to that process, the conveners built a feeling of trust among this group of professionals. We bought into the overall plan because we knew our expertise would be utilized and valued and that Metro had followed through on their promise. At the other end of the spectrum, one of the most disappointing experiences in my career was working with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) on a new freeway segment in Clackamas County, the third-largest county in the Portland metropolitan region and the state of Oregon. At the time, I was Clackamas County chair. I oversaw the meeting agendas and organized the work of the Board of County Commissioners regarding everything in its purview, including social services, public health, zoning, planning, and coordination with other elected officials, including the sheriff, district attorney, and treasurer. The county was doing the planning and managing the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the new freeway segment; it is very unusual for a county in Oregon to fund the work for a stateowned highway. The regional body for transportation decision-making (the Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation) was not interested in the project initially because it would have had a negative impact on land use, particularly the destruction of rural lands, which made it difficult to find state and federal funding. By the time I was elected in 2007 and began work on this plan, it was twenty years in the making. I wanted to get funding to make improvements to the roadway while ensuring that we didn’t destroy rural and industrial land in the process. Industrial land in the region is a scarce resource, and the county needed to retain as many jobs as possible, so we needed to reduce the footprint of the roadway by building a bypass.

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The county spent a year negotiating with the community and business leaders for a performance-based Practical Design approach (something I worked to include). This involved a phased approach to the implementation that would result in one lane in each direction rather than the four lanes initially proposed in ODOT’s initial EIS. Together, we—me as the county chair and business interests in the region—lobbied the legislature for funding for the first phase of the project, and we were successful. In Clackamas County, we came away from the negotiations believing ODOT would follow through on the commitments it made. However, several months after the funding was awarded, I found out indirectly (not from ODOT staff ) that ODOT had gone ahead and designed the full bypass with four lanes, which would take valuable industrial land, instead of designing improvements to the existing interchange and an initial two-lane bypass. By the time that we found out, ODOT was so far along in the project that it would have been more expensive and more difficult to turn back. Instead of fixing the existing interchange before building the bypass—which ODOT had promised to do to address the safety concerns with the increase in traffic volume—it just built a new exchange. This caused a significant delay in addressing the safety issue. I had to spend additional county time and resources to hire a consultant and try to negotiate the project back to the more Practical Design approach that we had already negotiated with ODOT. In the end, we were able to get ODOT back to a Practical Design in which they built the bypass and reduced the footprint of the freeway. The action of ODOT undermined the trust that had been built through the collaboration. ODOT not only lost the trust of people like me, but more important, it lost the trust of the community served by the project. To cultivate an environment in which community members trust that they will be seen and heard, it is essential to first build internal connections and make sure that partners in this work are seen and heard. Collaboration needs to be strong from beginning to end for it to be successful and, dare I say, within our professional ethics. “It’s years of building that trust with each other,” says Angelo Fernandez about the processes he’s built over the past decade at Eagle County.

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He says it’s about “being intentional on the front end about how you want to support somebody and how you create opportunities for relationship building.” Through the years, Fernandez and Eagle County’s administrative-level leadership spent a lot of time working with the leadership team on conflict resolution, trust building, inclusive leadership competencies, and emotional intelligence. This set the stage for productive and strong working relationships that led to day-to-day processes he facilitates now. Fernandez set up regular leadership team meetings of all the department directors using a “hot seat” protocol, in which each month a different director prepared a worksheet with an issue the team was working through. The director had fifteen minutes to describe it. All of the other directors then reflected back to make sure they understood the issue and then helped brainstorm solutions. “It was done in a way to build trust, and everyone had good intentions behind it,” he says. “So, it wasn’t cutting people down or criticizing in any way. It was really an effort to provide peer support for each other.” “We still do it with the infrastructure Angelo put in place, and it only gets stronger,” says Brandon Williams. It’s this process that builds trust, which then leads to innovative programs. While Fernandez spent a decade building trust throughout Eagle County government, I do believe the trust-building process can be cultivated within a team leading a transportation project. Brainstorming activities such as the “hot seat” protocol can be really useful with internal transportation planning teams because it offers a safe space to share ideas openly and honestly. It also sets the tone that “no idea is a bad idea.” Of course, no final decisions are made in those brainstorming sessions. Rather, they are a way to generate ideas that can be brought out to the community through the engagement process to get feedback to apply to the final solution. It all began with internal trust among agency employees, which then, as Fernandez says, “extended outside of Eagle County to build trust with partner agencies that ultimately led to Transit Hub.” Professional Ethics We must approach the process of working with one another with a sense of responsibility to honor our colleagues and community

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members, their expertise, their time, and their input. If you use the information in this book to craft an engagement process that looks as if you asked for input, but you have no real intent to consider others’ views or change your plans, you face an ethical challenge. It is unethical to ask people to engage without an intent to use or consider the information gathered, whether it is in your professional code of ethics or not. All public servants must be aware that our responsibility is to carry out our country’s democratic principles. Wasting people’s time and negating their viewpoint by not fully addressing it is what causes people to lose trust. It also conveys that you don’t value the perspectives and lived experiences of those involved. It is ethical practice to honor the time of both the community and the professionals with whom we work. I think it can be helpful to think about our responsibility to our colleagues and to our community members by grounding ourselves in our professional code of ethics. Most of our professions come with a formalized code of ethics, usually created by professional associations. Yet I doubt many of us revisit them or have ever looked at them. But they can be a valuable starting point for grounding ourselves in our larger responsibility. For example, the code of ethics of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is guided by these overarching principles: • Create safe, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure; • Treat all persons with respect, dignity, and fairness in a manner that fosters equitable participation without regard to personal identity; • Consider the current and anticipated needs of society; and • Utilize their knowledge and skills to enhance the quality of life for humanity.15 I’d argue that collaboration with your colleagues and with your community are all a part of fulfilling these principles. Nowhere does the code of ethics say that “these are the only guidelines you can use” or that “the engineer’s solutions are the only viable ones.” What the code of ethics does is lead with an overall goal. You will find that many of the professionals you work with have similar principles and codes of ethics that are more about the values and overall objective of creating vibrant, safe communities.

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When we think of these codes of ethics as they pertain to working with colleagues, they can be excellent foundations for understanding the people with whom we’re working and where they’re coming from. The knowledge that we’re all coming from a place grounded in ethics can be an important element to return to if conflict or challenges arise. Importantly, though, these codes of ethics are merely a starting point because important elements are unfortunately left out. Many of the professions involved in transportation planning and engineering have not deeply grappled with inclusivity, diversity, and racial equity, and very few (if any) really address them. And while codes of ethics such as the ASCE’s note the importance of “equitable participation,” we often aren’t formally trained in or given the tools to do that properly. So, to go beyond the professional code of ethics, we need to create an internal code of ethics that is rooted in values of racial justice, democratic process, and community engagement. To ensure that we are holding ourselves to the highest standards, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are reflecting not just our professional ethics but also our democratic values and our personal ethics. If something does not feel right in your gut, don’t ignore that feeling; dig into it. That is how we grow and learn as professionals. Often, what helps give us courage to stand up to the naysayers is the support and array of expertise of a diverse team of collaborators. When something doesn’t feel right about a certain approach, they are the people we should go to for deeper conversations about what doesn’t feel right and why. They are the people who can give different perspectives on an issue. And they might also have greater ties to the community through their work that offer insights you wouldn’t otherwise know. While Fernandez doesn’t explicitly mention the code of ethics at Eagle County, he does emphasize that the entire department leads with equity in mind. To them, that is the agency’s code of ethics in a way. When you lead with equity, you’re more inclined to collaborate with your colleagues to ask tough questions about what the community needs, and you’re more inclined to bring those questions to the community through a community engagement process. Charles Marohn Jr., founder of Strong Towns, states the following in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:

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For many years, I believed that my education, training, and license gave me superior insight into how cities work. I believed that I was uniquely positioned to know what was best for society—at least when it came to transportation. . . . Most of all I believed that my efforts to plan, design, and engineer transportation systems were a service to society, that I was a part of creating a prosperous America that could be shared by everyone, and that the only real impediments to success were a lack of funding and the political courage to stand up to naysayers. In all these beliefs and more, I was wrong.16

How to Break Down Silos Eagle County spent many years working to create a cross-department collaborative approach within county government, with other levels of government, and with the private sector. The lessons learned can be translated to any level of government. Fernandez says, “It’s about taking time to build trust and bond at the beginning so that you can work through innovation and creativity as well as conflict.” Although building trust can take time, he says, “what we’re doing as an organization, you can actually replicate on a shorter-term scale.” So much can feel out of your control when you are working on behalf of a large agency or organization—be it the priorities of the agency or of the administration. But I believe that a project lead has some personal agency over the process of a project. A project lead has a lot of individual power to create a team that brings in a variety of experiences to help work with the community to create solutions. Project leads do not need to default to the original scope when the project lands on their desk, and they have the power to include considerations related to modern concerns—land use and development, traffic patterns, community values, politics, and the evolution of technology and engineering solutions. While industry guidelines might make it seem there is only one way to do things, that’s not true. And project leads can push past this mentality by asking questions internally with colleagues to brainstorm about the problem, start to think about an issue from different

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professional perspectives, involve people who have a fresh take on an issue, and begin identifying community leaders who have differing perspectives that are closer to the ground. Project leads do not have to go it alone. They can build a team of people with diverse ranges of expertise and connections with the community. The process doesn’t have to be overly complicated if you assemble the right team, facilitate the team-building process, establish common values, set clear expectations, and be transparent and accountable. In creating the Transit Hub app, Brandon Williams had a personal sense of agency as a project lead to seek out the right people to provide feedback for the project. Although he led the project, he needed viewpoints from different departments to make the solution better. What I’ve often heard from transportation engineers is that they shouldn’t be involved with anything not related to transportation, and anything outside that narrow purview would be considered beyond the scope of their work. But since everything is transportation related in some respect, a good outcome must require many viewpoints within an agency and with external partners. It’s true that some agencies are more supportive of deeper collaboration than others. Environments where the culture is much more siloed might make it more difficult to engage in deeper collaboration, but I still think it’s possible. A project lead has a lot of power in the process of engagement internally and externally. You can begin by creating a more collaborative environment internally on the project planning team, which will lead to deeper engagement with the community. The following are some things I have learned about assembling and managing a strong team. Assemble the Right Team “From a competency and character standpoint,” says Fernandez, “you’ve got to assemble the right team to have good subject matter experts and people who might [bring] fresh eyes to the issue or may have the aptitude to grow into [the knowledge] or they’re seen as a strong leader in the organization overall.” Fernandez speaks of another program led by Eagle County called Vista, which is a partnership between towns, municipalities,

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community-based organizations, businesses, nonprofits, and community members to develop a long-term comprehensive county plan.17 When considering potential Stewardship Team members in 2021, the Eagle County team looked at a few criteria: the candidates’ level of involvement in the community, their level of authority, and their lived experience, such as their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. We used a similar approach in creating the task force for the Get Moving 2020 initiative discussed in chapter 3. You want your team to include a range of technical skills and expertise and connections to the communities that you will engage with as a part of the process. This is how Eagle County assembled its internal team that convened and codesigned the Vista informationgathering and community engagement process. The county included team members from departments including sustainable communities, project management, the city management office (Fernandez was the representative from that office), and public health, including the health policy planner. “It’s a well-rounded team,” says Fernandez, “not as diverse [racially and ethnically] as we would like, but as we continue to develop a county workforce, we continue to make sure we’re engaging everybody.” The comprehensive plan looks at land use, housing, transportation, economic resilience, economic development, and climate action goals, so it naturally requires a diverse range of professional perspectives at the process-planning table. I’d argue that transportation always intersects with such issues, so even if we’re not building a comprehensive county plan, as Eagle County was doing with Vista, we still need to engage diverse perspectives. Facilitate the Team-Building Processes Angelo Fernandez has a background in organizational and leadership development and strongly believes in putting time and energy into creating a collaborative team environment before even starting to talk about specific projects. One way he does this is by facilitating psychometric assessments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator18 or the CliftonStrengths assessment (formerly Clifton StrengthsFinder)19 for the leadership team members who are collaborating on a consistent basis. These

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assessments can help everyone to better understand how they think and work and how their colleagues think and work. The findings can help team members understand how to better work together and give them a common language for communicating. While this doesn’t have to be a formal assessment, there should at the very least be a basic level of learning about colleagues on the team. To work well with your colleagues, you want to make sure that you understand where they’re coming from. “Where this becomes especially relevant in transportation is the classic fight between engineers and planners,” says Morgan Beryl, formerly Eagle County’s director of community development. “Engineers tend to be . . . very numbers driven, more black-and-white, and detaildriven, where planners tend to be big vision and big picture. “I think we experienced that conflict at Eagle County at times,” she says, “but looking at how people think [in terms] of both weaknesses and strengths helps people acknowledge that and approach that person in a way that makes them feel safe.” Team-building assessments make that process of getting through the potential conflict so much easier and do a great deal to instill and build trust among team members. Outside of assessments and a general grounding in the team dynamic, team building also involves providing a process framework that includes cyclical decision-making, in which everyone on the team is able to give input. This means that team meetings should be well facilitated. The “hot seat” protocol Fernandez uses is an example of how the team works together to problem solve and is encouraged to give input and ideas on an ongoing basis. Mechanisms for communication should be created so that everyone on the team is involved in decision-making processes and is apprised of next steps or any decisions by the agency. There’s nothing more demoralizing to someone who has been part of a team process than to hear about an agency decision at the same time as the public. Internal team building is no different from external coalition building. Just remember that every opinion has a seed of a great idea and should be discussed openly and pragmatically. If there is a downside to an idea, it should be aired in a respectful way. If there is a risk, it might be a risk worth taking, and it may be a risk that is worth mentioning to

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others outside the process to make sure you are not dismissing a good idea in the name of risk. This is all part of the trust-building process. Building a strong team is an ongoing process that requires a consistent, positive relationship-building process. Establish Common Values From all of the interviews conducted with transportation professionals and city and county agency representatives for this book, one thing continuously came up: lead with common values. In the past, transportation projects were often guided by the perceived problem, which was usually defined by someone else and handed over to the project manager to find a solution. But that approach misses a lot, particularly the context, the people who will be affected by whatever the solution is, and feedback directly from the community that is experiencing the problem. Of course, this problemdefining process should be done in partnership with the community (which I’ll discuss in chapter 5), but it also requires starting with a solid foundation of internal team members who are attuned to the needs of the community and have a diverse range of expertise to solve community problems. The team members will create the process, so they should have buy-in on the ultimate goal. That’s why any team carrying out work that affects the community should lead with the core value that their work, above everything, is to make the community a better place for the people who live there. To determine what are the common values, you can start by merely having a conversation about everyone’s professional and personal priorities for this project. You can begin by rooting the discussion in professional ethics, guidance of values from the boards that govern the city, county, or state culture, and community attitude and awareness surveys already available to you. Notably, professionals at the table are going to have different priorities and goals, so you will want to know what those are at the outset and then use those priorities and goals as a basis to help define the common, broad value among them. These will be concepts you hold most dear, from technical excellence to treating and listening to people with respect, recognizing diversity, equity and inclusion, and supporting the livability of the area. As the Eagle

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County team sought to identify a transportation access solution, their overarching goal wasn’t a specific type of project; rather, it was a value of ensuring that all people—particularly the most historically marginalized—could have access to safe, accessible, and clear transportation information. Leading with that broad goal, particularly where equity was concerned, brought them to an innovative solution in Transit Hub. I wholeheartedly believe that among all of the values we lead with, the highest should be equity. We use a racial equity framework in all of our work at Metro because we know that if we make our communities better for the people who are most marginalized, they will be better for everyone. Eagle County’s Transit Hub app is a big example of that. A solution designed with the most marginalized community members in mind is now a valuable resource for everyone in the community. Every step of a project’s planning, design, and implementation process should seek to address the challenges faced by the most marginalized in the community. This will require your team members to be fully on board with this approach from the outset (chapter 5 goes into greater detail about what that process should look like). “Our core values drive our actions, and our actions generate outcomes,” says Carlos Braceras of the Utah Department of Transportation. “So, we measure people in our organization not by how many projects they get done but by whether or not they’re acting within their values as an organization. They’re trying to realize the mission of the organization.” When everyone on a team is leading with common values in mind, it opens up a level of creativity and innovation that can move the process forward in successful ways. Metro is ahead of the game on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in a lot of ways because we have a well-resourced and robust DEI team who work with departments and teams on all levels to help define what DEI means in all of their work. I acknowledge that this resource isn’t available everywhere, but there are ways all transportation project teams can take an equity approach on a project basis. At Metro, the DEI team sits down with staff and goes through every process they’re carrying out in their department, from establishment of the project, the organization chart, who’s included in the project,

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what and where and how the community engagement is happening, and how are they going to do the outreach. The DEI team helps to identify the most inclusive approaches for all of these elements. The values and goals established at the outset serve as guideposts throughout the project. They’re not prescriptive because the circumstances are different in each case. Creating a diverse team in which members are empowered to make suggestions and bring elements to the values statement that you might not get from a team purely made up of engineers and planners is important to truly taking an equity approach. Space should always be made to ask tough questions that help challenge the status quo or to ask for clarifications as you bring together people from other departments and disciplines who may bring their own language and assumptions. By leading with those values, you will know that your team is aligned from the beginning. That doesn’t mean there might not be disagreements or that it will be smooth sailing from there on, but it’s a foundation. “If we can understand at its core that we all want the same thing [and] we just want to get there in different ways,” says Angelo Fernandez, “[we] can negotiate on the strategies of how to get there.” Set Expectations For me, to feel part of a true collaboration, I need to have a clear understanding of my role in a project. Once the values are agreed upon, it should be made clear to everyone on a team what they are expected to do and how the team can communicate most efficiently. Clarification of roles doesn’t necessarily mean a team member gets to make a decision on behalf of the group; rather, all members have their own expertise and should bring to the group different ways of accomplishing their portion of the work. If you’re doing this in collaboration, you create roles that reflect the skills each person brings, whether they involve community engagement, outreach to other technical professionals, or coordination with agency heads. “You have to deliver understanding about who has decision-making power, what types of decision-making processes you’re going to use,

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and who are the stakeholders in that,” says Fernandez. “Just because you provide input doesn’t always mean we’ll take that recommendation . . . setting those expectations up front is really important when you’re talking about collaboration.” Ultimately, the final decision comes down to the project lead, but when you can all arrive at a decision through a well-documented collaborative process, you have a team of champions in your corner who will advocate for the decisions and the process along the way. Fernandez emphasizes that these expectations must be created when there is already a level of trust among members. While not every recommendation will necessarily be used, all team members will be heard, their ideas will be considered seriously, and their contribution matters. In addition to establishing roles and expectations, there should be an agreed-upon framework and timeline for the project. Knowing how decisions will be made and how input will be given and documented gives team members a level of comfort and ability to see the full picture. But there must, of course, be an understanding that some flexibility and adaptability will be needed. The framework should be seen as a guide, not the be-all and end-all. I believe that these expectations, common values, and processes should be documented at the outset so the team can come back to them whenever there is conflict or questioning about how to move forward with a decision. With the Clackamas County example given earlier in the chapter, the negotiation teams didn’t create a set of mutually agreed-upon common values or goals at the outset. That meant that all stakeholders (particularly those at ODOT and those of us advocating for community interests) were approaching the project with different perceptions of the priorities. If we had come to the table agreeing about the proposed project goals and societal issues, it would have served as a touchpoint for when there were disagreements. We could have asked ourselves collectively: Is this solution meant to address the community’s land use concerns while also solving congestion? If it wasn’t, then we would have looked at other alternatives together. The agreed-upon expectations, values, and processes can also be useful benchmarks to evaluate or reevaluate the timeline expectations and make changes to the process at any given time. It should be a living document that adapts and changes along with the project.

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Above everything, collaboration with other professionals is about following through and continuing to build trust. It is also about building internal teams that are best designed to meet community needs, and that must start by getting out of our professional silos. The solutions we come up with will be better when we involve as many areas of expertise and voices as we possibly can. I truly feel inspired by the collaborative work that people such as Angelo Fernandez and his team are doing. It shows there’s so much innovation waiting for us if only we can move beyond the confines of our training and connect with our colleagues. And I believe it’s also what leads us to do the work to truly listen to and connect with the communities we serve.

Chapter 5

The Community Solutions–Based Approach in Practice

As we move forward, it’s not going to get easier; it’s going to get harder. The more we look to understand people and what’s important to people, the more complicated it gets. People are pretty dang complicated. You have to think about how you can apply your engineering and planning skills to solve people problems. —Carlos Braceras, executive director, Utah Department of Transportation

C

arlos Braceras is someone who has shifted the culture of a state transportation agency (Utah DOT) by stressing the importance of engaging with the community and finding solutions that aren’t so closely tied to the guidelines we’re often taught in engineering. In his leadership roles at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), he was instrumental in the rewriting of the Green Book (the reference manual for AASHTO’s Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets) to include more flexible guidelines.1 I’ve been inspired by colleagues such as Braceras, who see the great 121

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value of the role of engineers but who are also keen to ask a lot of questions. These colleagues have taught me to look beyond my traditional engineering education and start asking questions such as “Who defined the problem?”; “Who defined the metrics?”; “Who decided on the solutions?”; “How were the decisions made?”; and “Whose problem are we trying to solve?” “Engineers are wonderful at solving problems,” says Braceras, “but you also have to be good at asking the right questions so that you know you’re solving the right problems.” When you start asking the right questions of the right people, says Braceras, “you go from talking about things to talking about people. Everything we do is about people. It’s about helping create a community where people want to live and grow up. And creating a place where there are opportunities for people to get jobs and play in the parks.” The community solutions–based approach is not rooted in mathematics and physics that may be used to determine the smoothness of the pavement or the safe curvature of the road. It centers on engaging with the community throughout the process to get to the right solution for that community. The process is less about the physical roadway and more about the values and needs of the people in the surrounding community, with a focus on those who have been most historically marginalized. The community solutions–based approach seeks to find ways to acknowledge historical racism in planning and engineering and to be inclusive and respectful of the people who are traditionally left out of the conversation. The criminal justice advocacy organization JustLeadershipUSA, founded by Glenn E. Martin, was founded on a principle that is apt for this discussion: “the people closest to the problem are also closest to the solution, but often farthest away from resources and power.”2 Those closest to the resources and power, often representatives of government agencies, should channel resources and power to the community from the very beginning of a process. Project managers do have some level of power to determine how a project is carried out. While you need to justify all the steps you take in the process (as you should for any project), you can create a process of engagement that works for the community. The community solutions–based approach as I see it integrates

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community engagement throughout the transportation planning process in a way that truly serves communities. While it is our job as transportation professionals to develop potential scenarios that meet technical needs and meet safety guidelines, we must continuously test our assumptions about what our work can represent with the community members who will be utilizing the spaces we help create. With that, I think it’s worth digging into what I mean by community engagement.

Community Engagement In transportation engineering, I’ve felt that the idea of community engagement is vastly misunderstood. I’ve often seen project leads and agencies view community engagement as a barrier to achieving the traditional performance outcomes we assumed (i.e., being on time and on budget). I’ve seen this in the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project in Portland, where little to no community engagement was carried out, possibly because those creating the solutions thought that would just cause more delays and, presumably, thought they already understood the problem and didn’t need community input. To be fair, I do think the project managers thought they carried out community engagement, but it was very surface-level and conducted less with the community and more with staff at the city level. Those discussions left out a lot of stakeholders, particularly members of the community who would be most affected by the project and those who were planning on the area becoming much more diverse by centering values meant to build generational wealth among marginalized populations. As a result, the goals to stay on time and on budget were thwarted. Once community stakeholders got wind of what the plans were, the project was delayed and budgets ballooned because the community had not been involved in the decision-making process. Because I think project leads tend to think they conduct community engagement, it’s important to discuss what community engagement actually is. The term “community engagement” is often used interchangeably with “public engagement” and “civic engagement.” I believe that true

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community engagement must do more than seek input on an already assumed design by the project team. It must seek out the input of those who may be affected by the project, especially those who have been marginalized. The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University3 created “The Principles for Equitable and Inclusive Civic Engagement: A Guide to Transformative Change,” in which author Kip Holley explained that “civic engagement describes the practices, principles and socioeconomic conditions that comprise the environment in which people interact with their community and come together to make and implement community decisions that provide justice and opportunity for all community members.” He continued, “Community decision-making is the foundation of access to opportunities and justice.”4 I recognize that for many transportation engineers and planners, the prospect of deeper community engagement feels overwhelming. Most of us were never trained in community engagement, and it’s not part of the engineering school curriculum, so I understand the feeling. But that’s where collaboration with key internal and community partners comes in, as discussed in chapter 4. Not only is the collaboration essential to bring in diverse perspectives; it also helps to enforce that you’re not alone in this process. Once a project lands on your desk, you don’t have to begin by doing large-scale outreach efforts immediately. In fact, you should start small to get the lay of the land. You can be more informal about the process by having discussions with professionals internally who might have more insight into community needs or have strong connections with community leaders or organizations that could help answer questions and help you see the problem from the ground level. This is also where you begin by creating your internal planning team, which should, as I laid out in chapter 4, represent a diverse set of perspectives and professions. From there, your team will work together to start building coalitions of community partners. I emphasize coalitions in that we must cast a wide net within the community to ensure that many interests, perspectives, and lived experiences are represented at the table. Oregon Metro’s Transportation Funding Task Force for Get Moving 2020 (discussed in chapter 3) is an example of such a coalition that

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included voices from business, labor, environmental advocacy, and culturally specific community-based organizations. Such coalitions serve as a link to the community and can help to create a safe and open space for residents to speak freely when meetings are led by organizations and people they trust. Community members are more likely to feel that their voices are being heard. And above all, community engagement must be a part of the planning process from start to finish. I think this is an issue many an engineer and planner has struggled with. A lot of traditional planning timelines have designated points in time for “community engagement,” and they are often too late to make any difference. Usually, the community is involved after the project has been scoped, and in some cases after it has been mostly designed. At that point, the project team takes the project to the community and asks for input, but they’re already so far along in the design process that the only level of input the community can have are very specific details (e.g., if you’re improving a roadway, a business owner might ask that the driveway to the business be moved ten feet away left or right). And in so many cases, these efforts are a bit half-hearted and don’t take people’s needs and limitations into account. A meeting held at a downtown office on a Tuesday afternoon isn’t as likely to attract people who, say, don’t have a car or have to work at that time of day or have childcare needs or have language barriers and do not feel welcome in an environment outside their typical community meeting places. Even if only five people show up, it’s looked at as checking off “community engagement,” and then the process moves on to the next phase. It should be obvious by this point in the book that this one meeting is not true community engagement, and it’s not a good attempt at creating a transportation solution that works for people. That is why we need a wholesale reframing of how we do community engagement and how essential it is at every single stage of the planning process. That is the community solutions–based approach. Transportation engineers and planners need to have a project timeline. After all, legislatures, government departments, and communities, for that matter, want to have a sense of the overall time frame, and often a timeline is imposed. The reasons and factors for a particular timeline vary, but usually timelines are created for very practical

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reasons. In some cases, the state legislature that approves financing requires the money to be spent within a certain amount of time. Another factor that might require a timeline is the potential for inflation: project teams may want to implement within a period when costs of materials won’t rise significantly. And in a lot of cases, when projects are being implemented in a community, one project must be complete before the next one can start. Timelines will always be a reality, but the community solutions– based approach can be helpful for the overall process plan if the cycles of feedback loops to the timeline are factored in to reduce the risk of having to backtrack. A loop shouldn’t be closed until you move on to the next phase of the project. The community solutions–based approach should be used by project leads from the moment a project lands on their desk. It is a tool that can be used to frame the process and timeline for a project in collaboration with a diverse internal planning team. It’s not prescriptive because every community and every project is different. It should provide guidance on what steps to take at each stage. This chapter highlights two case studies—the Livable Claiborne Communities (LCC) study in New Orleans, which looked at the Claiborne Expressway and potential options for removal or redesign of the surrounding space, and the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) Tunnel Project in Baltimore, which looks at the replacement of an unsafe rail tunnel without negative impact to the community. These two examples show how the community solutions–based approach works in practice.

Case Study Backgrounds In the early twentieth century, North Claiborne Avenue in the heart of New Orleans, Louisiana, was a beautiful boulevard lined with towering trees. The street, which went through the historically Black neighborhood of Tremé, was lined with shops, cafés, music venues, grocers, small businesses, and homes (figure 5-1). In 1968, residents of North Claiborne Avenue were displaced by the Interstate 10 Claiborne Expressway.5 It was one of the many Black neighborhoods in the United States destroyed in the name of urban renewal. (See box 5-1 for more background.)

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Figure 5-1  Before construction of the elevated expressway, New Orleans’s Claiborne Avenue was an expansive boulevard with a long strand of live oak trees that created a beautiful canopy over a neighborhood with thriving Black-owned businesses. (Louisiana Division/City Archives, New Orleans Public Library)

Local proposals to find alternatives to the highway began not long after the expressway was built, stemming back to the mid-1970s.6 In a 1976 report funded by the Louisiana Department of Highways, Clifton James and Rudy Lombard, as part of the Claiborne Avenue Design Team, laid out recommendations for improvements to the neighborhoods adjacent to the highway.7 But there wasn’t much movement until much later. In 2010—in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and in an era of neighborhood revival in New Orleans—a group called the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) published a report proposing to restore Claiborne Avenue by tearing out the freeway and reviving the neighborhood to as close to its historical vibrancy as it could.8 It was around that time when the city, under Mayor Mitch Landrieu, began to reenvision what it meant to have the community

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Box 5-1 What Was Lost By the Claiborne Avenue History Project The story of N. Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans is a narrative with parallels in every major American city with a significant Black community, but the Claiborne story is unique because of the exceptional memories of its residents who hold tight to their history and to the Avenue’s rich and original cultural traditions. New Orleans was segregated into the 1960s and white exclusion of African Americans from commercial districts resulted in the Avenue becoming the main thoroughfare for Black communities living in the immediate surrounding neighborhoods and across the entire city. Claiborne connected uptown and downtown like an artery, the oldest part of which, N. Claiborne, ran directly through the historic neighborhood of Tremé. The Avenue became well known as the site for Black Mardi Gras; Indians; Zulu floats; Baby Dolls; Skeletons, and community figures such as the Batiste Brothers. Celebrated and key players from New Orleans music and cultural history have long shared a deep connection to N. Claiborne’s theaters, restaurants, bars, venues, surrounding streets and cemeteries. However, between 1966 and 1969 the construction of the Interstate 10 highway initiated the speedy demise of this important thoroughfare; steel reinforcing rods now occupy the spaces where the roots of live oaks once spread, concrete pillars replaced their trunks, and the shadow of the interstate highway now towers above the neutral ground where generations of families used to walk to work, interact, picnic, and socialize. N. Claiborne Avenue has been at the heart of the New Orleans African American cultural, commercial and political experience for over two hundred years, and its communities’ stories are emblematic of the ultimate American experiences: the broad themes of construction and expansion, cultural and economic boom, obliteration and devastation, and then potential resurrection, and the opportunity for art and its enduring traditions to triumph in the face of adversity. Given the continuing discussions around bringing down Interstate-10 over N. Claiborne by the Claiborne Avenue Alliance; post-Katrina workforce development studies and initiatives by Livable Claiborne Communities, which examined the future of this corridor and its residents; (continued)

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Box 5-1 (continued) Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation’s important work; and now most recently with the Biden Administration and DoT’s focus on #TransportationEquity, we believe that CAHP’s focus on community, identity, and agency is well-timed. Source: Reprinted with permission from the Claiborne Avenue History Project, https://claiborneavenue.wordpress.com/. CAHP seeks to address and redress these ever-present wounds by capturing and transforming today’s human stories behind N. Claiborne Avenue’s history and weaving these voices into our multi-platform interdisciplinary project creating a community of voices to deepen a collective understanding of what it means culturally to be connected by a physical geographical space for over two hundred years. Few resources exist that fully document 20th century cultural, economic, political, and social exchange within this space; and none has sought to accumulate existing sources in one place with community mechanisms for ongoing data-gathering.

involved in understanding “place” and what that meant for transportation planning. In 2010, the city was awarded nearly $2.8 million in a combination of funding from an Urban Development Sustainable Communities Challenge Grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to study the Claiborne Avenue corridor to find solutions to the destruction of the neighborhood caused by the freeway decades before. This ambitious new project, called Livable Claiborne Communities, began in 2012, when the city was still recovering from Katrina. To lead the study, Mayor Landrieu brought on Bill Gilchrist as director of place-based planning. Gilchrist, an architect and urban designer, began working closely with many organizations in the New Orleans area after Katrina to aid in the recovery and revival efforts. Gilchrist said of the LCC project, “The whole idea was looking at coordination. It wasn’t just a transportation question, but the full range of implications around land use, development, design, sustainability, all of the above. As such, it was a great opportunity . . . to operationalize a lot of what the office was to do.”

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To be able to do this well, the city needed to acknowledge the racist history of the initial highway project and to confront more recent tensions on the surface after Hurricane Katrina. “[Post-Katrina sentiments created] a very volatile situation in a lot of ways because it was so uneven in the recovery efforts,” says Austin Allen, principal at DesignJones, one of the firms contracted to work on the LCC project. “Certain neighborhoods were backed, and some neighborhoods looked like 2005.” Many residents were fed up with decades of disinvestment and broken promises by government officials, planners, and engineers to help rebuild and revive their communities. So, the question that lingered over the project for the community was: How will this time be any different? To regain trust and carry out a project that people who lived there wanted and needed required an enormous amount of community engagement that deeply involved the community members who were impacted the most by government action or inaction in both the recent and more distant past. Specifically, the project team needed to hear from people who were impacted by the initial urban renewal highway project and those who were disproportionately impacted by Hurricane Katrina. The team knew there needed to be a great deal of local involvement and leadership, especially from Black-led community-based organizations, not only to make headway in instilling trust in the process but also to make sure they would be able to carry out the study effectively. I see the LCC project as a study in process, specifically in how community engagement, particularly through a racial equity framework, is central to any transportation and planning process. When the entire transportation study is centered on community at the outset, there’s greater opportunity to address the true problem, which won’t come out of transportation professionals making assumptions in isolation from the community. The project also shows that even with certain federal regulations that might be in the way, there are still possibilities to solve a part of the problem that people have with their spaces. I was not involved in this project but know about it through my longtime colleague Yolanda Takesian of Kittelson & Associates, who was the consultant project lead. From the outset, this project seemed

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different from the traditional approach I was used to seeing, where agency and transportation project teams saw surface-level community engagement as a requisite box to tick. Rather, the entire LCC study was centered on community engagement and was uniquely designed to meet people where they were, both physically in their spaces and culturally. It provides an important example of how we can approach our planning and design projects with community. The LCC process began with very few assumptions about the problem. While many went in with the idea that the highway would be taken down because it had displaced the thriving Black community, the complete removal was not a guaranteed outcome to the inquiry process. Nor was it assumed to be favored by everyone at the table. The LCC project was built primarily to discover what people wanted from the space, given the present-day circumstances. The community engagement was designed to encourage people who are often left out of decision-making to be a part of the process. A lot of what they arrived at—which I’ll discuss later—ended up being somewhat of a surprise to everyone involved in the project, transportation professionals, city agency representatives, and community members alike. In an early meeting, tensions ran high among some of the participants. Muskoghee Alibaamuu of Tremé addressed facilitators directly, saying, “You’re gonna come down here with your degrees, do what you want to do, then go back where you came from. How do we know this is no different?”9 The city representatives had to be especially forthright about what was possible from the very beginning to ensure they were able to manage expectations. “There was almost universal expectation that [the highway] would be removed,” says Gilchrist. “But because of [federal] highway protocol, that wasn’t going to be immediately possible, so we had to look at alternatives and other enhancements.” A large part of the study involved a large-scale community engagement effort to identify those alternatives. That had to be made clear up front. What people from the city found from this process is that even though they couldn’t immediately deliver what many hoped and expected of the project (removal of the highway), there were programs that could be put into place to make better use of the existing space.

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As I write, the highway is still there. President Joseph Biden’s administration’s 2021 infrastructure plan gives some hope that the highway could be removed, but the $1 billion allocated to reconnecting neighborhoods divided by highways is not nearly enough to undo the past damage to the many neighborhoods impacted during construction of the highway.10 But the study sets up transportation professionals and community members for a greater possibility for success regardless of what happens to the “bridge,” as locals call it, because they’ve already done the work to envision and plan for what a thriving Claiborne community would look like. Additionally, the process created a forum for dialogue and healing between the community and the city. The structure of the discussions shifted the power to the community members, who were given opportunities to express their frustrations, fears, and hopes for the place they lived. It brought the conversation far beyond transportation. The other example is the planning process for the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) Tunnel Project in Baltimore, Maryland. Veronica P. McBeth was transit bureau chief of the Baltimore City Department of Transportation at the time and was an essential part of the planning team. She presents background details about the project in box 5-2. The B&P Tunnel Project is more typical of one that would land on a project lead’s desk in that it follows the standard National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Environmental Impact Study protocol. The project had been a priority for the state of Maryland and for Amtrak for many years, since the tunnel—which was and still is in use as a main route through the Northeast Corridor (NEC) railroad line—had reached the end of its useful life. This project could have gone very differently if people such as Veronica McBeth and Odessa Phillip had not been leading the charge and advocates including council member Nick Mosby had not been so involved. It’s important to familiarize yourself with the background on each of these projects in boxes 5-1 and 5-2 because I will weave examples from those projects to showcase specific elements they include throughout the process to successfully engage the community, work with a racial equity framework, and collaborate as an effective planning team.

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Box 5-2 Background on the Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Replacement Project By Veronica P. McBeth The Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) Tunnel is 1.4 miles long, running through a busy and important section of the Northeast Corridor (NEC) railroad line. According to Amtrak, the tunnel is nearly 150 years old, dating back to the Civil War era.a As such, with its age, the tunnel is well beyond the state of good repair needed for the commuter rail (MARC Penn Line) and the NEC and is in dire need of structural repairs, upgrades for fire and life safety systems, and several other things. Each day the tunnel stands as is, there is a risk of disaster; its safety is of enormous priority. The NEC runs for 457 miles in the northeastern United States, connecting Washington, DC, to Boston, Massachusetts, and supports over 820,000 trips per day.b The B&P Tunnel replacement program will allow for a 4-mile section of the tunnel to be upgraded and transformed to help smooth and create safe passage along the NEC. This transformation—with the tunnel newly renamed the Frederick Douglass Tunnel—will include two new high-capacity tubes for passenger trains; new roadway, railroad bridges, rail systems, and tracks; and an upgraded West Baltimore MARC station that will be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. While the safety needs are certainly indisputable, the major challenge is that a large segment of the new tunnel alignment goes through the neighborhood of Reservoir Hill, and there will be significant impacts to the people who live there. According to a 2017 Baltimore City Health Department report, 85 percent of the over 10,500 residents of the Penn North/Reservoir Hill community are Black.c Located in Northwest Baltimore just south of Druid Hill Park bordering Interstate 83, Reservoir Hill sits right in the “Black Butterfly” area (referenced in chapter 3), which, as Morgan State University professor Lawrence Brown noted in an article in the Baltimore Sun, reflects the racially based disparity in access to resources in the different swaths of the city (see figure 5-2).d Historically, the community was once part of an expansive and connected community known as Mount Royal. However, like many Black communities in the early to mid-twentieth century, Mount Royal fell

(continued)

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Box 5-2 (continued) Figure 5-2  Baltimore City’s “Black Butterfly” and “White L” sections show that the racial segregation that occurred during the redlining era of the 1930s is still maintained today. The majority Black neighborhood of Reservoir Hill is located within the “Black Butterfly.” (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

victim to racist urban planning policies that, like so many examples in this book, plowed through thriving historically Black, as well as Jewish, neighborhoods. In this case, the community was divided by the 1963 expansion of Interstate 83 (called locally the Jones Falls Expressway, or the JFX), which went through Druid Hill Park and eliminated the north–south streets along that corridor.e Not only were many residents displaced, but the community was also essentially cut off from the park, one of the city’s major expansive green spaces.f During this urban renewal era, the highway project, along with construction of large street thoroughfares around the park and the area, cut Reservoir Hill off from Bolton Hill, which is predominantly White and wealthier. Bolton Hill was protected during urban renewal, and it continues to see more investments in infrastructure projects even today. As a predominantly Black community that was historically underserved and disinvested, the residents of Reservoir Hill already had a level of distrust and fear about a significant project like the B&P Tunnel happening in their community. So, it was no surprise that there was pushback from the community once the announcement was made. As mentioned, the initial preferred alignment of the tunnel would impact Reservoir Hill, and the community had concerns about the severity of the impacts. The community had worries about the existing and new tunnels going under homes, the removal of a large community garden in an existing food desert, the possibility of eminent domain, vent stacks in (continued)

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Box 5-2 (continued) the neighborhoods, noise, air pollution, and, of course, the potential loss of community cohesiveness due to displacement of local residents. There were several other proposed alternatives that had more severe impacts on the community before the preferred alignment was selected. The preferred alignment that was eventually submitted through the NEPA study was selected after considerable community engagement with people who lived in Reservoir Hill and their city council member, Nick Mosby, who is also a longtime resident of the neighborhood. The community engagement process included over two dozen meetings, with a lot of time spent listening, explaining, and ensuring that we would take as much time as needed to explain the scenarios of the tunnel alignment. As this book goes into later, the meetings and interactions with this historically Black community did not start without their challenges. The consultants and rail company leading the project needed to understand the nuances of what had happened with major infrastructure projects in the past. Further, it was necessary to help them understand that representation matters from the project team level and that it is important to meet people where they are, using layman’s terms so everyone can understand the scope of the project. The neighbors were used to officials coming in to tell them what was going to happen to them and for them instead of asking them about their needs and having interactive engagement early and often. This book goes into more detail about the process as it relates to the community solutions–based approach, but the project’s public engagement successes were related to the project team intentionally establishing trust and relationships with the community throughout and beyond the planning phase. In this case, once the preferred alignment for the tunnel was selected, there was a mitigation agreement that accompanied the Record of Decision for the NEPA study for $50 million that would be dedicated for improvements to the impacted communities. Even with its earlier challenges, this project serves as an excellent case study of how to execute meaningful community engagement in otherwise disenfranchised communities. This project is a representation of planning and public engagement as a symbiotic organism. And it shows how equity needs to always be at the forefront of every project and engagement effort. (continued)

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Box 5-2 (continued) Note: Veronica P. McBeth was the transit bureau chief for the Baltimore City Department of Transportation from 2014 to 2018. She managed the Baltimore City tasks associated with a multiparty National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) study for the B&P Tunnel Project alongside the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT), and Amtrak. During this two-year NEPA study, she oversaw the city’s engagement through the various steps of the NEPA process to ensure that all federal regulations and guidelines were followed. The process included over two dozen public engagement meetings, review of various alternatives and associated impacts, and assistance with materials included in the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), the final EIS, and the record of decision. Ms. McBeth is currently a transportation planner with Kittelson & Associates. a Amtrak, “B&P Tunnel Replacement Program,” accessed January 12, 2022, https://www .amtrak.com/bptunnel. b Northeast Corridor Commission, “Northeast Corridor Annual Report: Operations and Infrastructure; Fiscal Year 2016,” May 2017, p. 2, accessed January 12, 2022, https://nec-com mission.com/app/uploads/2018/04/NEC-Annual-Report_FY16.pdf. c Baltimore City Health Department, “Baltimore City 2017 Neighborhood Health Profile: Penn North/Reservoir Hill,” June 2017, accessed January 12, 2022, https://health.baltimorecity .gov/sites/default/files/NHP%202017%20-%2044%20Penn%20North-Reservoir%20Hill %20(rev%206-9-17).pdf. d Lawrence Brown, “Two Baltimores: The White L vs. the Black Butterfly,” Baltimore Sun, June 28, 2016, accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper /bcpnews-two-baltimores-the-white-l-vs-the-black-butterfly-20160628-htmlstory.html. e Interstate-Guide.com, “Interstate 83,” accessed January 12, 2022, https://www.inter state-guide.com/i-083/. f Emily Opilo, “An Expressway Divided Them. Decades Later, a Redesign of Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park Offers Neighbors Hope,” Baltimore Sun, September 9, 2021, accessed January 12, 2022, https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-prem-md-ci-baltimore-druid-hill -park-20210909-ajyv2mx5bzhdxb6nbutqd5nx6q-story.html.

Breaking Down the Community Solutions–Based Approach The community solutions–based approach, illustrated in figure 5-3, includes four main phases: problem statement creation, scope development and testing, plan development and testing, and design development and testing. You may recognize these as the major phases of the planning and design of any transportation project, with a testing and outreach component added. Each phase has its own feedback loop—or, as I like to say, “learning

Figure 5-3  The Community Solutions–Based Approach Learning Loops: The community engagement process involves a series of feedback loops with the community to ensure you’re solving the right problems in a way that is least harmful and most beneficial to the community. (Graphic design by Elizabeth Ryan)

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loop,” a term I learned from organizational consultant Steve Patty— designed to continuously engage the community as we are designing a project. I describe the community engagement processes as “testing” in the diagram because engagement with the community is essential to testing our assumptions at every single stage. As project leads, it’s inevitable that we will come in with preconceived notions about the project solution and, in many cases, a general scope that was already laid out before the project got to you. It is natural to have some kind of expectation, but testing these assumptions with the community and making changes based on that feedback is a part of how we evolve. You consistently test your assumptions about what you have heard and what you have seen on the ground. And then you test your assumptions about how you interpreted what you heard as you integrate them into updated scenarios. As you move through the process, the questions and concerns that community members have should decrease over time, especially if you integrate feedback successfully. But the process is meant to ensure that you’re constantly reevaluating what you’re hearing and how you’re interpreting it and what that means for the scenarios you’re developing. Importantly, each loop in this diagram should be completed and closed before you move on to the next phase. The phases are separated because you need to make sure you have answered all the questions you can, asked all the people you can, and created as many drafts as needed to ensure you’re on the right track to solve the right problem before you move on to the next design phase. With each stage of the process, you zoom in closer and closer to the details. The involvement of the community at each stage helps ensure that, as a project team, you have answered all the questions you can and integrated them as well as possible before moving ahead to the next step. Not only does involving the community at each stage help refine the solution; it’s also more transparent and you’ll have less pushback later when project plans are released. No one will be surprised by the outcome because everyone will have been involved in the process all along. Let’s walk through the phases as they were applied in the two case studies.

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Create the Problem Statement The purpose of creating a problem statement is to come to a consensus on what the major challenges are, both from the technical, engineering, and safety perspective and from the community perspective. The community perspective includes access to transportation modes, public safety concerns, affordable housing issues, and barriers to building businesses or building community cohesion. While many of these issues are not under the direct authority of a department of transportation at the state, county, or city level, you must understand how the transportation project can help or hinder success in meeting these goals and whether there are partners to help achieve a larger community vision. Hearing the community perspective is a major part of understanding how all services are connected, as I discussed in chapter 4. Project teams usually have a technical understanding of the problem; the purpose of community engagement is to get a clearer sense of how the community perceives the problem and any potential solutions. At this stage, you’re conducting a broad investigation into the values of the community and those who would be impacted by the project (figure 5-4). You’re letting the community help to define the problem. But before digging into community outreach, it is important to put together the project team.

Assemble the Project Team Once a project lands on your desk, the first step is to identify your planning team on the basis of conversations with community stakeholders—community leaders, local representatives, business owners, and others—who have a stronger sense of what community members might want. (Assembling the right team is covered in more detail in chapter 4.) These conversations should not take the place of the larger community conversation that should be conducted when defining the problem statement. These conversations are intended to give preliminary insight into who should be at the decision-making table and how to get them there. The team should include a wide range of transportation and community experts who bring distinct assets to the project.

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Figure 5-4  Create the Problem Statement: The first phase of the process involves the cocreation of a problem statement with the community. (Graphic design by Elizabeth Ryan)

Sometimes, the team is fully assembled after the advisory committee is established. There aren’t always advisory committees, but I believe they play an essential role, as I’ll discuss later on. In the Livable Claiborne Communities study, the full study was grant funded (by an Urban Development Sustainable Communities Challenge Grant from HUD and a TIGER II Planning Grant from the US Department of Transportation) and managed by the City of New Orleans. Because of this structure, the advisory committee was selected before the project team was hired, an unusual but necessary step because community input was essential in order to apply for and be awarded the funding. “It was really the partnership of local interests that was able to leverage the grant from the federal government,” says Bill Gilchrist. The community’s involvement was therefore essential in showing community members’ desire and need to engage in a largescale community engagement project such as this.

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I have used this methodology twice because of distrust by the community of the agency I was working with (Clackamas County and the Oregon Department of Transportation). In both cases, I let the advisory committee “hire” the facilitator and the consultants working on the project. In each case, the staff organized the process for hiring and signed the final contracts on behalf of the jurisdiction. But the advisory committee decided what they were looking for, did the interviews, and selected the finalists. This built trust between the agency and the committee as well as between the consultants and the committee. The LCC advisory committee was made up of a coalition of organizations and foundations that served as advocates for groups in the community including small business owners, those served by social service organizations, and neighborhood organizations. I’ll talk more about the advisory board later in this chapter, but it’s important to note this for clarity here. It also shows that sometimes the approach needs to be adapted on the basis of specific project circumstances. The advisory committee was tasked with assembling the project team of external consultants to conduct the study. The committee chose two firms to lead the LCC study process: Goody Clancy, based in Boston, and Kittelson & Associates, based in Baltimore, who were hired by the City of New Orleans. They brought together a wide coalition of partners including national real estate and workforce economists and four local New Orleans outreach and design and engineering firms. Yolanda Takesian from Kittelson & Associates, who led this project team, noted how each local New Orleans firm had specific assets that were vital to successful community engagement. One long-standing public relations firm, Bright Moments, was skilled in people-focused deep community engagement, with its wealth of contacts and ability to connect person-to-person. A strategic communications firm, the Hawthorne Agency, had the technological expertise to design and manage the website. A landscape architecture firm, DesignJones, had already been doing a great bit of work and videography in the Lower Ninth Ward post-Katrina and had ties to many community members from that work. An architecture firm, Perez, brought recording and neighborhood design skills to document what was being discussed, which helped bring transparency and openness to the process.

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These firms were chosen to help make connections among people and to each of the decision points of the study. For the B&P Tunnel Project, the team was mostly assembled by the entities that oversaw the project, including contractors from Amtrak (the lead engineers); the Baltimore City Department of Transportation (Baltimore City DOT), represented by Veronica McBeth; the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT); and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). Baltimore City DOT also hired Odessa Phillip to conduct the community engagement work. Phillip— a civil engineer and planner who is president and chief executive officer of Assedo Consulting—brought both her technical expertise and her decades of experience in engaging with communities. She worked closely with McBeth as a representative for Baltimore City DOT interests, but she also served as the connector between all of the other team members. Additionally, within Baltimore City DOT, Veronica McBeth and her team of community liaisons served as the “boots on the ground” in helping to organize and arrange meetings convenient for community members. As McBeth details in box 5-2, the new alignment for the rail tunnel would go through a predominantly Black neighborhood in Baltimore. McBeth and Phillip were adamant that the people who served as liaisons and conducted most of the outreach knew the impacted community well and also looked like the people who lived there. Well before this project, McBeth’s team had regular engagement with the community and were known by people there. The role of the community liaisons on the team was to regularly attend community meetings, knock on doors to distribute flyers with program information, join walk-throughs with city council members, and host meetings themselves. In short, McBeth’s team already had a finger on the pulse of community values, needs, and concerns.

Learn, Listen, Context Intro At this phase, you’re asking very broad questions to get a macro-level perspective of the community’s values, needs, and desires.

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Certain overarching questions should be asked at each phase of the process. Box 5-3 lists questions to ask during the Create the Problem Statement phase. The list is not exhaustive, but it’s a place to start. It includes questions to ask not only in the beginning but throughout the entire process. Box 5-3 Questions to Ask during the Create the Problem Statement Phase Internal Inquiry Questions Who can help me identify stakeholders, thought leaders, communitybased organizations, and others who can help me understand the problems related to the project? Who do I need to talk to determine the lay of the land today in the community and what future vision of this area has been discussed? Community Needs Questions What is the history of the neighborhood or community in which we’re doing the work? How was it developed? Who lived here first? How has it changed? Why has it changed? What are the stories of the area that people tell? Is there trauma in those stories? (Some of this can be answered by internal research and should be baseline knowledge for anyone working on the project.) How are things going in the community? How are you (the interviewee) doing? (Make it personal.) What places do people in the community love? Or hate? Why? How do these places feel safe and inviting or not? How do they represent your cultural values or not? What are your overall hopes and desires for your community? What are your major transportation challenges here? What are your major barriers to generational wealth creation? What is your number one concern for kids, seniors, and parents in this community? What concerns do you have about the project’s initial problem statement? Is the existing problem statement still relevant based on policies, community expectations, and what other land uses or transportation projects are occurring in the area? Does it represent the community needs? (continued)

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Box 5-3 (continued) What is the history of my department or client in this area? Are we/they a trusted partner, or is there trauma from past projects? What is that trauma? How should we engage in a facilitated conversation to identify and prioritize the needs of the community? What community-based organizations should we work with to do deep community engagement? What more should I know that I have not asked? Who else should I talk to? Who needs to be at the table to define the new problem statement? What kind of support would we need to provide to get community participation? Who should be on the advisory committee? Internal Agency Questions Have I communicated this process and the discussions throughout the process to elected officials and others to keep moving forward and get their input as well? Have I included a diversity of lived experience in the planning and design team that can help ensure we are including a variety of perspectives on transportation and its import to different needs? After learning all this, have I started to prepare everyone for the possibility that the timeline and the budget may need to be adjusted in the future because the original scope was not adequate?

You need to approach this process from the perspective of discovery. You do this by asking people about the challenges they experience with transportation and how transportation could be better. Additionally, you ask more general questions that might not be transportation related but that involve issues in which their lives could be made notably better, such as the relationship between transportation and housing, employment, economic vitality, and education. It is important to look at how transportation affects people’s access to services and employment and the implications for the economy, the environment, and public health.11

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The questions you ask should help you understand the history of the area, what members of the community perceive to be its successes and failures, what they love and value about their community, and what they want and need in order to have a vibrant and livable community. Some answers you hear might not be directly related to transportation, and that should be expected. That is why you’re working in partnership with other stakeholders. The LCC study in New Orleans had a high level of community involvement from the very beginning. Interviews were conducted with over ninety stakeholders, and approximately eight hundred people participated in public meetings over the yearlong process beginning in 2012.12 These individual interviews with neighborhood and organization leaders helped to create both a foundation of understanding of what the community members might be seeking and a baseline of support among community leaders, who could help bring community members to future meetings. The team did not come in with any preconceived solutions. While the possibility of removing the highway was always part of the discussion, there was an understanding that it wasn’t the only potential solution on the table. The community engagement was designed to cocreate solutions, focusing not just on transportation but also on livability, economic opportunity, and equity.13 The overarching goals of the outreach were “focused on identifying and integrating public common ground into the study’s goals, scenarios and implementation strategies which drove the agenda and programming for all public meetings.”14 The meetings were held in the community, not at a downtown office, at places where the community members were more likely to feel safe and comfortable and heard. The five public-facing meetings (which began in December 2012) took place in a variety of formats at community-centric locations around the study area, including schools and churches, Dillard University, a YMCA, and a cultural arts center along Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. During the earlier part of the study, particularly when the team was working on defining the problem, the events were larger, with attendance ranging from thirty to one hundred participants.

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These larger facilitated meetings were designed to educate community members about the study and the process but also to hear from them and integrate that feedback into the areas of focus for further study. The sharing component of the study took place in facilitated small breakout groups, in which attendees were more likely to share honest and open concerns and aspirations. These meetings were all designed to be interactive, and some even had a festive atmosphere, with opportunities for children to share their thoughts through art facilitated by the team in collaboration with elementary school art teachers. One unique element at this stage was a video and audio interview project called On the Record. This part of the study was geared toward hearing from many of the elders of the community and was intended both to gather information and to honor the elders’ stories. This kind of large-scale project (transportation related or otherwise), says Yolanda Takesian, “comes around to a community once in a generation, so there should be a certain amount of reverence to the activity.” On the Record was a part of instilling that reverence, giving elders and community members who had experienced and witnessed change the opportunity to share what this project meant to them and to do it on video that can be preserved in historical records. Video documentation is important because it helps show the people who live there and what matters to them in a more nuanced way than, say, a comment in a public record. “It really gave people a chance to reflect on things and share with their community that which was important to them at that place in time,” says Takesian. “It honors with ritual and reverence.” On the Record shows that the process was more than just getting a group of people to make decisions with the least impact on the community; rather, it added depth to the experience and showed that transportation is not just about cars and roads. From all of these neighborhood meetings, the LCC team created a broad list of shared priorities for communities within the study area, including the Claiborne overpass; public transit; cultural preservation; traffic, trucking, and freight; affordable housing; historic preservation; parks and playgrounds; street improvements; job growth; locally owned businesses; and stormwater and drainage.15

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For the B&P Tunnel Project, representatives from Baltimore City DOT, including Veronica McBeth, were the most involved with the community engagement efforts throughout. Their process reflects the conflict between the traditional engineering approach and true community engagement. “I will tell you that as the city, we were more a part of coordination, presence, and being additional boots on the ground  .  .  . explaining the project and how it was going,” says McBeth of the work of her team of community liaisons. “The consultants that were in charge of explanations . . . to be very candid it was a very White, male presence [at first] not understanding that you cannot go into a predominantly Black working-class community and use words like ‘easement,’ ‘vibrational studies,’ ‘state of good repair.’” Additionally, the way the meetings were held in the beginning was very traditional and “formulaic,” as Odessa Phillip describes that approach. The planning team had set up a small number of meetings that weren’t at convenient times for community members. “We either had one extreme or another,” she says. “Either attendees were angry or nobody showed up. We did those early meetings and that did not work.” From the engineering side, the problem was very clear: the tunnel had long been in a state of disrepair, requiring a realignment of the track and the tunnel to accommodate a greater volume of passenger and freight traffic in order to alleviate a bottleneck on an important part of the Northeast Corridor. But until the point when the team reached out to the community, the problem was defined solely from the engineering side. This was where some of the tension came in because the initial preferred alignment was also the cheapest. But they also saw from the community engagement that it also had the greatest impact on the community, and the community would discover this throughout the introductory meetings. “The early meetings were essentially going into the impacted communities with boards about the existing alignment and then the various proposed alternative alignments,” says McBeth. “We showed all the alternatives because we hadn’t formally made a decision on which one. Going in there, providing the context and the history of the tunnel.” While there was a preferred alternative, they also had an opportunity

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to hear directly from community members about why some scenarios wouldn’t work for them. “There was confusion and contention at those early meetings, once people started making their rounds around the room where we had maps with the alignments up to look at the alignment options and the alternatives,” says McBeth. “You see the larger maps, but then you have the maps on the table where you can see block-by-block; that’s when people were like, ‘Shoot, I live right here.’” It started a very real conversation about how many people it would displace and what that would look like. Additionally, those meetings brought up discussions of Amtrak’s ownership of a lot of the land alongside the railroad track. While eminent domain is something any city can potentially invoke, there’s a unique quirk in Greater Baltimore called “ground rent.” In many cases all over the city, homeowners do not technically own the ground under their house (unless they make sure to buy or own it outright upon purchase of the home).16 In the case of these homes that are near the railroad track, there was a high likelihood that Amtrak owned the land and had a clearer line to take that land for any rail improvements. This came up as a great concern for a lot of the community members at these meetings. Additionally, a number of people pointed out Whitelock Community Farm, which served the community. The neighborhood is within a food desert, so this community farm was one of the most convenient ways for community members, especially those with mobility issues or without personal vehicles, to have access to healthy food. What’s more, many of the people didn’t even use the train, so not only was their community going to be impacted; they weren’t going to see any of the benefit. Naturally, community members were coming to the realization that this project was going to happen one way or another, and they knew they had to do what they could to help minimize the impact as much as possible. But a lot of anger and frustration came out in those early meetings because community members didn’t feel they were being listened to by the lead consultant. “There was definitely some pushback and some stress between the community engagement team and the consultants from the larger

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firms,” says McBeth. It wasn’t until after the third or fourth meeting with the community that things began to change for the better. It was also at this time that local elected officials started to get involved, particularly Nick Mosby, who represented the community at that time. Mosby, a longtime resident of the Reservoir Hills neighborhood, is currently president of the Baltimore City Council. “My biggest role was serving as an interrupter to the first plan,” says Mosby, who met with planning team members soon after the project was announced to the public. “My background was electrical engineering; that afforded the ability to review those initial plans in more depth and come up with thought-provoking questions and concerns.” His major concerns in that neighborhood related simply to costbenefit analyses. He recalls representatives from Amtrak and the FRA touting the desire for reducing the train travel experience between New York City and Washington, DC, by seven minutes. While this might seem like a large win from an engineering and planning standpoint, to Mosby—and especially to his constituents—a time savings of seven minutes on a train that community members would likely never use, in exchange for the loss of homes and potential impact on safety, seemed like a great cost to a community. “The reality is these infrastructure projects have never been to the benefit of Black and Brown communities in the country, particularly this neighborhood in Baltimore; they have already received the short end of the stick,” says Mosby, emphasizing how this project fits into the larger history of racism in planning in the city. “It’s been for a greater good [of the entire city] at the expense of Black and Brown communities.” He made sure this fact could not be ignored even for a project that had to be done to prevent impending disaster in the existing tunnel. The project planning team heard these concerns and realized what they were doing wasn’t working. In order to have a successful project, they needed to work with the community in a more productive way to gain a better sense of their concerns and to find solutions that could benefit them in some way, even if the neighborhood would still be greatly impacted. This was when the team decided to take a different tack. One thing Odessa Phillip stresses is that everyone on the planning

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team was on the same page about making sure they did this right. While everyone was coming from different priorities (e.g., the lead engineer was hyperfocused on safety of all the structures along the railway, Amtrak wanted to reduce the bottleneck, and Baltimore City wanted the least possible impact on the community), they all respected one another and their expertise, and they all knew that hearing from the community was essential to doing the right thing. So, they moved away from a designated number of meetings and became more flexible about where, when, and how often they met with the community. “We started out with planning eight meetings,” says Phillip. “We ended up holding over one hundred meetings over the course of the NEPA process.” Additionally, they changed the tone. “We started to make it personal,” says Phillip. “This has been my philosophy in engagement. The one lesson that doesn’t change for any project: a home is a personal investment. If you treat people like you know the impact is on the biggest financial investment they’ll ever make, [their home,] they’ll respect it.” McBeth explains that requires “explaining how the project could go while not talking to them like they’re another engineer.” While these seem like simple changes, they made a huge difference. In so many community meetings led by engineers, the tone is very academic. Not only does it make the information unclear; it also puts you at odds with the community. “If I’m talking to a nurse from the community and I say ‘The easement [by] your house is going to be encroached on by an alignment,’ I used three ambiguous terms in one statement, and it’s not only going to be confusing, it’s going to make her not trust me,” says McBeth. The other change, says McBeth, is that “they saw people that looked like them.” “We started to call it ‘The Sista Girl Road Show,’” says Phillip. “The faces were myself, Jacqueline Thorne [from MDOT], Nikia Mack [from Baltimore City DOT], and Veronica when we had to represent the city.” All of them were Black women who were experts in their field and clearly held clout both with the community and on the technical planning team. “It started to look to the impacted folks [people in the community]

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that we weren’t just throwing a face of a person of color in front of you,” says Phillip. “We started to look like decision-makers.” It looked that way to the community because they were decision-makers. Alongside this team, the technical experts were all still there, but they had a specific role: to provide insights as needed throughout the process rather than lead the meetings. When they finally had facilitators who the community members identified with, trust began to be built. Additionally, the community members knew that there were people on the internal team who would help advocate for their interests. The listening that happens during this phase is essential to drafting a problem statement that reflects both the engineering and community concerns. Before these community meetings, the engineers already knew what their problem was and even had preconceived notions about the solution. But when this information was tested with the community, they were able to integrate their concerns into a draft problem statement that more fully represented their needs. All of this information gathering is meant to lead to a draft problem statement, which will continue to be built upon in the next phase.

Establish an Advisory Committee Between the first phase (Create the Problem Statement) and the second phase (Rescope and Test), an advisory committee should be created on the basis of the feedback about who should be at the table helping to oversee and advise the project. As part of the engagement that happens while drafting the problem statement, you will want to ask the community members who they want to be a part of an advisory committee that helps keep the project team accountable to the inclusive process. The active, empowered, and resourced task force (which can also be considered an advisory committee) at the center of the Get Moving 2020 initiative (see chapter 3) was central to keeping our racial equity framework at the center. An advisory committee or task force is an important component of the community solutions–based approach because it represents the community interests throughout the project and helps hold the project team accountable to community needs.

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The advisory committee provides a smaller and more frequent touchpoint for the community. Additionally, its involvement is formal and in the public sphere; there are levels of accountability that help hold the project team accountable to the benchmarks they set with the advisory committee. Every time the project team meets with the community at large, it should then convene with the advisory committee to repeat what members believe they heard from the community and test whether their interpretation is accurate. They should then meet with the advisory committee when they have integrated the feedback into the scenarios. From there, the project team can take the scenarios to the community, saying, “This is what we believe we heard from you and the advisory committee; is this accurate? What parts are consistent and what needs to be reworked?” With an empowered, diverse advisory group, you’ll have multiple perspectives at the table that are likely to differ on the same issue (e.g., representatives from a labor group and a representative from a culturally specific organization). In those meetings, you may be facilitating really difficult conversations that foster a sense of ownership on behalf of the advisory group members. Hashing out potentially conflicting interests to come to an agreement in that room is important in order to be able to take this to the community and say, “This is how we arrived at this decision and why this is integrated in the proposal.” With an advisory group, you’re able to do this transparently and in a public way. In the LCC project in New Orleans, the advisory group was already in place prior to the outset of the study. While typically the advisory committee is established after the initial problem development phase, the grants associated with the LCC study required having an advisory group established at the very beginning. But the structure of how the group functioned and who was in it offers an excellent example of a high-functioning and empowered advisory group. Because of the large scale of engagement, the advisory structure involved two tiers of committees: the Governance Committee and the Project Advisory Committee (PAC).

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The Governance Committee represented agencies involved in the study who had access to data used for the study and who would be responsible for carrying forward government actions from the study. The PAC was a group of fourteen stakeholders who were part of the original grant advisory committee. That coalition of local community-based organizations, including the Foundation for Louisiana, the NewCorp Business Assistance Center, the Greater New Orleans Foundation, and Providence Community Housing, proved to be the most important partnerships for the City of New Orleans to carry out the project. For example, Vaughn Fauria, executive director of the small-business lending organization NewCorp, brought to the study her perspective on solutions that would help the small businesses along the corridor she served. Perhaps more important, her involvement helped give access to the LCC study to individuals and groups whose collaboration would be important to the advocacy needed to resolve long-standing issues and access to resources. The PAC involved a wider array of constituents within the geographic scope. “The LCC study team particularly reached out to study area residents and business and land owners, New Orleanians who regularly utilize or otherwise depend on the corridor,”17 the LCC report notes. This group met with the Governance Committee and the LCC study team at seven study milestones to reflect back what they were hearing and to make sure they were integrating feedback from the community effectively in the scenarios they were creating for the next stage of the process. As the B&P Tunnel Project team saw the need for a robust set of mitigation efforts to discuss throughout the course of the planning, they realized they needed to bring in community members more formally for an advisory committee. This committee represented a broad spectrum of interests, including people such as faith leaders, neighborhood association representatives, business owners, bike advocates, and staff members of local elected officials. “We created this group that then we met with multiple times as we were trying to flesh out what the mitigation package would look like,” says Odessa Phillip. This group was essential to ensuring that they were asking the right

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questions and interpreting community concerns accurately. Additionally, because this group came from potentially contradictory standpoints, they could hash out their issues in a smaller forum where they could come to a compromise to take out to the community. As I’ve mentioned before, it is important that members of the advisory committee are empowered to speak up and provide their perspectives. I’ve seen advisory committee members who were given very little support—they were talked at by the project teams in transportation jargon. Or the committee was stacked with transportation professionals or people who wouldn’t necessarily provide fresh insight to the project team. We must make sure these committees represent the communities they’re working on behalf of and that they have the tools to succeed. They likely will not know transportation at the level of detail that planners and engineers do, so you will need to spend time giving them that technical background, and you will need to provide forums and meetings that aren’t so formal that they don’t feel comfortable speaking or sharing. Supporting the advisory committee also involves ensuring that committee members can attend meetings by paying them for their time, providing childcare, meeting at locations convenient to public transportation, and providing translation services. Many potential committee members who could add value to the process might not be able to afford the time and energy to participate even though they have the expertise. Once that advisory team is onboarded, the project is ready to move onto the rescoping stage. Rescope and Test The purpose of the rescoping stage is to redefine the extent of outcomes that need to be discussed that are directly or indirectly related to a potential project—both geographically and in terms of the issues that must be addressed. You will be building on the previous loop, where you worked to define the values of the community and began creating a consensus problem statement. That problem statement probably contains more than what anyone had originally expected. The project engineers likely went in with a purely engineering-related idea of the problem and

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Figure 5-5  Rescope and Test: The second phase involves a feedback loop with the community to define the range of issues you will tackle and the geography and extent of the proposed project. (Graphic design by Elizabeth Ryan)

wouldn’t have known what the community’s concerns and needs were until they heard directly from the people who lived in that community. Through that process, once you have the problem statement, you will need to work to find consensus on what success will look like for the final outcome or at the end of the project. I call this stage Rescope and Test because it’s very likely that everyone working on the project went in with a general idea of the “scope” (figure 5-5). In fact, many projects in a regional transportation plan will have been scoped years prior. Many transportation professionals reading this will question why I scope or rescope so far into this process or include it at all. I do this because that initial scope was likely not even close to getting at the true scale of the project. Those scopes are typically one sentence that contains a “problem” of congestion or safety, a solution, and an estimated cost that already exists when you are handed a project.

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An example scope could be “Reduce congestion on mainline highway at interchange X by adding a lane to the northbound off-ramp and improve the signals at intersections of the interchange with the local arterial to decrease delay for $25 million.” That one-sentence scope will have then been included in a Transportation Improvement Program twenty-year list of projects years, maybe even decades, prior to the project having the funding to proceed. I am intentionally including “rescope” at this phase of the planning process because those one-sentence scopes are not enough. They were usually made inside the transportation department with little to no community engagement and were created on the basis of what was happening with the roadway maintained and operated by the agency or client. And many times, they are made in the absence of a vision of the area or corridor. There is no way they can give an accurate picture of the full corridor need and especially the need related to the community. By reengaging in the scoping process in a more robust way, the project lead can influence the process of arriving at a more accurate picture of the project, which includes a more accurate budget, and creating a scope that benefits the community that will be affected by the project. This gives you the opportunity to step back and look at the system and see how your influence can help the community. I also understand that individuals have only so much authority in their position, but each of us plays a part in a project’s development and implementation. Some of us are environmental scientists, some are facilitators, and some are engineers or planners. I am elected, which gives me a broad range of authority, but it is limited by the charter that people of the region passed at the ballot box. Whatever your authority, that does not limit the influence you can have to make your community a better place. At the rescoping stage, you can use your position to put issues on the table that you may not think you have direct authority over, and that is okay. Addressing the issues up front does not increase risk; rather, it decreases risk in the overall project delivery process. It means that you are listening and noticing that the problem may not have been defined with enough information. Many times, it will turn out that you have more leeway to help than you thought, or you will build a coalition to help with the rest through a trusted process.

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Questioning the initial scope is part of this process, and allowing for transparency in this questioning is a big part of providing the opportunity for consensus. It also opens up communication about what other issues need to be resolved through the process, such as transit access, transit service, affordable housing, access to parks, business district viability, safe routes to school, trees and landscaping, pedestrian safety, cultural and historic places and events, community-building needs, what happens to the businesses and transit while the area is under construction, workforce development, and apprenticeship availability needs. These are all as much about that specific project as the original desire of the scope. If you test assumptions about the original scope with the information gathered, you might start to see, for instance, how the Rose Quarter Project could have found a more precise scope that met people’s expectations beyond just reducing congestion at that one spot on the freeway. To be clear, the scope should contain a series of potential outcomes but not solutions. The solutions come during the planning phase. For example, for the hypothetical interchange I described on page 156, where there is congestion on the mainline state highway, let’s say it is in an urbanizing area and the town is known as a bike-friendly city that not only loves its trees but also has won awards for its tree policies and livability. Recently, a company that builds graduated assisted living facilities for seniors bought ten acres of farmland at one corner of the interchange in question, which would necessitate a community engagement process regarding what that development would look like, how it would function, and how it would meet city code requirements for bike friendliness and tree coverage. The outcomes of the feedback based on community engagement might look like the following: • Decrease congestion in the northbound direction on the main line during the peak hour. • Increase mobility and accessibility to the surface streets and land uses along those streets by all modes, with an emphasis on transit, bikes, and pedestrians. • Improve pedestrian and cyclist safety through the interchange area on the surface streets, with an emphasis on seniors’ needs.

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• Improve landscaping to enhance attractiveness and meet city tree coverage goals. • Exceed workforce development goals at the city, county, and state levels. This is clearly very different from the original one-sentence scope. These kinds of outcomes can be arrived at only when the community is involved. Box 5-4 lists some questions you’ll want to ask during the Rescope and Test phase. Of course, not all of these outcomes are within your authority or your expertise, so you’ll want to start including team members who can help bring expert perspectives to the planning stage. For example, for this hypothetical example, you’d want a specialist in senior mobility or a bike/pedestrian engineer. Additionally, you’ll need to look further into the corridor to meet these goals. To do this, you can look at the local road corridor about a mile in each direction to find out why the signalized intersections at the interchange ramps aren’t meeting expectations and how to make sure that the vehicle mobility goals are not in conflict with the transit, bike, pedestrian safety, and accessibility goals. It is okay to have multiple, vague, and conflicting goals. That is normal, and it’s a perfect representation of a community where not everyone has the same goals. Democracy in action is a process to come to a consensus in which most parties can be satisfied. That’s also where your advisory committee comes in, to help navigate the conflicting interests in a productive and public way. Your job is to walk the advisory committee and the community through the trade-offs in the planning phase based on different ways to solve the problems and meet the outcomes they set. It also bears emphasizing that the rescope elements should fall under these categories: geographic scope and community interests.

Geographic Scope While many times on smaller projects the geographic scope is agreed upon at the outset, for medium to large projects it doesn’t always get

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Box 5-4 Questions to Ask during the Rescope and Test Phase Advisory Committee Have we chosen a trusted facilitator for the advisory committee? Does the advisory committee have a solid representation of the community as well as stakeholders? Are we supporting the committee members with information and ways to participate in the process? Outcomes Based on the stated values and goals that the community has articulated, what expected outcomes for the community do people have? How far geographically should the project reach (for example, should the scope include the entirety of the neighborhood or just a half-mile radius)? What have I learned from conversations with community members about their needs? Do I have that expertise on staff ? If not, how can I create an interdepartmental team inside the state or local jurisdiction to access the expertise in housing or economic development or workforce development? Have we begun work with community-based organizations to do public engagement to rescope the project and test that rescope? How will I support the community-based organizations to ensure they have the resources and background in transportation and land use if they don’t already have them? Internal Agency Am I prepared to take this through another iteration if we aren’t getting the outcomes right, if we did not have everyone at the table, or if we did not really understand what people were asking? Have I communicated this process and the discussions throughout the process to elected officials and others to keep moving forward and get their input as well? After learning all this, have I started to prepare everyone for the possibility that the timeline and budget may need to be adjusted in the future because the original scope was not adequate?

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fleshed out in more detail until this second, more precise scoping stage. At this point, you may realize that the geography that needs to be addressed extends farther out into the transportation system or farther out into the community alongside the corridor than you originally thought. The natural inclination within a state agency is to assume that whatever asset you own is the only thing you can influence. That’s how initial scopes coming in tend to be drawn with very tight influence areas. But when you involve the community and other jurisdictions in the scoping part of the process, you begin to find that the geographic scope extends well beyond that specific problem area. The actual problems may be caused upstream or downstream from the area experiencing the safety or congestion issue. For our interchange example, in order to understand the transportation system and how it is functioning and affecting the interchange, you may need to include a mile in each direction along the local arterial rather than just along the highway on-ramps and off-ramps. For projects that span entire highway corridor segments, you may need to include frontage roads, parallel local arterials within one mile of each side of the corridor, and the perpendicular local arterials connecting for a mile back. You do this because if any part of the system is not working, people will find a way around it, thus diverting traffic around the congested areas, which could mean you are just pushing a problem off the state highway and onto the local roads or vice versa. At this stage, you ask how far the project should reach. For example, should the scope include the entirety of the neighborhood or just a half-mile radius? With the Rose Quarter Project, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) very early on decided that the issue was at the interchange on the freeway only. This was determined without consulting local jurisdictions and community members. Because the project team didn’t make thorough community engagement efforts, they didn’t have a full sense of the entire connectivity of the surface street problems and what the future land uses could be. Without including community members and other stakeholders in the scoping stage, you’re bound to get a very narrow scope that won’t actually address the full scale of needs.

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Community Needs The other important element of the rescoping stage is defining the outcomes for community needs. For the Rose Quarter Project, if the City of Portland and local community groups had been more closely involved in the scoping stage, they would have been able to include community vision elements laid out by the Albina Vision Trust as well as by Portland Public Schools, which has a middle school that would be impacted by the project. Had ODOT engaged in these conversations during the Create the Problem Statement phase, it would have had a more accurate view of the potential scope and would have included all of these elements in the project. When the problem statement creation stage is more general, the scope is where you get deeper into the details of which jurisdictions should be involved in the solution, how far into the system the project will go, what other agencies and stakeholders need to be involved to help with the full scope, and what other areas of the adjacent neighborhood will be considered the project area. The transportation department is a partner and staff can participate in those discussions and, depending on the state, might even help finance or find resources for the solution if the solutions are beyond the transportation aspects of the project. The revised scope should be tested with the advisory committee and stakeholders to make sure all the issues and needs and desires have been documented. And then technical staff from multiple agencies and expert consultants should determine how to proceed to performance metrics. In the New Orleans LCC study, the initial ideas for the scope were conceived decades before: to remove the freeway. This history was very much a part of the initial idea for the LCC project. So, from the community point of view, there were assumptions and desires to see the highway come down completely, which can be considered the original “scope” that needed to be reinvestigated at this phase. However, the point of the project team coming in was to engage in the rescoping stage from a more open mindset as to which scenarios would and could be considered.

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In the Create the Problem Statement phase, the LCC team began to learn a bit more about community values and priorities. Interestingly, there was not consensus about removing the highway. Some wanted to rethink the use of the space underneath the bridge. So, in the Rescope and Test phase, the LCC team needed to continue to test the initial problem statement. In this phase, they were able to flesh out the areas where people strongly agreed, which included protection of the authenticity of local cultural expression, stormwater and floodwater mitigation efforts, job and workforce development, support of local businesses (versus national retail chains), and not displacing current residents.18 These are the outcomes that the community was able to land on that could be channeled into more specific scenarios in the planning phase. For the B&P Tunnel Project, the purpose of the project (which for our purposes can be considered the initial scope) was simply to replace the existing tunnel, which was over 150 years old and approaching the end of its useful life. “So, the purpose of the project is to identify alternatives that can be considered for how to handle a piece of aging infrastructure,” says Odessa Phillip. “Within that NEPA process, one alternative is to do nothing. Then you start looking at alternatives that follow all the problems.” The engineering and structural problems extended from the fact that it was a two-track tunnel that didn’t give trains the ability to pass and, for scheduled maintenance, would shut down an entire section of the important Northeast Corridor. So, the goals at the outset were to increase the volume of train traffic that could go through that corridor and to continue to allow trains through during scheduled maintenance. The original scope was made internally at Amtrak on the basis of those needs. Because the initial scope didn’t involve the community, this assumption required having discussions with the community. From those meetings with the community, the planning team was able to identify a more robust set of outcomes, including the following: • Identify an alignment that displaced the least number of community members.

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• Mitigate any environmental impact with funding and/or community-oriented projects. • Identify in-kind environmental replacements (e.g., if you destroy a wetland, you have to replace it). • Improve the livability standards in the community, including city street repairs and beautification projects. • And, of course, meet the engineering requirements: reduce the time to travel the corridor, increase the capacity of the corridor, and minimize or eliminate the bottleneck on the corridor. Plan and Test The purpose of the Plan and Test phase is to test possible solutions or sets of solutions against each other using performance metrics. Once you have agreed on the project scope, or outcomes, and you have a general sense of what success should look like, you can start zooming in to create an outline of said plan in the Plan and Test phase (figure 5-6). This is where performance metrics begin to come in. The team works together to define performance metrics for both transportation and what I call transportation-plus projects—essentially all the other scopes identified outside the transportation purview, such as the school impact and the neighborhood vitality work. At this stage, the project team should keep all ideas on the table and use all the tools in the toolbox, from flexibility of design guidelines to other ways to manage demand so that technical concerns don’t override community goals. Box 5-5 lists the types of questions to ask during the Plan and Test phase. After testing various scenarios against each other through a transparent process with the community, the advisory committee, and other stakeholders, you arrive at a preferred alternative or a preferred set of solutions that most parties can agree upon. To arrive at that preferred solution, every possible solution or set of solutions should be tested, including things that as a transportation professional you “know” in your gut may or may not work. It should all be included in those dialogues so that community members can see that their ideas are being heard and tested. If you trust the community, they will make really good decisions when their own values are being reflected in the performance metrics used to weigh the alternatives to meet their stated outcomes.

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Figure 5-6  Plan and Test: The third phase poses various scenarios based on the scope to provide options for community members to visualize and understand the tangible aspects of the project and give feedback. (Graphic design by Elizabeth Ryan)

These performance measures can flow from the values and outcomes. For example, on our hypothetical interchange project in an urbanizing area, we can work to create some simple performance metrics that would measure the success of the project in the future. Those solution goals and the metrics that will be used to show success could include the following per our hypothetical interchange: • Decrease congestion in the northbound direction on the main line. Metrics to use could include mode share (transit, drive alone, and high occupancy vehicle use in peak period) and FHWA’s Safety Performance Management Final Rule, which measures fatalities and injuries on a roadway.19 • Increase mobility and accessibility to the surface streets and land uses along those streets. Metrics could include mode share (transit,

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Box 5-5 Questions to Ask during the Plan and Test Phase Performance Measures How would we measure success with performance metrics on these adopted outcomes? Have we included qualitative and quantitative measures so that the community hears that we are concerned about their issues even if they are not “measurable” at this time because of inability to forecast or lack of data? Scenario Planning Have we solicited solutions and desired outcomes to the problem statement arrived at by consensus during that phase? Have we tested the scenarios of solutions or solution sets with the advisory committee and other stakeholders as well as elected officials to make sure all ideas are on the table and the scenarios are agreed to before embarking on technical analysis? How are we set up to negotiate toward a final hybrid scenario to move into a preferred alternative consensus recommendation? Who will suggest a final alternative that gets us to consensus? Is that person or agency a trusted partner? How will the preferred alternative reflect the outcomes and values? How will it be truthful to the trade-offs? Internal Agency Are we ready to go through another round of this learning loop when scenarios move into hybrid scenarios as people start to make trade-offs? Are we ready internally to test solutions that will require flexibility in guidelines, whether they are level-of-service or design guidelines? Have I communicated this process and the discussions throughout the process to elected officials and others to keep moving forward and get their input as well? After learning all this, have I started to prepare everyone for the possibility that the timeline and the budget may need to be adjusted in the future because the original project proposal and cost estimate were not adequate?

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drive alone, high occupancy vehicle use in peak period, bikes and pedestrians) to help measure transit accessibility and productivity, connectivity of bike lanes and sidewalks, safe pedestrian crossings per mile of the local arterial, and average speed of traffic along the local arterial. • Improve pedestrian and cyclist safety through the interchange area on the surface streets, with an emphasis on seniors’ needs. Metrics could include the number of curb ramps per mile along the arterial, widths of sidewalks, and metrics from the FHWA’s Safety Performance Management Final Rule focusing on the number of nonmotorized fatalities and nonmotorized serious injuries based on age. • Improve landscaping to enhance attractiveness and meet city tree coverage goals. Metrics would include the percentage of sidewalks shaded by tree canopy within five years, percentage of study area with groupings of five or more trees, acres of landscaping in the state right-of-way, and acres of landscaping along the local arterial. • Exceed workforce development goals at the city, county, and state levels. Metrics would include apprenticeship hours, contracting goals for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)–owned companies, wages, and safety standards. I note these specific types of performance metrics mainly to show how they can be integrated during this part of the planning process.20 For each of the scenarios you present to the community, you would include performance metrics such as these to show how the solution would play out in the short and long term. Community members will then have an opportunity to react, give feedback, and help bring the scenarios to a final consensus that would conclude with a preferred alternative. In the New Orleans LCC study, the problem statement workshop information was compiled by the team and channeled into four scenarios that they shared in scenario workshops in Central City and Tremé. The presentations covered existing conditions and trends and offered potential solutions. Workshop participants were given the option to weigh in on the scenarios and the potential solutions and were given

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maps with which to work together to develop their own future scenarios. This helped refine the goals into what can be thought of as a scope. The feedback was essential during the next phase of scenario and project development.21 In addition to the larger community meetings, they held smaller meetings called Kitchen Table Workshops, which Austin Allen and his team at DesignJones helped facilitate. In these workshops, they used an approach that came out of the work of Diane Jones Allen, founder of DesignJones.22 “The Kitchen Table Work Session,” wrote Jones Allen, “investigates a situation, strengthens existing communication networks or builds new ones, and affords people a degree of control at the most local level by providing venues that go beyond public meetings and stakeholder interviews.”23 These sessions took place in the homes of community residents—particularly people who had been involved with the meetings and who were considered strong assets in their community. These residents then invited friends, neighbors, and acquaintances to join them in a small focus group throughout this portion of the study. The trained facilitators presented scenarios that included the performance metrics and walked the focus group through data using computers or tablets. The performance metrics that they used in these scenarios included urban design; land use, vacant land, and blighted land; community resources and fresh food; employment and workforce development analyses; office, retail, and mixed-use market potential; housing market potential; drainage and subsidence; transportation systems and operations; roadway geometry and physical characteristics; bicycle, pedestrian, and transit infrastructure; and operational and safety analyses.24 Participants were encouraged to speak their mind and share their thoughts openly. Being at a literal “kitchen table” of a neighbor’s home provided a safe space for people to react and ask honest questions, which they might not be as comfortable doing in larger forums. Through all of these formats of engagement and continuous integration of the learning loops, the final proposal was not a surprise to community members because they were involved in its cocreation. It’s important to note that while the project was already at the plan stage, the Mardi Gras Indians Council25 agreed to become involved

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after some initial resistance to the idea. This was a watershed moment. The Mardi Gras Indians (also called the Black Masking Indians) are an important social and culture bearer group in New Orleans. These secret societies date back to the 1800s, when Black residents were banned from the city’s Mardi Gras celebrations. The name “Mardi Gras Indians” sought to honor the Native Americans who protected and aided enslaved people of the region.26 Their masking tradition, according to one elder, survives because “behind the mask is Africa,” which reflects the shared values of this community-centered cultural expression. Today, the group not only showcases some of the unique and amazing vibrancy of New Orleans culture but also represents an important affinity group within the study’s core area. The Mardi Gras Indians were vital to a fully effective community engagement effort because the group often used the space under the bridge for ceremonial activities. LCC team members conducted outreach with them throughout the earlier stages, but the Mardi Gras Indians were resistant because of the history of broken promises by the city and other government entities, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But they saw the way the process was conducted in the earlier stages and determined that there was potential for things to be different. Given that the LCC team was beyond the problem statement and rescoping phases, it is notable that they were able to pivot to include such important voices. That kind of flexibility is really important. It shows that you can keep to a project timeline while also making midplan adjustments, especially when it comes to including important voices. And what the Mardi Gras Indians had to say was important. They requested that the meetings be on their terms—in their meeting space, with them facilitating the discussion and setting the agenda with support from the team. The LCC team accommodated their request. Yolanda Takesian said, “Their request was to get all of the heads of the city agencies to that first meeting. That’s typically hard for city agencies to do, but at the time, each invited agency head sat in the front row and listened to what they needed to hear from the presenters. It really helped to get long-standing issues that people wanted to talk about out and on the table.”

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At those meetings, the Mardi Gras Indians shared their thoughts about the space—they favored keeping the bridge up because the space provided shade and shelter for many of their rituals and parades. One of their top priorities is cultural preservation and fair compensation for their activities while ensuring they aren’t being co-opted by tourism. During Mardi Gras, the space under the bridge is their space. Many of their concerns weren’t specific to transportation but were related to land use and respect reflected in equal access to certain spaces in the city. For example, after Hurricane Katrina, the City of New Orleans restricted access to Louis Armstrong Park and Congo Square, a space vital to the city’s African music and cultural traditions and used by Tremé residents for community gathering and masking ceremonies.27 Access ways into the park were limited to the French Quarter entrance and closed with chain locks from the Tremé sides—where many of the group’s members and culture bearers lived—because of the need to control who entered. Similar to the racism in the history of transportation policies and practices, shutting off access to people in the community sent a message to residents from Tremé that they didn’t belong there. The Mardi Gras Indians and other culture bearers wanted to lay claim for others to a historic and valued Black space. They did this by letting city leaders know how important that access to public space is and that they should do something about it. These were all pieces of information that the study could bring into the conversation and address in the final recommendations. These meetings and discussions were not anticipated in the initial plan of action, but because community feedback is part of each stage of the process, there was flexibility to add meetings and adjust priorities to create more equitable outcomes. All of these meetings and the back-and-forth with community members contributed to creating final recommendations that were rooted in consensus. Throughout the entire process, “people were asking complicated questions,” says Austin Allen. “The solution in the end spoke to that.” The solution wasn’t necessarily to take down the bridge in one go, or even immediately. “What we found from the community is that they were using the space,” says Takesian. “You could walk in the shade or protected from

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the rain from one end of the viaduct to the other. . . . The ‘bridge’ has activity under it [and connects parts of the community] that it originally divided.” Essentially, they found that the community had adapted and made the space their own, and that needed to be recognized in the final outcome. Additionally, there wasn’t strong consensus over taking the bridge down, and there existed a logistic reality that there wasn’t funding or a structural basis to remove it, so solutions needed to acknowledge those facts. The inquiry process culminated in a report that provided recommendations to connect community goals that were developed in the Create the Problem Statement phase to strategic action. This phase concluded with four scenarios, each having its own benefits and all rooted in community solutions as they related to working for neighborhood streets, transit, traffic and vehicle travel, and trucks and freight. It’s important to note that the scenarios upgraded the transit from bus to streetcar and included different levels of investment under the bridge. Those scenarios were as follows: • Scenario 1: The bridge would stay in place, but they would remove a series of access ramps, restore the street connections across Claiborne Avenue where those ramps stood, and provide enhanced bus service along the length of Claiborne Avenue. Reclaimed land in this scenario would add 3,500 new households and 600 new jobs and bring new shopping and apartments to key locations.28 • Scenario 2: The bridge would stay in place, but they would take the removal of access ramps farther and introduce an access system with unimpeded local access along surface streets on North Claiborne Avenue. Land reclaimed from the ramps in this scenario would add 4,500 new households and 1,070 new jobs, bring new shopping and apartments to key locations, and create new opportunities for neighborhood centers.29 • Scenario 3a: This scenario, built upon scenario 2, would expand investments in premium transit on the Claiborne corridor but would take down a portion of the I-10 elevated expressway. This scenario would add 6,000 new households and 1,270 new jobs.30 • Scenario 3b: This scenario, which performed the best of all scenarios

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for both regional and local travel and opened high-value land to redevelopment, would take down I-10 in that corridor, as well as the entire downtown interchange of I-10 and US Route 90 Business, thus reconnecting important streets in the corridor and returning Claiborne Avenue to a grand avenue rather than an at-grade thoroughfare. It would also include upgrades to the Pontchartrain Expressway creating a distributor-collector road.31 Because the study was designed to look at a range of possible solutions, the final recommendations tested multiple scenarios that could be revisited at the point where major investment would be necessary. In the meantime, the final report’s action steps could be pursued during the first, second, third, and five-plus years after the study to maintain momentum toward the community goals and objectives. Additionally, it became clear through the process that the community prioritized integrating new connectivity into its cultural fabric and resisted any change that would disrupt this adaptation to the freeway over the pure connectivity of the street grid. This is not something a transportation engineer would have seen immediately or would have known had the community not been so involved in the process. That’s why the report didn’t end with these scenarios. “Regardless of the decisions made about major transportation projects discussed in the scenarios,” the report states, “the study finds that many actions and initiatives can strengthen existing communitybuilding activities and recent and ongoing investment in housing, the Medical Center and quality of life projects.”32 The study ended at the planning stage, since the bridge couldn’t be removed immediately because of the federal requirements. But actions could be taken in the more immediate future that would address the community needs, specifically through formal commitments, such as a Community Benefits Agreement. Now that the B&P Tunnel Project had reached a consensus on the kind of solutions they’d like to see, the team could take the scenarios back to the community to go through all potential options (see figure 5-7). They asked the community about their preferences, what they liked or didn’t like about the options, and what concerned them.

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Figure 5-7  This map shows the three proposed alignments, including the location of the existing B&P Tunnel. The alignment of all of them as a continuous arc allowed for faster speeds. Options 3A and 3C would have caused higher levels of residential displacement. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

Figure 5-7 shows the three options (3A, 3B, and 3C). One thing that Odessa Phillip makes sure to do at the outset of a project, particularly during the planning phase, is to have a discussion with the internal planning team about what the community does and does not get to weigh in on. Because there are engineering components, while there may be concerns, the community might not have the ultimate say on certain structural elements. However, in this case, they did have a say in helping to identify the preferred alternative that would impact them the least. Additionally, they would have even more of a say in decisions about mitigation, as discussed in the next section. As they got down into the details, community members raised new concerns, such as when the project team explained where vent stacks

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would go. Vent stacks exist over underground railroad tunnels for the rare event of an underground fire, allowing smoke to ventilate and push the fire out more quickly. Naturally, the locations of these vent stacks were worrisome to people in the adjacent neighborhoods, particularly those who had kids at an elementary school next to a proposed vent stack location. But vent stacks are an engineering and safety requirement, so while the community didn’t have a say in whether there were vent stacks or not—and in many cases where they were going to be located—the team did need to spend time at this stage explaining the purpose of them. Because at this planning stage they allowed for greater detailed discussions, they could talk about the purpose of the vent stacks and potentially negotiate locations. While the neighborhood community engagement work was going on at this stage, there were also discussions with representatives of a local company that carried out heavy civil construction projects and manufactured materials such as asphalt and concrete. The alignment preferred by the community would move the rail line farther from the company, which was an issue because the company used the rail line for deliveries. After the company threatened to pull out of the city (which would have resulted in a lot of job losses), the project team had to find a solution that could appease all parties. A representative from the company was also on the community advisory committee, which helped to find some common ground between the community and the business interests. At the conclusion of this phase, the team arrived at a new preferred alternative that would cost more but would have the least impact on the community. Figure 5-8 shows the preferred alternative that the planning team arrived at with community consensus. “ ‘Least’ impact is relative, though,” says Veronica McBeth, “because there’s still an impact as far as still having eminent domain issues, still having to place the vent stacks into some of the neighborhoods.” The team continued to go back out to the community to discuss the new plan and get feedback. “From presenting what the old alignment was going to do, it would hopefully provide assurances,” says McBeth, “essentially saying ‘We heard you; these are the lesser impacts.’” Because people would still be displaced, there really was not a perfect

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Figure 5-8  This map shows the final alignment and preferred alternative (option 3B) presented in the NEPA study, which was more amenable to community members and other stakeholders. Because this alignment would cause fewer residential displacements than the other alignment options (thirty instead of fifty-one), it would have had the least cost to the community. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

solution for the community. “And that still doesn’t sit well with a lot of members of the community,” says council member Nick Mosby. What he describes is a reality in a lot of these types of projects. The community might not be happy with the final outcome, but they were at least heard and treated respectfully throughout the process of engagement. And changes were made because of their input. Had there not been appropriate community engagement at any of these stages or had the team not listened to what the community said, the alignment might have been cheaper, but it would have been a huge detriment to the community and likely would have been received

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negatively, similar to the Portland Rose Quarter Project. There was no ideal solution to the tunnel project for the community, but it was involved in choosing the least detrimental solution. Community engagement led to the agreement to provide funding and ensure that the project’s environmental impact on the Whitelock community would be mitigated. For both of the foregoing examples, one major outcome of the community engagement efforts was the agreements created that would benefit the transportation-plus projects—those related to but outside the scope of the transportation project. This is where the planning process splits off into two concurrent processes: the Design and Test phase and the development of an agreement with the community, such as a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA). These agreements address the elements that are important to the community but can’t be carried out as part of the transportation project. If Necessary, Create a Community Benefits Agreement A CBA has typically been an enforceable agreement between the project owner, labor, workforce, community, and contractor. CBAs started off as Labor Project Agreements to ensure harmony between the contractor and the labor unions and among the labor unions to clarify which work belongs to each union. In creating a CBA, agencies and community coalitions work together to find solutions for the problems that were identified in the community engagement process during the previous phases. Usually, though, they can’t be addressed in the transportation project because the areas beyond the roadway are managed by another jurisdiction (e.g., sidewalks or tree planting is managed by the local DOT rather than the state DOT, which manages the roadway) or are not directly related to transportation (figure 5-9). As defined by the Oregon Department of Transportation, Community Benefits Agreements can include the following: • Improved racial and gender workforce equity through improved access to training (apprenticeship) programs and career opportunities Increased contracting opportunities for certified firms • Maximization of the impact of investments for the benefit of the communities in which they are located33

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Figure 5-9  Create a Community Benefits Agreement: All of the transportation-plus needs and goals generated during the scoping and planning phases go into a document such as a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), which then follows its own separate, but connected, learning loop process of design and often links up after the transportation design phase. (Graphic design by Elizabeth Ryan)

For medium-, large-, and mega-scale projects in which the community needs are much more complex, a more formal agreement should be made. This should be the norm. Smaller projects may not need a formal agreement. Creating a CBA is not currently standard practice. I hope it does become standard, though, because as I’ve mentioned time and again, the people who travel along our roadways also live and work and play in the communities through which the roadways run. While not having a CBA doesn’t necessarily mean that these transportation-plus projects won’t happen, a CBA does put them into the public record. Beyond that, it helps to reestablish trust so that the community sees—in that

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public record—that they were heard. Box 5-6 includes questions that can be asked during the CBA development process. In most cases, the project team should work on and manage the CBA process. That’s what happened in the B&P Tunnel Project because the environmental mitigation efforts were very much aligned with the project. This was also the case for Oregon Metro’s Get Moving 2020 project, in which the team at Metro worked with community members to develop an agreement on promises that certain transportation-plus projects would be addressed. Among six other commitments, one major transportation-plus element concerned implementing antidisplacement programs. Example commitments to the community included using participatory budgeting principles for resource allocation for anti-displacement programs, funding anti-displacement programs with oversight from a community-led regional equity coalition, and coordinating future anti-displacement work with existing work and conversations with local jurisdictions and community-based organizations.34 In all, there were forty specific commitments that fell under the seven themes that were priorities for communities. You can find additional details about Get Moving 2020 in chapter 3. If there are elements that will be handled by other jurisdictions, a separate intergovernmental agreement will be needed to make sure that those elements are prioritized and funded to meet those CBA outcomes. But in some cases, the scope of a CBA might be far larger than the project team’s scope of work, so the CBA process would break off into a concurrent planning process. This is what happened with the LCC project in New Orleans as the initial study came to a conclusion. While the CBA process may or may not be handled by the project team, I include this loop in the diagram because the project team should see that this process is discussed publicly as one way to ensure that what is important to the community is going to be carried out. There have been a lot of promises in the past that have not been kept. Putting proper consideration and resources behind those transportation-plus elements is essential to a successful outcome. Because transportation is interconnected with all other services, it’s still the responsibility of the DOT to manage the tangential, transportation-plus projects and hold space to make commitments to the community. Even

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Box 5-6 Questions to Ask during the Create a Community Benefits Agreement Phase Workforce What are the state and federal goals for Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) contracting? Can we exceed them? How would we do that? What are the state and federal goals for apprenticeship for the project for women and people of color? Can we exceed them? How would we do that? How will we support women and people of color in getting these contracts or jobs and keeping them? What kind of support will we need to include at the staff/consultant level to support people in getting the work and create a positive working environment for them? Community Needs What other community needs should we address, including affordable housing, transit service levels, and art and cultural gathering places? And how do we include those in a CBA as well as in intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) with other agencies? Are there opportunities for intergenerational wealth creation beyond temporary construction jobs? Have we met the outcomes the community wanted at the beginning? Internal Agency Are we ready to do another learning loop when scenarios move into hybrid scenarios as people start to make trade-offs? Are we ready internally to test solutions that will require flexibility in guidelines, whether they are level-of-service or design guidelines? Have I communicated this process and the discussions throughout the process to elected officials and others to keep moving forward and get their input as well? After learning all this, have I started to prepare everyone for the possibility that the timeline and the budget may need to be adjusted in the future because the original proposed project and cost estimate were not adequate?

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though your transportation agency is unlikely to bear responsibility for all these things, you have the responsibility to make sure the issues the community has with the project are addressed in some way. It also strengthens trust that the team will follow through and include those concerns in future actions. The CBA phase will include prioritization of community benefits (testing with the community, of course) that leads to the development of an action plan in partnership between community-based organizations, public agencies, and related businesses. A signed agreement should be adopted that spells out the commitments between the agencies and the external stakeholders. Finally, the team sets up a separate advisory group (or in some cases a whole new planning team) to help keep track of what was agreed upon and keep the parties accountable. This work usually links back up with the transportation planning process at the point of implementation. In New Orleans, based on the LCC study findings, the city’s next step was to invest in the existing space under the bridge, which required a whole new engagement process that included a community benefits agreement of sorts. While it wasn’t laid out specifically as a CBA, the city made specific commitments that were within its power to begin revitalizing the space under the elevated expressway. As part of that agreement, the city designated a nineteen-block area under the I-10 freeway as the Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District (CID), which is now overseen by the Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation (Ujamaa EDC).35 Establishment of the CID was driven by the LCC study goals of preservation of culture and identity and equitable access to economic prosperity by providing business and entrepreneurship support.36 The CID was created in partnership with the Foundation for Louisiana, the Tambourine and Fan youth group, and Ashé Cultural Center/Efforts of Grace, which would lead the community engagement efforts that were part of the agreement made with the city. Judith Williams Dangerfield—who is the founding board chair of Ujamaa EDC, the founder of Metro-Source, and an expert in equity and inclusion in public policy—was part of that goal-developing process. She notes that Ujamaa doesn’t have a stance on whether the bridge comes down or not.

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Dangerfield says that the CBA-like development process was created in “recognition that when [the bridge] was put there, the community adapted and uses the space. . . . So if you’re going to change it, make sure you’re going to change it in a way that people want and not exacerbate the problems.” In that, she notes the importance of an antidisplacement plan for any solution regarding the freeway. Reflecting this mindset, the CID development efforts included intentional community engagement processes called charettes—collaborative, interdisciplinary stakeholder planning workshops focused on community change—between May and October 2017.37 As I mentioned before, this process was not led by the original LCC team, but it was a related and important step. The findings from the charettes were put into the CID master plan. The goals were to reduce traffic speed for pedestrian safety, create programs for residents, create space for resident-owned businesses, reduce air and water pollution, address stormwater management, celebrate and memorialize the cultural icons of the neighborhood, implement a complete streets project to help existing businesses along the corridor, and maintain space for existing cultural events.38 Dangerfield says that the process of following through with those goals has been moving forward, albeit slowly. One major logistic and bureaucratic challenge is that the bridge and the space underneath it are owned by the State of Louisiana. However, the funds for investing in that area are from the City of New Orleans. So, there’s a bureaucratic challenge regarding which agency can run and manage that space. Ujamaa EDC is currently negotiating with the city to solve this issue. “For Ujamaa to be effective there has to be [a memorandum of understanding] between our organization and the city so that we can have the accountability and responsibility for the programming,” Dangerfield says. It’s there that the CBA would become more binding because the state would then act in accordance with a formal agreement. This would allow Ujamaa EDC to raise funds and use them for their programming purposes. This is an example of how and why transportation entities involved in these processes must also be a part of the tangential community-oriented projects related to a CBA.

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Before long-term, permanent programming can be offered, various stages of investments need to be made, particularly to establish the subsurface infrastructure for running water and proper lighting. Later phases will deal with stormwater and repairs and even greenscaping infrastructure to align with the CID sustainability goals. Funding those necessary infrastructure projects would enable Ujamaa EDC to put in place all of the elements laid out in the CID plan: a market with local vendors and a public garden and fountain space that would include displays about community leaders. Ujamaa and its partners also made sure to keep some of the parking space for vendors. One possible reason for the slow momentum is that the city’s administration changed at the point that LCC priorities would begin implementation. And with all political cycles comes a shift in priorities, but they are moving toward an agreement. This is where the project stands at the time of this writing. There is movement forward, but complex projects such as this require a great deal of engagement on all sides to ensure that the community needs are being met. For the B&P Tunnel Project, the CBA development process was led by the transportation planning team and was negotiated through the development of the NEPA study, also with the use of charettes. This agreement was specifically focused on mitigation efforts and negotiations regarding what Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration would contribute to help offset the negative environmental outcomes on the community. The commitments for mitigation efforts would be written into the NEPA study (and would become the record of decision once accepted by the FRA); the funding entities (Amtrak and the FRA) would be responsible for them upon implementation of the project. While it wasn’t called a community benefits agreement, for all intents and purposes, that’s what this was. “Typically, mitigation is looked at as one-on-one, such as if you impact a home, you buy it at fair market value,” says Odessa Phillip. But seeing that it was an established area (with little ability to build more housing in that area) and the impact of displacement would mean that

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residents likely wouldn’t be able to return, the planning team knew they needed to do more than work one-on-one; they needed to focus the mitigation efforts community-wide. “So, we started looking at specific issues, like ‘If we’re going to skirt the edge of this high school, could we help them redo their playing field?,’” she says. “We started having conversations like that and we asked community members to tell us all their ideas and we’d filter through them.” When they filtered through the ideas, the team grouped them into categories that turned into suggestions for community-wide efforts that addressed impact concerns in greater detail. For example, because Whitelock Community Farm would be impacted, they discussed how they could find a bigger, better plot of land for a new garden. They also discussed other needs beyond those related to the railway impact, including better streets, sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike lanes. “These are all things to help lift community impacts that would help make the neighborhood safer,” says Veronica McBeth. What the negotiations between the community and Amtrak and the FRA landed on was $50 million in contributions that would aid in mitigation efforts. This number was written into the final NEPA study as such: “These mitigation measures are designed specifically for the neighborhoods impacted by the Project, and particularly the minority and low-income populations residing within these neighborhoods. Due to the permanent nature of the Project impacts, such as building demolitions and right-of-way acquisition in [environmental justice] communities, adverse effects to [environmental justice] populations will remain after mitigation.”39 This financial commitment, along with the ideas on which the team collaborated with the community, were all part of that community benefits agreement. This financial commitment would come with, essentially, very few strings attached and would likely be managed by a local community investment organization. Because the project hasn’t been fully funded yet, this remains a commitment, but as soon as the project moves on to the final design and implementation, the community should receive this money. In all likelihood, there would be some management by

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the Baltimore City Department of Transportation or the Maryland Department of Transportation. McBeth says that in all her years as a planner, this was the first time she had successfully worked on a mitigation agreement of this kind. It was a huge success for her team at the city. The successful resolution can also be attributed to the tireless advocacy of council member Nick Mosby. Mosby also emphasizes how important—and, unfortunately, unique—it was to have people such as McBeth on the internal planning team who understood his concerns and reflected them back to him. “It was really comforting to me that I saw Veronica saying, ‘What you’re doing is right, and I want you to know that I hear where you’re coming from,’” he says. And they both worked hard to make sure that community voice was part of the process the entire way. It’s clear that if there had not been strong community engagement, with community members both listened to and heard, these mitigation efforts would not have been made. Design and Test The purpose of the Design and Test phase is to continue to apply the performance metrics to the engineering design of the chosen modes in the preferred alternative and their specific alignments to meet the needs of the transportation system but also, more important, those of the community. Certainly, elements of the project’s design are considered progressively throughout all of the phases. Here, the design is finalized so the project can move into implementation (figure 5-10). At this phase, you have a plan in mind, but there are still decisions to be made that would affect the community at a block-by-block level. For example, a project team could have chosen to build light rail as the preferred alternative. At this point, we would ask questions such as the following: Do we want the light rail to take a lane in the existing street right-of-way, or do we want it to have its own new lane that could expand the right-of-way? Even further into the design, we would need to ask whether the light rail should be placed in the inside lane or the outside lane and how that choice would affect access to land

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Figure 5-10 Design and Test: The final planning and design phase goes into the specific design details of the preferred alternative to answer questions and make decisions in partnership with the community. (Graphic design by Elizabeth Ryan)

uses or conflicts with other modes. Box 5-7 lists the types of questions you’ll want to ask at this phase. Even though the details can be minute, they still need to be tested with the community to make sure the community is on board with the decisions. Additionally, for many projects (including the two examples I’ve discussed in this chapter), there may be a good bit of time between the planning phase and the final design and implementation of the projects. So, this phase reengages the community while honing in on those final details. Much of what the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ design guidelines envision is that you have done all the heavy lifting of engaging with members of the community to design a vision for their corridor, which usually means reprioritizing the space for the

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Box 5-7 Questions to Ask during the Design and Test Phase Community Engagement Based on the community values we heard and the desired outcomes the community stated, is the early design (30 percent design) meeting expectations—do you see any issues we should consider revising to make it work better on the ground for you? If we are having trouble reconciling these outcomes in the design, how should we prioritize these elements? If there were elements that needed to be prioritized in a first phase due to available funding, what would they be? Internal Agency Have we included everyone internally in the agency to make sure that when the preferred alternative is chosen, there is awareness that the agency needs to be prepared to do more than the original scope? Have we been clear that the Value Engineering method used does not refer to the community needs as “amenities” but rather keeps the community needs as essential? Are we ready to do another learning loop if the preferred alternative is found to have unanticipated design issues? Are we ready internally to test solutions that will require flexibility in guidelines, whether they are level-of-service or design guidelines? Have I communicated this process and the discussions throughout the process to elected officials and others to keep moving forward and get their input as well?

different modes, landscaping, art, location of safe crossings, and so on. And this new boulevard vision requires a series of projects over time to achieve. The guidelines show how to help prioritize the necessary elements to achieve safer, high levels of mobility and accessibility for all modes in a phased manner. This is helpful in finding funding over time and keeping your promise to achieve the full vision. At the time of this writing, there aren’t serious plans in the works to remove the elevated highway along the Claiborne Avenue corridor in New Orleans, so the project has not reached this step. The majority

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of the work that the LCC study prompted was specifically related to community development. If the highway is ever slated to come down, the community engagement process will have to start anew. “There was unprecedented community involvement in creating those initial plans,” says Judith Williams Dangerfield of Ujamaa EDC. “This needs the same kind of engagement—providing babysitters, making sure to provide people with a meal, and going door-to-door getting people engaged who are not normally connected.” What she’s hoping for, if this does potentially lead to removal of the bridge, is that they will go through the same kind of inquiry process the LCC conducted. For the B&P Tunnel Project in Baltimore, the team, in collaboration with the community, finally landed on the scenario laid out as the “preferred alternative” in the NEPA study. At the Design and Test phase, the project team started to get more into the engineering details. Since the NEPA study was submitted and accepted as the final record of decision in 2017,40 McBeth has no doubt that design has been going on behind the scenes. Because the decision is recorded and essentially bound by law, they must go through with the plans as they are laid out. President Biden’s 2021 infrastructure package—which allocated $66 billion for Amtrak’s repair backlog—could very well lead to final funding for the B&P Tunnel, given its great safety risks in its current state on a high-traffic Amtrak and commuter corridor.41 Because of this high priority, the design process continued. Odessa Phillip was hired by Amtrak in August 2021 to resume her role in leading the community engagement efforts. She has hired one of the Baltimore City DOT team members to work with her on the project. While the team she’s working with at Baltimore City DOT, MDOT, Amtrak, and the FRA is new, she says that the goals and the strong teamwork remain the same. They hired her team so that the community engagement could be done properly. The early stages of the engagement took place in the fall of 2021 and included public meetings and engagement efforts to remind community members about the project. Since the NEPA study concluded in 2017, it’s important to prepare the community. Inevitably, there will be new community members, and some people will have moved or passed

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away, so it is important to ensure that everyone who would be impacted by the project is up to speed. Additionally, there are new city council representatives. Nick Mosby is now the Baltimore City Council president and will surely be a stalwart advocate, just as he was the entire way through the earlier process. But there is now a new mayor and an entirely new staff at Baltimore City DOT. “It’s essentially starting the process over, but this time preparing the community for the next steps of the work starting, such as providing a timeline and what to expect,” says McBeth. Phillip and her team are, as of this writing, about to head into their first set of community mitigation meetings, which is predominantly the purpose of her work with Amtrak. They will begin to discuss what the projects will look like and how the $50 million will be administered logistically. Implement the Design The community engagement never really stops. As you enter into the final design and construction, there should continue to be a way to bring issues that arise to the community or the advisory committee members for a recommendation. This can be informal or formal, depending on how much the issues cause the project to stray from its original promises. There are many ways this can take place, including construction outreach methods. Make sure you have enough staff to take care of the businesses and residents along the construction corridor to keep people abreast of what’s happening, including when construction will occur in front of their business or home, how long people’s access to their property will be disrupted, and when noise will be generated from construction and during what hours. Communication is key at this stage. See box 5-8 for the types of questions to ask during the implementation phase. A light-rail tunnel project in Portland went as far as buying new windows for those living near the entrances to the tunnel where more is happening to limit their exposure to the excessive noise for the duration of the project. The Portland Streetcar construction projects have used an innovative construction methodology to help reduce

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Box 5-8 Questions to Ask during the Implement the Design Phase Contract How have I included the expectation of meeting community needs with the final design and construction? How have I included the CBA elements in the contractual obligations? How have I required my agency and the contractor to continue communication with thought leaders, residents, and business owners as issues arise during construction? Public Outreach Have I prepared the businesses and residents in the corridor for the construction timeline and impacts? Do I have enough staff to engage with the public, and are they empowered to get help through the contractor (and the contract) to mitigate noise, air quality, and business impacts? Have I made sure that people can safely access transit and pedestrian pathways while these are under construction? Internal Agency Have I communicated this process and the discussions throughout the process to elected officials and others to keep moving forward and get their input as well?

time installing rail in front of businesses and still move utilities, which can be extremely time-consuming. Another light-rail line worked to minimize time spent in front of each business, but during the construction period, the transit agency arranged for state, regional, and local public workers to go on organized lunch or bowling outings at the local establishments so each business would not see too much loss in revenue. Workers paid for their own lunches, but the restaurant or bowling alley had a predictable income for those days. In Seattle, during construction of the State Route 99 tunnel that replaced the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the state paid for increased levels of transit service for those who needed to access downtown Seattle from

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the west side of SR 99. It helped by reducing vehicular trips in and around the project area as well as helping the downtown area manage the potential congestion that would result from rerouting traffic. On the people side, the level of community engagement that you put in during development of the project should continue, through communication with thought leaders, stakeholders, residents, and business owners, into the construction phase. You will need to determine the number of outreach communication specialists you will need, depending on the complexity of the project and the number of methods of communication, from one-on-one to mass emails. And then determine how people can work with the project team if things are not going well. Undoubtedly, issues will arise in the field that no one could predict. When that happens, the team needs to be empowered to take the community members’ perspectives and concerns very seriously. What this community solutions–based process shows is that there is more than one type of community solution, which may have initially appeared to be just for a transportation-related issue. But it takes a deep dive into what that looks like for a place in order to understand, specifically, what those solutions are. It takes working directly and regularly with the community to define those problems and solutions together. And it takes a process that facilitates that type of engagement. It takes a process such as the community solutions–based approach. And while all of that conversation and discussion with the community might not seem as if you’re using the technical skills you were trained in during those early phases, know that they are valuable. In the same way that the community’s involvement with the design process lessens over time, during those later phases, the need for technical knowledge and expertise increases. “I still use all those engineering measures,” says Utah DOT’s Carlos Braceras. “They’re still used in decision-making. It doesn’t mean we leave things behind; it means we have grown. It’s the evolution of our profession. The role transportation has in people’s lives is evolving, and we as transportation professionals need to change.” How it has evolved is by truly integrating community into the process.

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When all is said and done, the engineering or architecture or planning skills will be needed to fulfill the project. For engineers and architects, the structures that are built can and should be safe and usable. You are absolutely needed to ensure that a project fulfills those design standards. And you’ll see that those skills will be put to better use when you create a project that works well for the community and the people therein. What using a community solutions–based approach means for your technical skills is that you can know you’re putting your expertise to use in the best way possible.

Chapter 6

Building Communities of People’s Dreams

W

ith the $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by the United States Senate and signed by President Joseph Biden in November 2021 comes a huge opportunity in transportation planning and engineering.1 Thousands of projects that have been waiting for funding for years, in many cases decades, are about to rise to the top of priority lists across the country. But there is a risk with this flow of money. Particularly, if we do things within the standard guidelines many of us were taught in engineering school, we could do a lot of harm in communities across the country. Through the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, some of that money—about $1 billion in grants over five years—is designated specifically for reconnecting and repairing communities that were destroyed by the midcentury urban highway expansions.2 While it’s something that can help address past harms, it is not nearly enough. We will need to look at how we do our work on all projects to make sure that we’re not simply repeating the mistakes of the past. A November 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation showed that displacement of Black and Brown communities didn’t end with construction of the Interstate Highway System in the middle of the twentieth 191

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century. In fact, reporters Liam Dillon and Ben Poston found that nearly two-thirds of projects that had taken place since 1991 in California, North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and Mississippi (the states that displaced the most people) disproportionately affected residents in Black and Latino neighborhoods.3 The investigation shows that the way we’ve been planning, designing, and building our roadways harms communities, and it will continue to do so if we don’t engage in a paradigm shift in transportation engineering and planning. It’s not too late to change course. In fact, the unprecedented level of funding that will come from the infrastructure bill offers us an opportunity to create this culture shift. And I believe it doesn’t have to start with agency mandates. Rather, it can start with the project managers who carry these out. The power to shift the way we do things is in the way we approach our work, and we can do this by using the community solutions–based approach. This all starts with prioritizing people within a community over budgets and timelines. “We call it ‘helping to build a community of your dreams,’” says Carlos Braceras of the Utah Department of Transportation. “It’s working with communities and understanding what is their dream for community, what they aspire to, and what values are important to a community.” To build communities of people’s dreams requires centering those people and their community as a part of the process. Being a transportation professional is not about building the physical roadways just for cars. We’re there to build communities that revolve around the people who live there. To do that, the overarching elements of strong racial equity, collaboration, and community engagement will help us build thriving communities. By taking a racial equity approach—through targeted universalism,4 as I described in chapter 3—you create solutions for communities whose members are the most likely to be harmed or killed on our streets. But in creating safer roadways for those who are the most often harmed, usually people of color, you are creating roadways that are safer for everyone. If we truly care about the economic vitality of our regions, we will prioritize those who can’t access opportunities such as well-resourced schools, health care, and well-paying jobs. And if we are truly building

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transportation for everyone, we should care about listening and understanding and designing on the basis of the values communities and the people therein hold dear. And in order to create innovative solutions, we must get out of our silos and work in collaboration with other professionals. Everything is better done as a team, and helping solve transportation solutions is no exception. This team approach, as shown by Angelo Fernandez and his team in Eagle County, Colorado (chapter 4), centers on building trust among professionals through a collaborative and open process. Working and collaborating with others can be hard and can feel time-consuming. But if done well, collaboration channels the best assets of each team member into solutions actually needed by the community whose problem you’re working to solve. Finally, at the center of all of this are the people whose transportation problems we are charged with solving: the community. And we need to do this through a truly engaged approach. Community engagement takes deeply listening to—and above all hearing—the people who spend every day traveling throughout their neighborhood and beyond. The community engagement process is also about us, as transportation professionals, keeping an open mind throughout the whole process and constantly testing our assumptions with the community. The community solutions–based approach offers a process for including all of those important elements that center community. The moment a project lands on your desk, this approach can guide you in carrying out the planning process, setting you and your project up to develop a solution that helps create the community of people’s dreams. The examples discussed throughout this book showcase a lot of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Lessons Learned What I appreciate about the examples is that they show that the range and type of projects will vary greatly, but the thread that runs through them is a focus on community. No matter what project you’re working on, the outcome will be better for the community if you use the community solutions–based approach. The following are some lessons that all transportation professionals can take from these examples.

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Community Insight Helps Provide a More Accurate Project Picture For the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) Tunnel Project, I can see how the increased budget that came about after the rescoping stage might seem as if it could be going beyond budget simply because it exceeded Amtrak’s hoped-for budget. However, what’s important to note is that the scoping stage was the process of creating the actual budget. Because the planning team did appropriate community engagement and took community feedback to come up with an alignment that was more amenable to the community, they were able to settle on a more appropriate budget. In fact, given the way it started, it could have gone downhill had they not doubled back to revisit the problem statement. “You’re always going to have to face the music eventually,” says council member Nick Mosby, who worked to ensure the community’s voice was heard. “Communities have become so sophisticated in the way that they organize. . . . You’re going to come up against resistance because you didn’t decide to engage folks early. That’s what I saw with [the B&P Tunnel Project].” Had the team not gone back to the community and instead merely led with the initial, slimmer budget, they could have met with a great deal of blowback from the community, leading to their potentially having to conduct a new NEPA study. Not only would that have angered the community; it would have set back a desperately needed improvement project by years. This is an example of how a project could appear to be made more expensive by including the needs of the community, but in reality community involvement decreases the risk of the project not moving forward or needing to start over, both of which would be more costly in the end. The I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project in Portland is an example of how the state transportation planning team set themselves up for more political risk by not consulting the community. The budget they proposed was not accurate to begin with. And now they’re being accused of having a “ballooning budget” and a project timeline that keeps getting pushed out because of local opposition. However, had they done the community engagement work earlier, the budget they submitted to the legislature would have more accurately reflected the

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needs of the project, and they’d still be on a shorter or similar timeline for implementation. The Transportation-Plus Elements Are Essential I’ve emphasized this time and again, but you cannot discount the importance of the projects that are not specific to the transportation issue in question. Transportation is interconnected with all city and community services, and that should be reflected in the way the process is carried out. For the Livable Claiborne Communities project in New Orleans, the feedback from the Mardi Gras Indians is an example of transportation-plus feedback being generated. Not all of their concerns were focused on the study area. When you have city officials who hear these concerns and have the power to focus on them, you can channel those issues into other solutions. The flexibility and the approach to the discovery seeking led to some somewhat surprising conclusions, specifically that people still used the space under the freeway. So, if the bridge wasn’t going to be taken down, something could be done to make that space safe, beautiful, and useful that would help restore the community vibrancy. Much of that is building from the ways the community is using the space (figure 6-1). “When you think about it, even the way it was created, it was not meant to be just the transportation movement of [cars]; it was really about building the character of a place,” says Bill Gilchrist, who was the director of place-based planning for the City of New Orleans when the study was carried out. “Without having those forums—and being invited into those forums—those on the project team wouldn’t have known [about all the opportunities] we learned about.” And isn’t that the purpose of transportation—to enable the creation of a place, not to destroy it for another community’s benefit? Gilchrist believes that New Orleans city staff especially started to see how much transportation and transportation solutions were interconnected with other city services such as education, parks and recreation, sustainability, and economic development. And within all that, they saw how vital certain culture bearers in the community are to finding and realizing solutions that benefit their community.

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Figure 6-1  The people in the neighborhoods next to the elevated Claiborne expressway have reclaimed the space beneath it, where vibrant splashes of color in the murals painted on the columns and on adjacent buildings overshadow the dark concrete. Musician Jon Batiste’s 2021 video for his song “Freedom” has significant scenes under the expressway. (Illustration by Alyssa Dennis)

That sense of interconnectivity of services is what largely led to the programs that came from the study. “Standard” Guidelines Do Not Prioritize Community Needs It’s important to emphasize that even the federal requirements in place to ensure as little environmental impact as possible (e.g., requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental assessments) do not necessarily prioritize community impact. “With NEPA, you prioritize the environment and you’re dismissing the people as part of the environment,” says Veronica McBeth, who was transit bureau chief of the Baltimore City Department of

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Transportation during the initial B&P Tunnel NEPA study. That’s something that continues to stick with her. The only reason the community was prioritized was that the planning team members were all on the same page about doing what was best for the community in this situation and advocates such as council member Mosby consistently brought up the community needs. The people who will be prioritized by default are usually the ones who are the loudest and have the most power (i.e., middle- to higherincome and usually White community members). So, while we certainly must carry out these environmental assessments, we need to constantly question whether and how community voice is essential to this. A Project Team That Advocates for Community Is Essential To help fill in the gaps that environmental assessments lack (e.g., a focus on people, specifically on marginalized people), you need to have a team that makes sure those voices are being heard. With the B&P Tunnel Project, there was tension between the planning team and the community in those early phases, and the project could have very well gone off the rails, so to speak. They were lucky to have a cohesive team who respected and trusted one another to ask the hard questions internally and, ultimately, do the right thing by pushing back on the traditional, formulaic approach to planning. Keep the Outcomes Central to Your Goal As humans, we can get stuck on what we think is correct, which tends to stifle creativity and, with it, innovation. We should never have so much ownership of a specific solution that we can’t see that the outcomes we are all striving for can be met with other solutions. Keep your eye on the prize, which is the outcome. In all of these examples, the project leads kept the overall goals of the community at center while achieving the transportation goals. They stayed open to the possibilities. On a daily basis, in meeting after meeting, I tell myself that achieving the outcomes is my job. Riding the wave of the discussion of solutions, without having too much ownership until a decision is reached, is the way to success.

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Trust the People and an Open Process My mentor John Fregonese always said that you have to trust the people and an open process to make good decisions. He worked with project teams all over the world on regional transportation and land use plans. Sometimes they were hired by regional agencies, sometimes by nonprofits, and sometimes by business associations. And each time, he would encourage that everyone be invited to the table, that everyone participate in building consensus on values and goals and performance metrics, and that everyone have the opportunity to weigh the tradeoffs and discuss difficult topics that people would think were too conservative or progressive leaning. In the end, people find ways to balance the different perspectives and find ways to prioritize how to achieve outcomes together. But the key to achieving this consensus is to be honest with everyone involved. If you do that, they will be honest with one another.

Our Profession Can Be a Force for Good Something Utah DOT’s Carlos Braceras said encompasses so much of what I feel about this profession. We are incredibly lucky to be in this profession. I can’t think of many professions that you touch every single person in a community. If you care about doing something that makes a difference for people, I can’t think of a better profession. As we move forward, it’s not going to get easier; it’s going to get harder. The more we look to understand people and what’s important to people, the more complicated it gets. People are pretty dang complicated. You’re not going to find this magic formula. You’re still going to need the formulas, because the work you do is super important, but you have to think about how you can apply your engineering and planning skills to solve people problems.

Braceras’s sentiments exactly express my reason for writing this book. I believe so much in my engineering profession and in all of the professionals who make up the transportation profession writ large. I believe in our ability to solve problems to help create thriving and

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vibrant communities. I believe in the possibilities of restorative justice through transportation solutions. I believe in our ability to work together to innovate and make transformative change. Of course, it’s not going to be easy, and there won’t be a formula for it. But this book helps provide a road map for asking the right questions, listening to the right people, and above all creating an open and inclusive process that leads to solutions that are better for all people and the planet. It will be hard, but it will be incredibly rewarding. As you approach your work moving forward, I encourage you to think about your own personal experiences. What are your life lessons? What stories do you have to share? Have you thought about the times when things seemed to work out really well for everyone? Who was at the table? Was is it a narrow set of interests and that was why it worked well? Or was it hard and contentious because the table was diverse, yet there was a breakthrough to get to yes? I encourage you to connect with other like-minded colleagues who are working to create a culture shift. Even if you’re not working within an agency or organization that is looking at alternatives to the perceived norm, you can find strength in numbers from others out there who are asking important questions. To do this, seek out people within transportation, architecture, landscape architecture, and planning firms, such as Walter Kulash, Yolanda Takesian, Lucy Gibson, Brian Ray, Nick Stamatiadis, Angelo Fernandez, Veronica McBeth, and Odessa Phillip, who are focused on outcomes. Find organizations like ours at Oregon Metro who have robust diversity, equity, and inclusion teams. You can find many of these professionals at local firms or city and county government who are closer to the ground and hear directly from the communities daily. Stay in a learning mode for your entire career. Remain curious about the guidelines and what is being researched now or has been thoroughly researched. Question the assumptions from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and see whether they have been proven right or wrong by data. When you run into a technical barrier, use it as an opportunity to test the assumption that it is really a barrier, and go do your research. Stay up-to-date with the latest community engagement strategies so you’ll know what seems to be working and what is not. And, importantly, get involved in your local community. Attend

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community meetings even when there’s not a project involved. Get to know community leaders and community-based organizations that are doing work on behalf of communities in your area. This is an important step to see yourself as a part of the community that you’re helping to build. Think about your journey in your profession. Your journey is your journey. I can’t predict what situations you will find yourself in as we build the infrastructure of the future. But like any good planner, you need to think ahead. Like any good engineer, you need to set the outcome and then reverse engineer so you’ll know what it will take. And like any good landscape architect, you need to help people visualize their values, which can be done only through listening. Former Oregon governor Tom McCall, who championed smart conservation practices in urban development, once said, “Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better.” As someone who is in a profession that is made to make the community better for all people, I see you as a hero. You care enough to think about how to find a way to include everyone at the table, and you don’t give up. Even when things seem too hard, you never give up, not because you want to build the largest, the longest, the deepest, the highest project, but because in the end, you care. You are all my heroes because you care. Now go help create a community of people’s dreams.

Notes Preface 1. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 192. 2. Cassie Owens, “Urban Planning Faces Possible Diversity Setback,” Next City, November 12, 2015, accessed August 20, 2021, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/planning -accreditation-board-diversity-urban-planning. 3. Data USA, “Civil Engineers,” accessed August 20, 2021, https://datausa.io /profile/soc/civil-engineers. 4. Rosie Cima, “How Diverse Is Your City?,” Priceonomics Data Studio, December 12, 2014, accessed August 20, 2021, https://priceonomics.com/how-diverse-is-your-city/. 5. Alana Semuels, “The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America,” Atlantic, July 22, 2016, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com /business/archive/2016/07/racist-history-portland/492035/. Chapter 1: Why Transportation Planning and Engineering Need a Paradigm Shift 1. Sarah Kolinovsky, “With Nomination, Pete Buttigieg Reflects on Historic Moment for LGBTQ Americans,” ABC News, December 16, 2020, accessed April 6, 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nomination-pete-buttigieg-reflects-historic -moment-lgbtq-americans/story?id=74762660. 2. Oregon Department of Transportation, “I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project: Project Description,” accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.i5rosequarter.org/. 3. Portland Housing Bureau, “Displacement in North and Northeast Portland: An Historical Overview,” accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.portlandoregon.gov /phb/article/655460. 4. Oregon Department of Transportation, “Keep Oregon Moving (HB 2017),” accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.oregon.gov/odot/pages/hb2017.aspx. 5. Andrew Theen, “Rose Quarter Project Would Likely Exceed $1 Billion if Freeway Caps Are Expanded, Reinforced,” Oregonian/OregonLive, updated April 6, 2021, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2020/01/rose-quar ter-project-would-likely-exceed-1-billion-if-freeway-caps-are-expanded-reinforced .html. 6. Oregon Department of Transportation, “I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project Environmental Assessment,” Key Number 19071, 2019, accessed April 5, 2022, https:// www.i5rosequarter.org/pdfs/environmental_assessment/I5%20Rose%20Quarter%20 Environmental%20Assessment.pdf. 7. Albina Vision Trust, “About AVT,” accessed August 20, 2021, https://albina vision.org/about/.

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202    Notes 8. Albina Vision Trust, “About AVT.” 9. Jeff Mapes, “Planned I-5 Freeway Widening Project in Portland Keeps Taking Hits,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, January 23, 2020, accessed January 5, 2022, https:// www.opb.org/news/article/planned-oregon-rose-quarter-interstate-5-project-plan/. 10. Oregon Department of Transportation, “I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project: Committees,” accessed April 12, 2022, https://www.i5rosequarter.org/community /committees.aspx. 11. Sam Stites, “Oregon Transportation Commission, Wary of I-5 Rose Quarter Project’s Growing Price Tag, Grants Conditional Approval,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, September 9, 2021, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/09 /oregon-transportation-commission-interstate-5-rose-quarter-project/. 12. Noel King, “A Brief History of How Racism Shaped Interstate Highways,” NPR, April 7, 2021, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a -brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways. 13. Wen Li, Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, and Jennifer E. Ifft, “The Impacts of the US Interstate Highway on Farmland Values and Agricultural Production: A Market Access Approach” (presentation at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, Atlanta, GA, July 21–23, 2019). 14. Damian Carrington, “New Map Reveals Shattering Effect of Roads on Nature,” Guardian, December 15, 2016, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com /environment/2016/dec/15/new-map-reveals-shattering-effect-of-roads-on-nature. 15. Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2020). 16. Drew DeSilver, Michael Lipka, and Dalia Fahmy, “10 Things We Know about Race and Policing in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, June 3, 2020, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/03/10-things-we-know-about -race-and-policing-in-the-u-s/. 17. Brita Belli, “Racial Disparity in Police Shootings Unchanged over 5 Years,” Yale News, October 27, 2020, accessed August 20, 2021, https://news.yale.edu/2020/10/27 /racial-disparity-police-shootings-unchanged-over-5-years. 18. Mapping Police Violence, “2021 Police Violence Report,” accessed April 5, 2022, https://policeviolencereport.org/. 19. TriMet, “The TriMet Story,” accessed January 5, 2022, https://trimet.org/his tory/trimetstory.htm. 20. Canadian Urban Institute, City Talk/Canada, “Moving to Action: How Do We Respond to Anti-Black Racism in Urbanist Practices and Conversations?,” June 23, 2020, accessed August 26, 2021, https://canurb.org/citytalk-news/moving-to-action -how-do-we-respond-to-anti-black-racism-in-urbanist-practices-and-conversations /?tab=panel-transcript. 21. Kip Holley, “The Principles for Equitable and Inclusive Civic Engagement: A Guide to Transformative Change” (Columbus: Ohio State University, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, May 2016), accessed August 26, 2021, http:// kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ki-civic-engagement.pdf. 22. David M. Chavis and Kien Lee, “What Is Community Anyway?,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, May 12, 2015, accessed August 26, 2021, https://ssir.org/articles /entry/what_is_community_anyway#.

Notes    203 23. Ishak Mohammed, Habib M. Alshuwaikhat, and Yusuf A. Adenle, “An Approach to Assess the Effectiveness of Smart Growth in Achieving Sustainable Development,” Sustainability 8, no. 4 (April 2016): 397, https://doi.org/10.3390/su8040397. Chapter 2: The Evolution of Approaches to Transportation Engineering and Planning 1. Emily Cochrane, “Senate Passes $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill, Handing Biden a Bipartisan Win,” New York Times, updated November 15, 2021, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/politics/infrastructure-bill-passes.html. 2. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Context Sensitivity,” accessed January 4, 2022, https://highways.dot.gov/federal-lands/about /context-sensitivity. 3. Jerry G. Pigman et al., “Context Sensitive Design: Thinking Beyond the Pavement; Documentation of Workshop Development and Training,” Research Report no. KTC-04-11/SPR204-99-1F (Lexington: University of Kentucky, College of Engineering, Kentucky Transportation Center, May 2004), accessed August 20, 2021, https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/21585; Maryland Department of Transportation et al., “Thinking Beyond the Pavement: A National Workshop on Integrating Highway Development with Communities and the Environment while Maintaining Safety and Performance,” FHWA Publication no. 1998, https://www.nh.gov/dot/org/projectde velopment/highwaydesign/contextsensitivesolutions/documents/ThinkingBeyon dthePavement.pdf. 4. Transportation Research Board (TRB), “Transportation Environmental Research Needs Statements: Context Sensitive Design,” March 2002, accessed August 20, 2021, http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conf/ern/section_01.pdf. 5. Smart Growth America, “What Are Complete Streets?,” accessed August 20, 2021, https://smartgrowthamerica.org/program/national-complete-streets-coalition /publications/what-are-complete-streets/. 6. National Association of City Transportation Officials, “Washington State DOT, 23 Cities Endorse Urban Street Design Guide,” December 18, 2013, accessed August 20, 2021, https://nacto.org/2013/12/18/washington-state-dot-23-cities-endorse-urban -street-design-guide/. 7. Scott Bradley, “Context Sensitive Design & Solutions: ‘A Better Way,’” PowerPoint presentation to the American Society of Landscape Architects, May 2004, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.asla.org/uploadedFiles/CMS/PPNs/Landing _Pages/Transportation_PPT_DesignSolutions_May_2004.pdf. 8. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, and Wisconsin Department of Transportation, “Final Environmental Impact Statement: Sauk City to Middleton,” FHWA Publication no. FHWA-WI-980487-Fv.2, December 1998, p. 427, accessed January 4, 2022, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id =e442AQAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PP1&hl=en. 9. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Thinking Beyond the Pavement with Context Sensitive Design,” FHWA Publication no. FHWA-RD-01-063, April/May 2001, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.fhwa .dot.gov/publications/focus/01apr/pavement.cfm. 10. New Jersey Department of Transportation, “A Community-Based Approach

204    Notes to Transportation,” accessed August 25, 2021, https://www.state.nj.us/transportation /eng/CSD/. 11. New York State Department of Transportation, “Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS),” accessed August 25, 2021, https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/engineering/de sign/dqab/css. 12. Washington State Department of Transportation, “Advancing Practical Solutions,” accessed April 5, 2022, https://wsdot.wa.gov/engineering-standards/advancing -practical-solutions. 13. Minnesota Department of Transportation, “Context Sensitive Solutions,” accessed August 25, 2021, https://www.dot.state.mn.us/context-sensitive-solutions /about.html. 14. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, “Context Sensitive Solutions,” accessed August 25, 2021, https://transportation.ky.gov/Congestion-Toolbox/Pages/Context -Sensitive-Solutions.aspx. 15. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, Office of Planning, “Final Report: Integration of Context Sensitive Solutions in the Transportation Planning Process,” FHWA Publication no. FHWA-HEP-07-014, January 2007, p. 15, accessed August 25, 2021, https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/1025/dot_1025_DS1 .pdf. 16. Maryland Department of Transportation, Maryland State Highway Administration, “Context Sensitive Solutions & Complete Streets,” accessed August 25, 2021, https://roads.maryland.gov/mdotsha/pages/Index.aspx?PageId=332. 17. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Thinking Beyond the Pavement with Context Sensitive Design,” FHWA Publication no. FHWA-RD-01-063, April/May 2001, accessed August 25, 2021, https://www.fhwa .dot.gov/publications/focus/01apr/pavement.cfm. 18. Hugh W. McGee Sr., Practical Highway Design Solutions: A Synthesis of Highway Practice (Washington, DC: Transportation Research Board, 2013), p. 2, https:// www.nap.edu/read/22636/chapter/2; Joseph Jones, “Practical Design,” Public Roads 73, no. 4 ( January/February 2010), https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads /10janfeb/06.cfm. 19. Jones, “Practical Design.” 20. Nikiforos Stamatiadis et al., “Practical Solution Concepts for Planning and Designing Roadways in Kentucky,” Research Report no. KTC-08-30/SPR369-08-1F (Lexington: University of Kentucky, College of Engineering, Kentucky Transportation Center, 2008), https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1088& context=ktc_researchreports. 21. Stamatiadis et al., “Practical Solution Concepts.” 22. Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, “50 Years of Building Communities,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.penndot.gov/about-us/50years/Pages /default.aspx. 23. New Jersey Department of Transportation and Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, “Smart Transportation Guidebook: Planning and Designing Highways and Streets That Support Sustainable and Livable Communities,” March 2008, p. 1, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.dvrpc.org/reports/08030A.pdf. 24. New Jersey Department of Transportation and Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, “Smart Transportation Guidebook,” pp. 2–4.

Notes    205 25. Freda Savana, “It’s Official: The 202 Parkway Is Open,” Bucks County (PA) Courier Times, December 4, 2012, accessed August 25, 2021, https://www.buckscountycou riertimes.com/story/news/2012/12/04/it-s-official-202-parkway/17855498007/. 26. Missouri Department of Transportation, “Implementation: Practical Design,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.modot.org/sites/default/files/documents/high way_safety/practicaldesignimplementation.pdf. 27. Lisa Wilson, “Utah DOT Memorandum on Implementation of Practical Design,” official memorandum, Utah Department of Transportation, Salt Lake City, February 2, 2011, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.nap.edu/read/22636/chapter/19. 28. Washington State Department of Transportation, “Advancing Practical Solutions.” 29. Joshua Laipply, “Revision to Guidance Recommendation: Formal Adoption of AASHTO 2011 Green Book on CDOT Projects,” official memorandum, Colorado Department of Transportation, Office of the Chief Engineer, Denver, November 10, 2016, https://www.codot.gov/business/designsupport/bulletins_manuals /design-bulletins/db-2018-7. 30. Hawaii Department of Transportation, “Hawaii Statewide Transportation Asset Management Plan,” June 30, 2019, accessed August 25, 2021, https://hidot.hawaii .gov/highways/files/2019/06/HDOT_TAMP_Final_June2019.pdf. 31. Stamatiadis et al., “Practical Solution Concepts.” 32. Oregon Department of Transportation, “2012 Highway Design Manual,” October 2012, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregon.gov/odot/Engineering/Pages /Hwy-Design-Manual.aspx. 33. Nikiforos Stamatiadis and Don Hartman, “Context-Sensitive Solutions versus Practical Solutions: What Are the Differences?,” Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2262, no. 1 (2011): 173–180, https://doi.org /10.3141/2262-17. 34. Urban Land Institute, When the Road Price Is Right: Land Use, Tolls, and Congestion Pricing (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 2013), p. 26, http://uli.org /wp-content/uploads/2013/03/When-the-Road-Price-is-Right_web_F.pdf. 35. Katherine F. Turnbull, “HOV Project Case Studies: History and Institutional Arrangements,” Report no. DOT-T-92-13 (Washington, DC: US Department of Transportation, December 1, 1990), accessed January 5, 2022, https://doi.org /10.21949/1404665. 36. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Mitigating Traffic Congestion: The Role of Demand-Side Strategies,” FHWA Publication no. FHWA-HOP-05-001, October 2004, p. 5, accessed January 4, 2022, https://ops .fhwa.dot.gov/publications/mitig_traf_cong/index.htm. 37. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Transportation Demand Management,” accessed January 4, 2022, https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov /plan4ops/trans_demand.htm#ftn1. 38. Gilles Duranton and Matthew A. Turner, “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities,” American Economic Review 101, no. 6 (October 2011): 2616–2652, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.101.6.2616. 39. ECONorthwest and Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Quade & Douglas, “Metropolitan Planning Technical Report No. 6: Evaluation of Transportation Alternatives” (Washington, DC: US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration,

206    Notes September 1995), p. 4-1, accessed January 4, 2022, https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view /dot/53878. 40. ECONorthwest and Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Quade & Douglas, “Least-Cost Planning,” p. 29. 41. 1000 Friends of Oregon, “Making the Connections: A Summary of the LUTRAQ Project,” February 1997, accessed January 4, 2022, https://collections.lib .utah.edu/details?id=198757; 1000 Friends of Oregon, “Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection: Modeling Practices,” 1991, accessed April 5, 2022, http://libraryarchives.metro.net/DPGTL/nonlocalagencies/1997-making-the-con nections-volume-7-portland-oregon.pdf. 42. 1000 Friends of Oregon, “Making the Connections: A Summary,” p. 4. 43. 1000 Friends of Oregon, “Making the Connections: A Summary,” p. 15. 44. 1000 Friends of Oregon, “Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection,” p. 7. 45. Oregon Department of Transportation, “Policy Brief: Funding Prioritization,” accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/Planning/Documents /PolicyBrief_FundingPrioritization.pdf. 46. Oregon Department of Transportation, “Oregon Mosaic: Value and Cost Informed Planning,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregon.gov/odot/planning/pages/mosaic.aspx; HDR, “Least Cost Planning Methodology for ODOT,” accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.hdrinc.com/portfolio/least-cost-planning-meth odology-for-odot. 47. Oregon Department of Transportation, “Oregon Mosaic: Background Information,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregon.gov/odot/Planning/Pages /Mosaic-Background.aspx. 48. Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, “Least-Cost Transportation Planning: Opportunities for the Vermont Agency of Transportation,” November 2014, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.veic.org/Media/default/documents/resources /reports/veic-least-cost-transportation-planning.pdf. 49. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Integrated Corridor Management, Transit, and Mobility on Demand,” accessed January 4, 2022, https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop16036/ch1.htm. 50. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Integrated Corridor Management.” 51. US Department of Transportation, “Final Report: Dallas Integrated Corridor Management (ICM) Demonstration Project,” FHWA Publication no. FHWAJPO-16-234, August 13, 2015, accessed January 4, 2022, https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view /dot/3573. 52. US Department of Transportation, “Final Report: Dallas Integrated Corridor Management (ICM) Demonstration Project,” p. 12. 53. US Department of Transportation, “Implementing Integrated Corridor Management (ICM) Strategies on the U.S. 75 Corridor in Dallas, Texas Produced an Estimated Benefit-to-Cost Ratio of 20.4:1,” October 31, 2011, accessed April 5, 2022, https://www.itskrs.its.dot.gov/its/benecost.nsf/ID/313049832d53a59885257926006fcf0. 54. Blake Christie et al., “Integrated Corridor Management: Implementation Guide and Lessons Learned,” FHWA Publication no. FHWA-JPO-16-280, US Department

Notes    207 of Transportation, September 2015, accessed January 4, 2022, https://connected-corri dors.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/fhwa_implementation_guide_v2.pdf. Chapter 3: Addressing the Legacy of Racist Transportation and Housing Policy 1. Smart Growth America, Smart Growth America’s Equity Summit—Day 3, video, 33:10–34:09, January 29, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBLAk9dnvt0&li st=PLkIS9ahfD8Q_zDHwpSIMrGfIHkLdElWTF&index=3. 2. Brendon Haggerty et al., “Multnomah County REACH Transportation Crash and Safety Report” (Portland, OR: Multnomah County, February 2021), accessed August 26, 2021, https://multco-web7-psh-files-usw2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fspublic/20210224_Final-REACH-Transportation-Safety.pdf. 3. Haggerty et al., “Multnomah County REACH Transportation Crash and Safety Report.” 4. Greg Nokes, “Black Exclusion Laws in Oregon,” Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon Historical Society, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/ar ticles/exclusion_laws/#.YNOjwzZKhTY. 5. Nokes, “Black Exclusion Laws in Oregon.” 6. Smart Growth America, Smart Growth America’s Equity Summit—Day 3, 23:19–23:27. 7. Oregon Metro, “$5 Billion Plan for Greater Portland Transit, Safety, Roads Heads to Voters,” July 16, 2020, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregonmetro .gov/news/5-billion-plan-greater-portland-transit-safety-roads-heads-voters. 8. Peter Wong, “2020 Census: Oregon and Portland Metro Area More Diverse,” Portland (OR) Tribune, August 12, 2021, accessed December 20, 2021, https://pam plinmedia.com/pt/9-news/518619-414229-2020-census-oregon-and-portland-metro -area-more-diverse. 9. Wong, “2020 Census.” 10. Oregon Metro, “Strategic Plan to Advance Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” October 5, 2017, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregonmetro.gov /sites/default/files/2017/10/05/Strategic-plan-advance-racial-equity-diversity-inclu sion-16087-20160613.pdf. 11. Oregon Metro, “Metro Transportation Funding Task Force,” February 27, 2020, accessed December 20, 2021, https://www.oregonmetro.gov/sites/default/files /2020/02/24/Transportation-Funding-Task-Force-Roster-20200227.pdf. 12. Oregon Metro, “Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation,” accessed December 20, 2021, https://www.oregonmetro.gov/regional-leadership/metro-advisory -committees/joint-policy-advisory-committee-transportation. 13. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), 51. 14. Odette Geldenhuys, “Housing Segregation: Apartheid in Baltimore,” Baltimore Sun, March 17, 1995, accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news /bs-xpm-1995-03-17-1995076191-story.html. 15. Christopher Silver,“The Racial Origins of Zoning: Southern Cities from 1910–40,” Planning Perspectives 6, no. 2 (1991): 189–205, https://doi.org/10.1080/02665439108725726. 16. Kriston Capps, “Breaking ‘the Backbone of Segregation’: After 100 Years, the Supreme Court Decision ‘Buchanan v. Warley’ Still Haunts Us,” Bloomberg CityLab,

208    Notes November 5, 2017, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news /articles/2017-11-05/-buchanan-v-warley-a-housing-milestone-at-100. 17. Price V. Fishback et al., “The Influence of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation on Housing Markets during the 1930s,” Review of Financial Studies 24, no. 6 (2011): 1782–1813, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20869290. 18. Rothstein, Color of Law, 63. 19. American Panorama, “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining /#loc=11/45.486/-122.808&city=portland-or&area=D2. 20. Kriston McIntosh et al., “Examining the Black-White Wealth Gap,” Brookings Institution, February 27, 2020, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu /blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-White-wealth-gap/. 21. Alexis Clark, “Tulsa’s ‘Black Wall Street’ Flourished as a Self-Contained Hub in Early 1900s,” History.com, updated January 27, 2021, accessed August 26, 2021, https:// www.history.com/news/black-wall-street-tulsa-race-massacre. 22. Jim Barnett and Steve Suo, “Albina 1996: North Williams Avenue, Portrait of a Once-Thriving Portland Jazz Scene,” Oregonian/OregonLive, updated January 10, 2019, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2014/08/al bina_1996_portrait_of_a_comm.html. 23. Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, “1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/. 24. US Senate, “Congress Approves the Federal-Aid Highway Act,” June 26, 1956, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute /Federal_Highway_Act.htm; US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, Office of Highway Policy Information, “Highway Statistics 2013,” October 21, 2014, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinforma tion/statistics/2013/hm20.cfm. 25. Wendell E. Pritchett, “The ‘Public Menace’ of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain,” Yale Law & Policy Review 21, no. 1 (2003): 3, https:// digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1451&context=ylpr. 26. Pritchett, “The ‘Public Menace’ of Blight,” p. 3. 27. Vince Graham, Urban Renewal  .  .  . Means Negro Removal. ~ James Baldwin (1963) ( James Baldwin interviewed by Kenneth Clark), video, 1:14, June 3, 2015, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Abhj17kYU. 28. Brentin Mock, “The Meaning of Blight,” Bloomberg CityLab, February 16, 2017, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-16 /why-we-talk-about-urban-blight. 29. Portland Housing Bureau, “Displacement in North and Northeast Portland: An Historical Overview,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.portlandoregon.gov /phb/article/655460. 30. Walidah Imarisha, Oregon Black History Timeline—Audio Commentary, video, 19:20, July 19, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2RVOunsZ8. 31. Casey Parks, “Fifty Years Later, Legacy Emanuel Medical Center Attempts to Make Amends for Razing Neighborhood,” Oregonian/OregonLive, updated January 10, 2019, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2012/09 /post_273.html. 32. Imarisha, Oregon Black History Timeline.

Notes    209 33. Diverse and Empowered Employees of Portland (DEEP), Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon? A Hidden History Presented by Walidah Imarisha, video, 1:35:27, November 9, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lcm1LDZZXg&feat ure=youtu.be. 34. DEEP, Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon?, 35:21. 35. Alberta Main Street, “The History of Alberta Street,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://albertamainst.org/history/. 36. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 37. Zach Dundas, “Portland’s New Economy,” Willamette Week, October 4, 2005, accessed December 20, 2021, https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-4882-portlands -new-new-economy.html. 38. Abe Asher, “How Northeast Portland’s Alberta St. Is Reclaiming Its Black Roots,” Portland (OR) Mercury, March 30, 2021, accessed December 20, 2021, https:// www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2021/03/30/32381283/how-northeast-portlands -alberta-st-is-reclaiming-its-black-roots. 39. DEEP, Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon? 40. DEEP, Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon?, 1:02:59–1:03:19. 41. DEEP, Why Aren’t There More Black People in Oregon?, 1:03:26–1:04:13. 42. Lawrence Brown, “Two Baltimores: The White L vs. the Black Butterfly,” Baltimore Sun, June 28, 2016, accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.baltimoresun.com /citypaper/bcpnews-two-baltimores-the-white-l-vs-the-black-butterfly-2016 0628-htmlstory.html. 43. Oregon Metro, “Strategic Plan to Advance Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” p. 8. 44. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles,” July 8, 2020, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.oregonmetro.gov /sites/default/files/2020/07/08/Get_Moving_2020_Racial_Equity_Analysis_Corri dors.pdf. 45. john a. powell, Stephen Menendian, and Wendy Ake, “Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice” (Berkeley: University of California, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, May 2019), https://belonging.berkeley.edu/targeteduniversalism. 46. Angela Glover Blackwell, “The Curb-Cut Effect,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2017, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_curb_cut_effect. 47. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles,” p. 33. 48. The Walk Score (https://www.walkscore.com/methodology.shtml) is an indicator that measures a person’s ability to complete most daily errands by walking on the basis of how close a neighborhood or home is to amenities and safe walking routes. A score of 90–100 means that daily errands don’t usually require a car; 0–24 means that most errands will require a car. 49. Brian S. McKenzie, “Neighborhood Access to Transit by Race, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Portland, OR,” City & Community 12, no. 2 ( June 2013): 149, https://doi .org/10.1111/cico.12022, https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/journals/CC /Jun13CCFeature.pdf. 50. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles.”

210    Notes 51. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Racial Equity Analysis Summary,” July 1, 2020, accessed December 20, 2021, https://www.oregonmetro.gov/sites/default/files/2020/07/08/Get_Moving_2020_Racial_Equity_Analy sis_Summary.pdf. 52. Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, “Community Highlights,” pp. 1–2, accessed December 21, 2021, https://www.apiahf.org/wp-content/uploads/2021 /01/2021.1.21_APANO_CommunityHighlights.pdf. 53. Venture Portland, “Jade District,” accessed December 21, 2021, http://venture portland.org/business-districts/our-members/jade-district/. 54. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles,” pp. 31–34. 55. Peter Wong, “Oregon OKs $66M for Transfer of 82nd Avenue to Portland Control,” Portland (OR) Tribune, November 18, 2021, accessed December 20, 2021, https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/528668-422672-oregon-oks-66m-for-transfer -of-82nd-avenue-to-portland-control. 56. City of Portland, Oregon, “High Crash Network Streets and Intersections,” accessed December 21, 2021, https://www.portland.gov/transportation/vision-zero /high-crash-network. 57. Destiny Thomas, Charlene McGee, and Jess Thompson, Walk the Talk, Talk the Walk—Purplelining: Strategies That Heal, video, Oregon Walks, 35:04–35:53, accessed August 26, 2021, https://oregonwalks.org/walk-the-talk-purplelining/. 58. Portland Bureau of Transportation, “Neighborhood Greenway Projects,” accessed April 5, 2022, https://www.portland.gov/transportation/pbot-projects/neigh borhood-greenways. 59. Jenny H. Liu, “Portland Green Loop Economic Analysis” (Portland, OR: Portland State University, Northwest Economic Research Center, November 2016), accessed October 21, 2021, http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/17922. 60. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles.” 61. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles,” p. 33. 62. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles,” p. 31. 63. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles,” p. 33. 64. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Analysis; Investment Corridor Profiles,” p. 33. 65. Asher, “How Northeast Portland’s Alberta St. Is Reclaiming Its Black Roots.” 66. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Outcomes and Strategies,” July 1, 2020, accessed January 10, 2022, https://www.oregonmetro.gov/sites/default /files/2020/07/08/Get_Moving_2020_Racial_Equity_Outcomes_and_Strategies.pdf. 67. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Outcomes and Strategies,” p. 3. 68. Learning for Justice, “Toolkit for ‘What Is White Privilege, Really?,’” Teaching Tolerance, no. 60 (Fall 2018), https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2018 /toolkit-for-what-is-white-privilege-really.

Notes    211 69. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019). 70. Thrivance Group, “Tools and Resources,” July 27, 2020, accessed August 26, 2021, https://thrivancegroup.com/tools-and-resources. 71. Center for Neighborhood Technology, “Transportation Equity Network,” accessed December 20, 2021, https://www.cnt.org/transportation-equity-network. 72. Transportation Equity Caucus, “Transportation Equity Caucus,” accessed December 20, 2021, https://equitycaucus.org/. 73. PolicyLink, “About Us,” accessed December 20, 2021, https://www.policylink .org/about-us. 74. Rebecca Ellis, “Portland Groups Sue to Delay I-5 Widening, Demand Study of Environmental Impacts,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, April 5, 2021, accessed August 20, 2021, https://www.opb.org/article/2021/04/05/portland-groups-sue-to-delay-i-5 -widening-demand-study-of-environmental-impacts/. 75. Ellis, “Portland Groups Sue to Delay I-5 Widening.” 76. Kip Holley, “The Principles for Equitable and Inclusive Civic Engagement: A Guide to Transformative Change” (Columbus: Ohio State University, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, May 2016), p. 35, accessed August 26, 2021, http:// kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ki-civic-engagement.pdf. Chapter 4: Getting Out of Our Silos 1. Vail Health, “Community Health Needs Assessment: Final Summary Report,” September 2019, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.vailhealth.org/pdf/Vail Health/CHNA/2019_CHNA_Final_Report_2019_09.pdf. 2. Vail Health, “Community Health Needs Assessment.” 3. Edward Stoner, “Eagle County’s Bike-Sharing Services Spreading through Area,” Aspen (CO) Times, October 6, 2019, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.aspentimes .com/news/local/eagle-countys-bike-sharing-services-spreading-through-area/. 4. Vail Health, “Community Health Needs Assessment,” pp. 10–11. 5. Vail Health, “Community Health Needs Assessment,” pp. 10–11. 6. Eagle County and Town of Vail, Colorado, “Transit Hub,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://transithub.com/. 7. US Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: Eagle County, Colorado,” accessed April 7, 2022, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/eaglecountycolorado/PST045221. 8. US Department of Health and Human Services, “Healthy People 2030: Social Determinants of Health,” accessed January 4, 2022, https://health.gov/healthypeople /objectives-and-data/social-determinants-health. 9. Vail Health, “Community Health Needs Assessment.” 10. Vail Health, “Community Health Needs Assessment,” p. 61. 11. Vail Health, “Community Health Needs Assessment,” p. 69. 12. Northwest Colorado Council of Governments Economic Development District, “Community Profile for Eagle County, Colorado,” September 2020, accessed January 4, 2022, https://files.vailvalleypartnership.com/sites/4/2021/05/EagleCountyCommunityProfile_Sept2020-1.pdf; Colorado Rural Workforce Consortium, “Emsi Economy Overview: Eagle County, CO (Emsi Q4 2019 Data Set),” accessed January 4, 2022, https://files.vailvalleypartnership.com/sites/4/2021/05/Economy_Overview _Eagle_County_CO_9523.pdf.

212    Notes 13. Colorado Rural Workforce Consortium, “Emsi Economy Overview,” p. 9. 14. Coalition for a Livable Future, “CLF Member Organizations,” accessed January 4, 2022, http://clfuture.org/about/clf-member-organizations. 15. American Society of Civil Engineers, “Code of Ethics,” accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.asce.org/career-growth/ethics/code-of-ethics. 16. Charles L. Marohn Jr., Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2021), pp. xxiii–xxiv. 17. Eagle County, Colorado, “What Is Vista?,” accessed January 4, 2022, https:// sites.google.com/eaglecounty.us/vista-site/what-is-vista?authuser=0. 18. Myers-Briggs Company, “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI),” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.themyersbriggs.com/en-US/Products-and-Services /Myers-Briggs. 19. Gallup, “CliftonStrengths,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.gallup.com /cliftonstrengths/en/strengthsfinder.aspx. Chapter 5: The Community Solutions–Based Approach in Practice 1. Don Hillis, “Executive Strategies to Deliver Practical Design,” NCHRP Project 20-24 (102) (Washington, DC: American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, July 2016), accessed January 5, 2022, https://onlinepubs.trb.org/on linepubs/nchrp/docs/NCHRP20-24(102)_FinalResearchMemorandum.pdf. 2. JustLeadershipUSA, “About Us,” accessed April 7, 2022, https://jlusa.org/about/. 3. Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Ohio State University, accessed January 8, 2022, https://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/. 4. Kip Holley, “The Principles for Equitable and Inclusive Civic Engagement: A Guide to Transformative Change” (Columbus: Ohio State University, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, May 2016), p. 23, accessed December 10, 2021, http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ki-civic-engagement .pdf. 5. Congress for the New Urbanism, “Claiborne Expressway, New Orleans, Louisiana,” accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.cnu.org/what-we-do/build-great-places /claiborne-expressway. 6. Lucy Gibson et al., “Restoring Claiborne Avenue: Alternatives for the Future of Claiborne Avenue” (Smart Mobility Inc. and Waggonner & Ball Architects, July 15, 2010), accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/Claiborne _Alternatives_071510.pdf. 7. Gibson et al., “Restoring Claiborne Avenue.” 8. Gibson et al., “Restoring Claiborne Avenue.” 9. Lyndon Jones, “Many Residents Leery of ‘Claiborne Corridor’ Study,” New Orleans Tribune, December 27, 2012, accessed October 21, 2021, https://theneworleanstri bune.com/many-residents-leery-of-claiborne-corridor-study/. 10. Jerry DiColo, “Biden Infrastructure Plan Would ‘Redress Historic Inequities,’ Like This New Orleans Highway,” NOLA.com, updated March 31, 2021, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.nola.com/nation_world/article_99bb4072-923c-11eb8d45-53d42f0446af.html; Audra D. S. Burch, “One Historic Black Neighborhood’s Stake in the Infrastructure Bill,” New York Times, November 20, 2021, accessed January 8, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/us/claiborne-expressway-new-orleans -infrastructure.html.

Notes    213 11. Philip R. Berke and Maria Manta Conroy, “Are We Planning for Sustainable Development?,” Journal of the American Planning Association 66, no. 1 (2000): 21–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/01944360008976081. 12. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities: Charting the Future of the Claiborne Communities,” p. 5, accessed August 26, 2021, https:// s3.amazonaws.com/networkneworleans/9-LCC-Study-Final-Report-web.pdf. 13. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” pp. 15–16. 14. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” p. 7. 15. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” p. 8. 16. People’s Law Library of Maryland, “Understanding Ground Rent in Maryland,” accessed January 8, 2022, https://www.peoples-law.org/understanding-ground -rent-maryland. 17. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” p. 6. 18. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” p. 8. 19. US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, “Safety Performance Management (Safety PM),” accessed January 8, 2022, https://safety.fhwa .dot.gov/hsip/spm/state_safety_targets/. 20. I won’t go too deeply into performance metrics because this book isn’t necessarily about those, but the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “Guide to Sustainable Transportation Performance Measures,” Report no. EPA 231-K-10-004, August 2011 (https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-01/documents/sustainable_transpo _performance.pdf ) is a resource that looks at twelve key performance measures beyond level-of-service standards and how to apply them in long-range planning, corridorlevel evaluation, programming of projects, and performance monitoring. 21. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” p. 6. 22. Diane Jones Allen, “Kitchen Table Work Session,” in Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity, ed. David de la Peña et al. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2017), pp. 270–273. 23. Allen, “Kitchen Table Work Session,” p. 270. 24. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” pp. 22–35. 25. Matt Sakakeeny, “Mardi Gras Indians,” 64 Parishes, February 21, 2020, accessed August 26, 2021, https://64parishes.org/entry/mardi-gras-indians. 26. NewOrleans.com, “Mardi Gras Indians,” accessed October 21, 2021, https:// www.neworleans.com/things-to-do/music/history-and-traditions/mardi-gras-in dians/; MardiGrasNewOrleans.com, “Mardi Gras Indians History and Tradition,” accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/history/mardi -gras-indians/. 27. Eye Candy, “Black History: Congo Square, New Orleans—the Heart of American Music,” Afropunk, February 26, 2018, accessed January 8, 2022, https://afropunk .com/2018/02/black-history-congo-square-new-orleans-heart-american-music/.

214    Notes 28. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” pp. 89–94. 29. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” pp. 95–100. 30. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” pp. 101–106. 31. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” pp. 107–114. 32. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” pp. 117. 33. Oregon Department of Transportation, “Community Workforce Agreements,” accessed January 8, 2022, https://www.oregon.gov/odot/equity/Pages/CBA.aspx. 34. Oregon Metro, “Get Moving 2020: Racial Equity Outcomes and Strategies,” July 1, 2020, p. 4, accessed January 10, 2022, https://www.oregonmetro.gov/sites/default /files/2020/07/08/Get_Moving_2020_Racial_Equity_Outcomes_and_Strategies.pdf. 35. Ujamaa EDC, Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District: Tricentennial Celebration and Master Plan Reveal, video, 18:40, August 20, 2019, https://www.youtube .com/watch?app=desktop&v=fhSwrwaSXWU&ab_channel=UjamaaEDC. 36. Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy, “Livable Claiborne Communities,” pp. 45–51. 37. World Bank, “Charettes,” accessed October 21, 2021, https://urban-regeneration .worldbank.org/node/40; Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District, “Community Design Charrette Report,” November 10, 2017, accessed October 21, 2021, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56d651bbb654f980b2815516/t/5b6cb906575d1fc84 40f8259/1533851940740/CID+Community+Design+Charrette+Report+11.10.17.pdf. 38. Ujamaa EDC, Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District, 5:20. 39. US Department of Transportation, Federal Railroad Administration, and Maryland Department of Transportation, “Record of Decision: Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Project,” March 2017, p. 62, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.amtrak.com /content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/bptunnel/BPT_Record -of-Decision_March2017_Signed.pdf. 40. US Department of Transportation, Federal Railroad Administration, and Maryland Department of Transportation, “Record of Decision: Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Project,” p. 62. 41. Luz Lazo, “The Infrastructure Package Puts $66 Billion into Rail. It Could Power the Biggest Expansion in Amtrak’s 50-Year History,” Washington Post, November 8, 2021, accessed January 8, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/trans portation/2021/11/08/amtrak-infrastructure-bill-funding/. Chapter 6: Building Communities of People’s Dreams 1. Emily Cochrane, “Senate Passes $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill, Handing Biden a Bipartisan Win,” New York Times, updated November 15, 2021, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/politics/infrastructure-bill-passes.html. 2. Caroline Vakil, “Advocates See Pilot Program to Address Inequalities from Highways as Crucial First Step,” The Hill, November 26, 2021, accessed January 6, 2022, https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/583066-advocates-see-pilot-program -to-address-highway-inequalities-as-crucial.

Notes    215 3. Liam Dillon and Ben Poston, “Freeways Force Out Residents in Communities of Color—Again,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2021, accessed January 6, 2022, https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino -communities/. 4. john a. powell, Stephen Menendian, and Wendy Ake, “Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice” (Berkeley: University of California, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, May 2019), https://belonging.berkeley.edu/targeteduniversalism.

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About the Author Lynn Peterson is currently the Oregon Metro Council president, leading the nation’s only elected regional government, which oversees regional affordable housing, parks, tourism and cultural venues, garbage and recycling, and, of course, transportation and land use planning. Prior to her current elected role, Lynn was the first elected chair of the Clackamas County Commission and served on the Lake Oswego City Council. She served as secretary of the Washington State Department of Transportation for Governor Jay Inslee, overseeing megaprojects including Seattle’s State Route 99 tunnel project and the SR 520 Floating Bridge replacement as well as Washington State Ferries (the third-largest system in the world) and the Washington Tolling System. She worked for Smart Growth America training state transportation departments in Practical Design and Solutions; served as senior transportation policy advisor to Oregon governor John Kitzhaber, strategic planning manager for Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, and transportation advocate for 1000 Friends of Oregon; and owns her own transportation consulting business. Lynn holds advanced degrees in civil and environmental engineering and urban and regional planning. Elizabeth Doerr is a writer in Portland, Oregon. She is founder and principal of the writing and communications strategy firm Doerr&Co. Her journalism has been published in Bloomberg CityLab, Baltimore City Paper, Parents.com, and Portland Monthly, among other publications. 229

Index

AAPI community. See Asian American and Pacific Islander community AASHTO. See American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials AASHTO guidelines (Green Book), 43, 121 accountability, racial equity and, 91–92 Adams, Kamelah, 83 added-capacity projects, 50 Adenle, Yusuf A., 21 advisory boards B&P Tunnel Project and, 153–154 LCC study and, 140–142, 152–153 overview of, 151–152 racial equity and, 91 affordable housing, transportation improvements and, 82–84 Alaskan Way Viaduct, 188–189 Albina neighborhood (Portland), 68–69, 69f, 70f, 71f, 72–73, 72f, 73f, 74f. See also Rose Quarter Improvement Project Albina Vision Trust (AVT), 4–5, 6, 13–14 Alibaamuu, Muskoghee, 131 Allen, Austin, 89, 167, 169 Alshuwaikhat, Habib M., 21 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), 60, 121 American Planning Association, 60 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 109–110 Amtrak, 148, 162 APANO. See Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon apps, 99–101 ASCE. See American Society of Civil Engineers Ashé Cultural Center/Efforts of Grace, 179 Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, 79 Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), 79–80, 83, 85–86

auxiliary lanes, 4 AVT. See Albina Vision Trust Baldwin, James, 72 ball-bank indicator test, xix–xx Baltimore, Maryland, 67–68, 76, 77f Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) Tunnel Project advisory committees and, 153–154 background of, 132–136 Community Benefits Agreements and, 177, 181–183 community needs and, 162–163 Design and Test phase and, 186–187 lessons learned from, 194, 197 Plan and Test phase and, 171–175, 172f, 174f problem statements and, 147–151 project team and, 142 Beryl, Morgan, 97, 114 Beyer, Lee, 6 Biden, Joseph, 191 bike-sharing, 98 BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community Get Moving 2020 measure and, 81, 84 Portland, Oregon and, 64 Rose Quarter Improvement Project and, 5, 7 traffic enforcement and, 10–11 Black Butterfly section (Baltimore), 77f, 133, 134f Black Masking Indians, 167–170, 195 Blackwell, Angela Glover, 78 blight, 71–74 Bolton Hill area (Baltimore), 134. See also Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) Tunnel Project Braceras, Carlos, 7, 23, 94, 116, 121–122, 189, 198–199 Bradway, Margi, 38 Bright Moments, 141 Broderson, Reed, 93

231

232    Index Brown, Charles T., 90 Brown, Lawrence, 76, 133 Buchanan v. Warley, 68 budgeting, 41 buses, 98–101, 99f, 104 Butler, Tamika, 90 car-only approach, problems of, 8 Chavis, David M., 15 civic engagement. See community engagement Clackamas County, Oregon, 106–107, 118 Claiborne Avenue project (New Orleans). See Livable Claiborne Communities study Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District (CID), 179 CliftonStrengths assessment, 113–114 CNU. See Congress for the New Urbanism collaboration. See also project teams connected services and, 102–105 elements of strong, 101–102 ethics and, 108–111 need for with other professionals, 15–19 trust and, 105–108 The Color of Law (Rothstein), 67, 89 comfortable speeds, xix–xx community, need to understand definition of, 14–15 Community Benefits Agreements (CBA), 84, 175–183, 176f community engagement. See also Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Project; Livable Claiborne Communities study lessons learned and, 194–195 limitations of traditional guidelines and, 12–14 need to understand definition of, 14–15 overview of, 123–126 community solutions-based approach community benefits agreements and, 175–183, 176f Design and Test phase of, 137f, 183–187, 184f implementation of, 187–189 overview of, 20–25, 122–123, 136–139, 137f, 189–190 Plan and Test phase of, 137f, 163–175, 164f problem statement creation, 137f, 139–154, 140f Rescope and Test phase of, 137f, 154–163, 155f complete streets policies, 21

Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), 127 connected services, 102–105 context-sensitive design (CSD), 32–40, 50, 59–60 context-sensitive solutions (CSS), 32, 33 cost-benefit analyses, 52 Cotugno, Andy, 18 CSD. See context-sensitive design CSS. See context-sensitive solutions Dallas, Texas, 58–59 Dangerfield, Judith Williams, 179–180, 186 data, racial equity framework and, 92–93 Davis, Veronica, 90 decision-making, metrics for, 9 DEI teams. See diversity, equity, and inclusion teams demand management, 32, 49–60 Design and Test phase, 184–187, 184f DesignJones, 141, 167 desire lines, 18, 19f Dillon, Liam, 192 dislocation, 74–76 displacement indicators, 83 Diverse and Empowered Employment of Portland (DEEP), 73 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) teams, 116–117 Dundas, Zach, 75 Eagle County, Colorado breaking down silos and, 111–112 connected services and, 102–105 ethics and, 110–111 right team and, 112–113 transit needs of, 97–101, 99f trust and, 107–108 Eastside Banfield Light Rail Project (Portland), 11 EIS. See Environmental Impact Statements 82nd Avenue corridor priority area (Portland), 78, 79–82, 80f Emanuel Hospital (Portland), 72–74 engagement. See community engagement engineers, xviii Environmental Impact Statements (EIS), 5, 92, 106–107, 132 equity, 21–22. See also racial equity ethics, 108–111 Executive Steering Committee, 6 expectations, setting of, 117–119

Index    233 fatalities, 30–31, 63–64 Fauria, Vaughn, 153 Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), 142 Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956), 70 feedback, need for, 16–17 Fernandez, Angelo, 98–101, 107–108, 110– 111, 113–114, 118–119 Florida, Richard, 75 food deserts, 148 Foundation for Louisiana, 153, 179 FRA. See Federal Railroad Administration Fregonese, John, 198 Frisbee, Tyler, 67, 81, 85, 86, 91, 92 gentrification, 11, 74–76, 82–84 geographic scope, 158–160 Get Moving 2020 initiative (Oregon), 64–67, 76–87, 177 Gibson, Lucy, 47 Gilchrist, Bill, 129, 131, 140, 195 goat tracks, 18, 19f Goody Clancy, 141 Governance Committee, 152–153 grants, racial equity and, 85 Greater New Orleans Foundation, 153 Green Book (AASHTO), 43, 121 Greenwood neighborhood (Tulsa), 70 ground rent, 148 Hartman, Don, 49 Hawthorne Agency, 141 health services, mobile, 104 Healthy People reports (DHHS), 102 Higashide, Steven, 90 high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, 49–50, 58–59 high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, 49–50, 58–59 Highway 12, 28–29, 29f, 30f, 36–38, 37f. See also Wisconsin Dells Holley, Kip, 14–15, 94, 124 Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC), 68, 71 How to Be an Antiracist (Kendi), 88 humility, 94 I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project. See Rose Quarter Improvement Project ICM. See integrated corridor management

Imarisha, Walidah, 73–74 implementation of design, overview of, 187–189 Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), 60, xxi integrated corridor management (ICM), 57–59 Interstate 10 (New Orleans). See Livable Claiborne Communities study Interstate 5, 72f, 73f Jade District (East Portland), 79–82, 80f James, Clifton, 127 Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation (Oregon), 65–66, 106–107 Jones Allen, Diane, 167 JustLeadershipUSA, 122 Katrina (hurricane), 130, 169 Keith, Kevin, 41–42 Kendi, Ibram X., 88 Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, 124 Kitchen Table Workshops, 167 Kittelson & Associates, 141 Klein, Gabe, 23 Kulash, Walter, 36–39, 37f, xix Labor Project Agreements, 175 lag time, budgeting and, 41 Lake Oswego, Oregon, xxii Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality (LUTRAQ), 53–57 Landrieu, Mitch, 127, 129 LCC study. See Livable Claiborne Communities study Leahy, Amanda, 18 Learning For Justice, 88 least-cost planning (LCP), 51–57 Lee, Kien, 15 Leopold, Aldo, xviii lessons learned, overview of, 193–198 light rail, racial equity and, 11–12 limitations of traditional guidelines collaboration and, 15–19 community engagement and, 12–14 community solutions-based approach to, 20–25 definition of community and, 14–15 overview of, 7–9 racial equity and, 10–12

234    Index Livable Claiborne Communities (LCC) study advisory committees and, 152–153 background of, 126–132, 127f Community Benefits Agreements and, 177, 179–181 community needs and, 161–162 Design and Test phase and, 185–186 lessons learned from, 195–196, 196f Plan and Test phase and, 166–171 problem statements and, 145–146 project team creation and, 140–141 Lombard, Rudy, 127 Mack, Nikia, 150 MARC Penn Line, 133 Mardi Gras Indians Council, 167–170, 195 Marohn, Charles Jr., 110–111 Martin, Glenn E., 122 Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT), 142 McBeth, Veronica P., 132, 136, 142, 147–150, 173, 182–183, 187, 196–197 McCall, Tom, 200 McKenzie, Brian S., 78 MDOT. See Maryland Department of Transportation medians, 89 Memorial Coliseum, 72–73 Metro. See Oregon Metro Council Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, 113–114 Millar, Roger, 22, 23, 44 MIRA (Mobile Intercultural Resource Alliance) Bus, 104 Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT), 40–42 mitigation agreements, 135 mobile health services, 104 MoDOT. See Missouri Department of Transportation Mohammed, Ishak, 20–21 mortgages, 68–69 Mosaic methodology, 56–57 Mosby, Nick, 149, 174, 183, 187, 194 Mount Royal community, 133. See also Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Project NACTO. See National Association of City Transportation Officials National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), 22, 35, 60

National Cooperative Highway Research Program (TRB), xx–xxi National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 60, 65, 196–197. See also Environmental Impact Statements National Land Use Planning Committee, 67 Native Americans, 167–170 Neighborhood Greenway program (Portland), 81 neutral ground, 89 New Orleans, Louisiana, 89. See also Livable Claiborne Communities study NewCorp Business Assistance Center, 153 Northeast Corridor (NEC) railroad line, 133. See also Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Project Ogbu, Liz, 90 Olmsted, Frederick Law Jr., 67 On the Record interview project, 146 1G.1-Major Improvements policy, 56 1000 Friends of Oregon, 54, 105 Oregon, 53–57, 60, 63–67. See also Portland, Oregon; Rose Quarter Improvement Project Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), 106–107 Oregon Metro Council, 64–65, 116–117. See also Get Moving 2020 initiative Osborne, Beth, 8, 64, 66 Owens-Wilson, Sebrina, 77–78, 81 PAC. See Project Advisory Committee Patty, Steve, 138 pedestrians, racial equity and, 10 Penn North community, 133. See also Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Project Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), 46–47, 48f Perez, 141 performance-based Practical Design, 32, 40–49, 59–60 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 47 Phillip, Odessa, 132, 142, 147, 149–151, 153, 162, 172, 181–182, 186 Pitter, Jay, 12 Plan and Test phase B&P Tunnel Project and, 171–175 LCC study and, 166–171 overview of, 163–166, 164f plangineering, 9 planning, least-cost, 51–57

Index    235 PolicyLink, 90 pollution, illnesses related to, 8 Pontchartrain Expressway, 171 Portland, Oregon, 11, 63–67, 74–76, xxi–xxii. See also Albina neighborhood; Get Moving 2020 initiative; Rose Quarter Improvement Project Portland Streetcar construction projects, 187–188 Poston, Ben, 192 powell, john a., 77 Practical Design/Practical Solutions/ Practical Improvements. See performance-based Practical Design “The Principles for Equitable and Inclusive Civic Engagement” (Kirwan Institute), 124 Pritchett, Wendell E., 71 problem statements advisory committees and, 151–154 B&P Tunnel Project and, 147–151 creation of, 139 LCC study and, 145–146 learning, listening, context and, 142–151 project team creation and, 139–142, 140f questions for, 143–144 Project Advisory Committee (PAC), 152–153 project teams, 112–119, 140–142, 197 Providence Community Housing, 153 psychometric assessments, 113–114 public engagement. See community engagement racial equity accountability mechanisms and, 91–92 community engagement and, 12–14 community solutions-based approach and, 20, 21–22 developing project goals around, 93 gentrification, dislocation and, 74–76 Get Moving 2020 measure and, 66–67, 76–87 hiring experts in field of, 90 humility in leadership and, 94 inclusive advisory boards and, 91 knowing community and, 88–90 limitations of traditional guidelines and, 10–12 need for, 191–193, xxi–xxiii Oregon and, 66–67 Portland, Oregon and, 63–64 public transit and, 78–83 self-awareness of privilege and, 87–88

urban renewal and, 70–74 viewing data through framework of, 92–93 zoning and regulatory practices and, 67–70 Ray, Brian, 34–35 Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, 191 redlining, 68–69, 69f Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), 105 Rescope and Test phase community needs and, 161–163 geographic scope and, 158–160 overview of, 155–158, 155f questions for, 159 Reservoir Hill community, 133, 134–135, 134f. See also Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Project ride-sharing, 98 rights-of-way (ROW), 32 Robinson, Thomas, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 67, 68 Rose Quarter Improvement Project (Portland) accountability and, 92 collaboration among professionals and, 17–18 lessons learned from, 194–195 need for community engagement and, 13–14 overview of, 2–7, 3f Rothstein, Richard, 67, 89 RTP. See Regional Transportation Plan Sadik-Khan, Janette, 23 safety, 30–31, xx–xxi scenario modeling, 53–57 Schmitt, Angie, 10 scope. See geographic scope; Rescope and Test phase SDOH. See social determinants of health Seattle, Washington, 188–189 segregation, 67–68 services, connected, 102–105 slums, 68–69 Sniffen, Ed, 23 social benefits, 52 social determinants of health (SDOH), 102, 104 speeds, comfortable, xix–xx Stamatiadis, Nikiforos, 42–43, 49

236    Index standardization, 28, 196–197 State Highway 12 (Wisconsin), 28–29, 29f, 30f, 36–38, 37f. See also Wisconsin Dells Strickler, Kris, 22–23 Takesian, Yolanda, 130, 141, 146, 168–170 Tambourine and Fan youth group, 179 targeted universalism, 77–78 task forces, 65–66 teams, project, 112–119, 140–142, 197 “Thinking Beyond the Pavement” conference, 33–34, 36 Thomas, Destiny, 80, 90 Thompson, Charles “Chuck,” 28–29 Thorne, Jacqueline, 150 3E’s of sustainable development, 20–21 Thrivance Group, 88 TIGER II Planning Grants, 140 Tongue, John, 45 tourism, 103 traffic enforcement, 10–11 transit, 78–83, 98–101 Transit Hub app, 99–101, 103–105, 112, 116 transportation demand management (TDM), 32, 49–60 Transportation Equity Caucus, 90 Transportation Equity Network, 90 Transportation Funding Task Force (Oregon), 65, 79, 91, 124–125 transportation-plus projects, 32, 93, 105, 163, 175-177, 195 trust, 105–108, 198

Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation (EDC), 179–181 universalism, 77–78 Urban Development and Sustainable Communities Challenge Grants, 129, 140 urban renewal, 69–74 Vail Health, 100–101, 102, 104–105 value, least-cost planning and, 53 Value Engineering (VE), 48–49 values, common, 115–117 vent stacks, 172–173 Vista program, 112–113 Walk Score measurements, 78, 82 Warley, Buchanan v., 68 Westside Bypass (Oregon), 54 White L section (Baltimore), 77f, 134f. See also Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel Project White privilege, 87–88 Whitelock Community Farm (Baltimore), 148, 182 Williams, Brandon, 99–102, 103–104, 112 windows, 187–188 Wisconsin Dells, 28–30, 29f, 30f, 36–38, 37f, xviii zoning, racial equity and, 67–70