Oregon Active Transportation Summit

The concept of e-bike lending libraries is simple: they allow people to borrow e-bikes – for a few hours or a few months. Borrowing lets people try e-bikes when they're not ready or able to commit to the expense of buying one. By getting people used to riding e-bikes for everyday trips, lending libraries make e-bikes more accessible, reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and advance city and state climate goals. A new report, "E-bike Lending Libraries: Trends and Practices in the United States," offers a comprehensive scan of e-bike lending libraries across the U.S. This presentation will talk about the different types of lending libraries, program elements, and the things to consider when developing a program.

Did you know that a single line of zoning code can determine whether a neighborhood is walkable—or car-dependent for decades? While we often focus on transportation investments building sidewalks and bike lanes in the public realm, local rules and regulations that govern the development in the private realm quietly shape the design of communities. Supporting community mobility requires more than just infrastructure investments—it demands cross-sector collaboration across land use and transportation practitioners.The Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) works with communities across the state to develop plans and regulations that foster active transportation and public transit. To make this work easier, DLCD and Cascadia Partners developed the Walkable Design Standards Guidebook, a practical resource that offers model code language and guidance on when and why certain approaches make sense for different places. This guidebook helps communities create walkable, vibrant, and transit-supportive environments.This session will provide attendees with an understanding of the often-overlooked land use regulations that shape urban environments and provide actionable strategies to improve community walkability. Attendees will gain insights into best practices for walkable urban design and learn how to apply them effectively. Through case studies from the Portland area, we’ll explore the interplay between urban design, walkability, and transit networks—offering concrete examples that participants can adapt to their own communities.

Hosting events that allow everyone to participate equally is important. This session will identify how to plan for, promote, and host accessible events:

• How to identify appropriate venues that provide accessible rooms and amenities.
• Invitations and announcements of the event that can be read with assistive technology and how to connect with organizations that support and service community members with disabilities with their help in promoting.
• For the day of, we will talk about site logistics, wayfinding, event staff, food & beverage services, and accessible presentations.
  
  

This presentation will be very helpful for any kind of event including outreach events, bike rides, and plaza events.

SPONSORED BY AARP Oregon

Attendees will learn about new and innovative ways that jurisdictions, transit providers and non-profits collaborate to encourage employers around the region to provide commute benefit programs that encourage and incentivize using travel options to get to work. Speakers will give examples of the successful programs that they offer, detail areas where they struggle to gain traction and hope to engage attendees in how they can support this work in their communities or use the resources for their own work.

Examples will include:
- new transit pass programs
- rewards and challenges
- upcoming vanpool subsidies
- online tools and webinars

SPONSORED BY Metro

Two sessions:

• Expanding Imagination with Non-Technical 3D Visualization

• Crashes Don’t Just Happen: Can We Model Them?

Expanding Imagination with Non-Technical 3D Visualization

In the immediate aftermath of a UO student killed on bicycle earlier in 2026, outrage about poor street design from new groups of people emerged. Within a week, a police-escorted funeral procession that closed major streets in Eugene ensued that was simultaneously a remembrance for the student and a public call for action. A week later, a public forum by a local advocacy group was hastily arranged to provide an outlet for the anger and to communicate to city leadership and staff that they need to do better in their street designs and need to do it more quickly; the event overflowed a middle school cafeteria with over 200 people in attendance, many who had never before engaged in street / transportation topics. One key part of both the gatherings and the potential directions was the use of a web-based, non-technical 3D street visualization software, called 3D Street, to redesign the street where the student was killed and to give this broader public a wider set of possibilities on how streets can be designed beyond calling for crosswalks, stop signs, and HAWK signals.

This session will focus on that visualization aspect of the case study, partially embedding it into the story itself and partially demonstrating the ease for non-technicians to make really effective redesign visualizations. As many of us know in the active transportation space, we have a lot of knowledge of how to build better streets, but we have a gap in putting knowledge into practice. Giving more people the tools to make effective visions of alternative futures and then using those visualizations to gather more support and pressure to accelerate better design practice is the focus of this session.


Crashes Don’t Just Happen: Can We Model Them?

Metro and ODOT have been working to develop and implement safety analysis techniques that incorporate systemic safety thinking to tell a fuller story about why and where traffic injuries occur in Oregon and in the Portland Metro Region. Many safety analyses focus on user behavior but ignore systemic impacts from infrastructure and roadway operational characteristics like traffic lanes and traffic volumes. This presentation will share recent work by ODOT to account for role that infrastructure and pedestrian volume play in explaining variation in pedestrian injuries. Metro is one of the first regions in the U.S. to attempt to implement spatial crash prediction models.

This talk will discuss the process of developing both agencies’ tools and where the tools currently stand. While developing these models, both agencies have learned about the data and tools available. They have raised interesting questions about how to use them to tell more complete stories about traffic safety in Oregon and Portland Metro region. This talk will emphasize opportunities for collaboration between Metro, ODOT and other partners to better predict the impact of investments on safety and pedestrian travel. It will discuss the initial results of the models and what they mean for the complicated relationships between vehicle-miles-traveled, investments for intervention, multi-modal travel, and safety outcomes. The talk will build into a bigger discussion on the role of data models to tell stories and inspire investment in safety and active transportation. It will engage the audience to share experiences about how to tell stories with complex models and limited data. This talk will revolve around open discussions, and we will encourage the audience to share their suggestions, experiences, and ideas for future collaboration.