Oregon Active Transportation Summit

The City of Eugene centers community engagement in our transportation planning processes, but have found that in many cases the conversation can be too narrow, with residents interacting only with staff. In 2024, the Transportation Planning Team began to explore how we could broaden the conversation so that community members aren't only talking with staff, but with each other. Afterall, projects impact everyone differently, and staff cannot represent those impacts to everyone, especially those opposed to a project. That brings us to our new style of public meeting, which we are calling Community Conversations. We asked ourselves, what if we created a public meeting where people could talk with one another and learn how this project might impact their neighbors? We booked a venue with circular tables, put together an interactive agenda, and ran our first Community Conversation for the 24th Avenue Protected Bike Lanes project. We have since replicated this process for the Polk Street Bike Lanes project. This workshop will show attendees how we run Community Conversation style meetings and the "why" behind the shift in how we run meetings. I will also create an interactive component where we run a mini community conversation so people can see it in action.