Become an Effective Transportation Advocate


Once again, it’s time for the annual PSU/PDOT Traffic and Transportation Class.

There’s no better way to understand how transportation works in this city, and how to work to influence it. This class has launched many activists, including yours truly.

Calling all neighborhood activists – Learn how the city that works, works! And how you can affect change in your community.

The Portland Traffic and Transportation Class offers Portlanders the opportunity to learn about the city’s transportation system while working on actual neighborhood projects that affect your community.

Work with decision and policy-makers, planners, scholars and engineers to get your neighborhood transportation project moving.

This interactive Portland State University class is open to all Portland citizens and full scholarships are available to qualified applicants. Learn more on the website.

Contact:

Scott Cohen
Portland Office of Transportation
Transportation Options Division
scott.cohen@pdxtrans.org
503-823-5345


0 responses to “Become an Effective Transportation Advocate”

  1. WELL,there ya go, everything about transit in this area is;

    1-PORTLAND

    2-PORTLAND

    3-PORTLAND

    The rest of the TRIMET service area gets the table scraps.

  2. Hey, anybody is welcome to take the class. The City of Portland will subsidize you if you are a Portland neighborhood activist.

    Do you expect Portland to subsidize Beaverton residents? I’m sure somebody would scream bloody hell if they did :-)

    Complain to Beaverton City Council (or substitute your local jurisdiction)…

  3. I like the way the ministry of propaganda has so successfully spun the WES as being first suburb to suburb service in America.

    IT CONNECTS TO MAX WHICH CONNECTS TO PORTLAND.

    You think they would have put that in there to service Beaverton or Willsonville?

    YEA RIGHT.

    PORTLAND PORTLAND PORTLAND…

    At least they could change the name of the transit district to accurately reflect what it is;

    PORTLAND TRANSIT!

  4. “Do you expect Portland to subsidize Beaverton residents? I’m sure somebody would scream bloody hell if they did”

    BTW CHRIS-

    Of course I don’t expect the bozo’s who run our city to do such a thing!

    After all, they have so many creative ways to throw away tax payer money as it is right now, they don’t need any new ideas!

    *PORTLAND, THE CITY THAT WASTES, then whines about it.*

  5. While I agree there should be a class like this for the suburbs, not only does PDOT subsidize it, but 2/3rd of the lectures are city of Portland employees. Learning how to request a speed bump on your street from the city of Portland is really a skill that doesn’t have any value to a resident of Beaverton, because Beaverton handles speed bump requests differently, (at leas, I assume so.) Yes, the TriMet and Metro lectures apply to everyone in the Metro region, but most of the lectures are just Portland centric, and if they weren’t, they’d be a lot less useful… What needs to happen is Beaverton needs to hold their own class, and Gresham needs to hold their own class, and etc… (Either that, or all the cities need to merge so that you only have one department/phone number/whatever to go talk to about bicycle issues in the entire Metro region.)

  6. Matthew wrote: Yes, the TriMet and Metro lectures apply to everyone in the Metro region, but most of the lectures are just Portland centric, and if they weren’t, they’d be a lot less useful… What needs to happen is Beaverton needs to hold their own class, and Gresham needs to hold their own class, and etc…

    Will TriMet and Metro provide the same level of support/participation for the Forest Grove, Cornelius, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Tigard, Tualatin, Durham, Rivergrove, King City, Sherwood, Wilsonville, Lake Oswego, West Linn, Oregon City, Gladstone, Johnson City, Happy Valley, Milwaukie, Gresham, Troutdale, Wood Village, Fairview, and Maywood Park programs as they do for Portland?

  7. Given that I can get my Metro councilor to show up to my neighborhood association meeting by just sending an e-mail, and only 15 people show up to our meetings anyways, I’m guessing yes…

    The bigger problem is probably finding 10 people in Maywood Park, (which I thought was actually part of the city of Portland, but I could be wrong about that,) who want to take a class like this in the first place.

  8. Hummm, so Maywood park is indeed it’s own city. (The city council meets less often than my neighborhood association, which isn’t that surprising since my neighborhood is about 10 times bigger than Maywood Park.) However, I got a building permit a few weeks ago, and it was messed up and seemed to have some zoning review stuff in it, and one of the zoning review checks was listed as “Maywood Park”, even though I’m 10 miles from it. So I asked BDS about it, (not about the Maywood Park bit, but the fact that there was a lot of zoning stuff for what was really just an electrical permit,) and then they issued a different one, so I don’t have that permit any more to look at…

    And so now I’m looking on Portlandmaps to see if I can find another permit that mentions Maywood Park, and I can’t, but I might not be remembering what it said, it might have said West Portland Park, (which is in the city of Portland, and does have special zoning rules.)

    But I do wonder if they contract with the city of Portland for building permits or something, since 777 citizens isn’t enough to staff, well, anything…

  9. Hummm, so Maywood park is indeed it’s own city

    Yep, and there’s a transportation reason for that: I-205. From what I’ve read, Maywood Park incorporated in an attempt to stop the freeway construction which would destroy their neighborhood. You could say that they incorporated to Become an Effective Transportation Advocate.

  10. Jason Barbour wrote: Yep, and there’s a transportation reason for that: I-205. From what I’ve read, Maywood Park incorporated in an attempt to stop the freeway construction which would destroy their neighborhood.

    Not only that, but when the Airport MAX (now Red Line) was built, TriMet also conveniently forgot that Maywood Park was an incorporated city.

    During planning, someone pointed out the little slip-up, and TriMet had to restart many of the processes in order to make sure they had approvals from Maywood Park. Because, Maywood Park technically had the ability to completely shut down (or severely hamper construction of) the MAX line.

    (However, they quickly approved it, because it was not in their interest to stop the MAX line construction. No MAX stations are located in Maywood Park city limits, and the MAX line is located inbetween the northbound and southbound lanes of I-205 within Maywood Park city limits, giving them very little justification for objection.)

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