OTREC-TT-10-01

With its statewide land use program, urban growth boundaries, Transportation Planning Rule (TPR), active (often activist) citizenry, progressive-dominated government, and, in Portland, modern history of transit investment and self-consciously alternative urban self-concept, Oregon has gone further, for longer, and been more successful than most places in pushing back against automobiles’ dominance of environment, lifestyle, and landscape. The story of Oregon’s ‘multimodal’ transportation planning includes four stages of action: the national, the metropolitan, the state governmental and the local. A full history to the present day also includes aspects of transportation planning such as freight planning and its relationship to the business and corporate communities; the specialized work of modelers, system-design technologists, economists, and intelligent-transportation engineers; and the visions, dreams, schemes and projections of futurists, whose imaginings led to the infrastructures we see today.