UO Campus Update, Fall 2011

The last few months at the University of Oregon have been busy, with students engaged in innovative activities to connect their transportation education with community and policy change. I’ll give an update on two activities: a student-run transportation photo exhibit and the impact of the Sustainable City Year program (SCY) of the Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI).

Last summer a group of 13 students (11 from the UO, one from PSU, and one from the University of Denver) traveled to Amsterdam for a new study abroad course on bicycle transportation (OTREC scholarships assisted many of the students). In addition to all the details they learned about design, policy, and cultural aspects related to the high bicycle mode share, students simply experienced an alternative (drug-free) transportation reality. Students frequently expressed how enjoyable it was to travel, how capable human beings actually are to navigate ambiguous transportation spaces and, really, just how normal biking was.

Not satisfied to keep the educational experiences to themselves, these students wanted to come back to the U.S. and share with a broader community. In early November, the students organized a public photo exhibit that included 12 voted-upon photos, a student-made looped video of cycling along a variety of cycle tracks and a few informational or inspirational boards for context. The opening event was held at the Humble Beagle in Eugene, a local bakery and restaurant, and attracted over 150. Attendees ranged from city staff (with their families), general public and students. None of the pictures had captions and the public was invited to write their own – a nice, fun, public engagement idea.  The buzz and spirit were great and the community conversations were fantastic.

This fall also saw the kickoff of another Sustainable City Year program, this year with Springfield, Ore. (details discussed elsewhere in the newsletter). Now that this innovative program is in its third year, some larger lessons are emerging. First, many disciplines engage in transportation issues that the transportation field normally ignores.  The SCY program regularly draws students from architecture, landscape architecture, business, law, public policy and even product design into the mix of creating sustainable communities, including the role of transportation. While many students in these disciplines are not experts in transportation, they do engage with the topic and desperately want easily accessible tools and knowledge to help them be more effective. 

Second, students are desperate to make a difference in the community while in school and SCY gives them an opportunity to do so with the knowledge that students in twelve other disciplines across 25 other classes will also be working with the same city. 

Third, cities are also desperate—partly for new ideas, but mostly for a new way to host community conversations that actually move things forward. Students, with their work based partly in reality and partly in utopia, have a freedom to push ideas further along than city staff or consultants may feel politically comfortable with. And the work can have real results. In Salem (last year’s SCY city), a majority of the city’s work plan for this year is based on student work from the last year. 

This match-making between students and a single city over the course of an entire academic year is a new approach to engaged learning that can serve as a model for universities across the country, and is one more way that OTREC investments are meeting the transportation needs of the nation.