(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 561: Poster Sessions at Mpact in Portland

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re back at the Mpact Transit + Community Conference in Portland Oregon at the Mpact Innovators Poster Sessions. We talk with young professionals about the transportation implementation and policy work they’ve been doing in the field including designing new transportation hubs, rethinking parking, and improving bus service.

You can find the posters below and listen to the episode at Streetsblog USA or find our archive at Libsyn.

This week we’re at the 2025 Mpact Transit + Community Conference in Portland Oregon and we’re chatting with young professionals about their work that they presented at the Mpact Innovators poster session. The Innovators is an all-volunteer national networking group that organizes events and networking at the conference each year. Each of the interviews is about five minutes and we have a link to the posters in the show notes in case you want to follow along with the visuals. I will note that the poster sessions occurred during one of the evening gatherings so you may hear a bit of background noise. But there are some pretty cool ideas in here so hopefully you all stick around to check all 8 of them out.

Cameron Thompson – Sisters East Portal Transportation Hub

Veronica Mandasari – Reimagining Mill Avenue: What Tempe can Learn from Portland’s Walkable Street Design

Emily D’Antonio – TriMet Better Bus: Improving Reliability at Greeley and Going

Eric Gasper – Bridgeless to Better Burnside

Daniel Lambert – Pathways Transit Assistance Team (PTAT):  A Trauma-Informed Alternative to Object-Oriented Security on Transit Systems

Ryan Martyn – Wasted Space: Using Parking Lots to Improve Neighborhood Completeness

Jules Plotts – Employer-Centered Accessibility Model to Non-Dayshift Work

Maddy Belden – Development & Datasets

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

So adding a bus stop and kind of park and ride. To the site. So existing today, there are a couple amenities on the site that are pretty typical to some kind of highway rest stops. It’s at the junction of two highways in Oregon, um, east West Highways. And the City of Sisters is really a small town that can get a lot of tourists all at once.

And so kind of trying to facilitate some of that movement of travel there. And so we took this all the way from the planning stage through design, and then it has, uh, recently been constructed. So exciting to take it through the whole kind of planning design elements there. But the planning phase really focused on kind of what elements do you really need on this site?

What are some community needs? And so that included a park and ride facility. So adding parking spots, adding a bus pull through lane, and some parking for the buses. As well. And we also looked at kind of phasing this site, um, seeing what was needed now today and what’s needed maybe in 5, 10, 20 years. And so we also looked at some long-term parking and RV parking because it’s a very heavily used area for camping as well.

And so the planning phase really brought all those elements together and bringing in the park and ride the bus stops and then that long term parking. And then the final design phase, uh, really looked at all those and thought of how can we actually build this on the site? And so one key piece, keeping all of the elements that were part of the planning phase, how do we design these to avoid trees?

We really expressed by the community.

And that’s kind of a general kind of statement from the City of sisters is really keeping that natural feel. So we kept a lot of the existing asphalt loop that’s there today, and that’s part of the design. And then really kind of made some free flowing parking spots, um, and kind of a free flowing loop rather than your typical.

And a rectangular looking parking lot to really avoid those trees. And so that was a lot of back and forth with the city. What trees can we remove working with, uh, the city there Another added element that the city of Sisters really wanted to see if we could add was another RV dump station.

I would say it was the biggest kind of piece that I learned was how to do that, how to make it still work with vehicles, still need to be able to actually fit in these parking spots, be able to kind of circulate through the site as well. So that was definitely probably the biggest thing I’ve learned.

And then after that I try to interconnect all the indicators that I generated from this. And I want to focus on this three. And I compare between Portland strategy and strategy. And here what I found is Portland has a very organized sidewalk deficient. So they divided the sidewalk into three zones. They also have some standard for the crossing spacing.

They also have the LPI is really nice. They’re leading pedestrian intervals, so I think Temple also has to do that. We already have some plans finding document mention about the LPI, but it’s not implemented yet. And after that I did a very quick social media review about what people think when we talk about sidewalk walkability, pedestrian.

They talk about how, how hot it in Arizona, it’s very hot and how unsafe is it or because there are a lot of cars accident. So that’s why I want, I want to focus on those two, like the she and the safety management. So when you see here, this is the before after. So before there is like only a few trees on the downtown.

The sitting place also only one per corridor and they have a lot of like on street parking. So I just want wondering how, if I implement Portland strategies to here. So I divided the sidewalk zones into three and I put some crosswalk there with the LPI standard, I also get rid some of the on street parking.

But it still has the drop off zone, but the other parking, I just remove it. So this is how it looks

We don’t do that now, so we still allow the cars can pass on the street car. Track. So here I think some of them are not allowed to do that. So that’s why I feel like the LPI also is very interesting. This is like,

So. Uh, basically pedestrian can cross the street like three until seven, second ahead, start before the vehicle.

Jeff Wood: And what’s completeness?

Ryan Martyn: Completeness would be non-car access to daily essentials.

Jeff Wood: So like a 15 minute city, 15 minute neighborhood type of thing.

Ryan Martyn: 15 minute neighborhood, 20 minute neighborhood, smart growth, new urbanism. Right. I think they all are discussing the same thing, come to the same conclusion. And so, you know, how do we create a closer proximity of like housing and those essentials?

I think parking lots are a big gap. And so Portland removed parking requirements, which kind of frees up this space to be developed into something else. So. I measured every single surface parking lot in the city of Portland. Turns out that 20% of this city is off street parking, and uh, then I measured the capacity for housing on those parking lots.

So 30% of parking lots in the city are zoned to allow housing. And, uh, 21% of parking lots total have the zoning and physical requirements to develop a building. And if we apply that across the entire city, these parking lots have the capacity to build over 300,000 new homes and double the city’s population.

Jeff Wood: That’s awesome. So tell me how you did the data collection and how you like pulled all the information together.

Ryan Martyn: Yeah, so by measuring the parking lots, I used QGIS and I just went through and traced the satellite image and identified all the parking lots by manually scanning. And then I identified five case study areas, which I use neighborhood centers.

Which are something defined by the city of Portland that are concentrations of growth and in the definition they are complete neighborhoods. So I felt like that was very appropriate. And uh, then I took my five case studies. And did a 3D model of each of them to just understand the capacity for housing based on the land use laws at the time, and to understand, you know, what portion of parking lots are big enough to create a building.

That’s another question I have is like, how do you figure out which parking lots can actually be developed on? Right? Like there’s a zoning aspect of it, but there’s also like a physical space or whether a developer would be really interested in doing it or not, I’m guessing.

Yeah. Yeah, so in Portland, a standard law size is 50 by 100.

So I just went through and said, if this parking lot is at least 50 by 100, that would be feasible to build a building.

Jeff Wood: So what was your favorite part about putting this together?

Ryan Martyn: Um, I love these two images down here.

Jeff Wood: You gotta explain ’em to people in audio.

Ryan Martyn: So I created this 3D model so that I could visually represent this transformation that I’m describing if we’re going to turn parking lots into housing.

I want people to visually understand what that could be like. And so on this poster here, we’ve got one image of a strip mall. It’s like 16 city blocks. 12 of those city blocks are just parking. And so in my proposal image, we break out those 12 city blocks by creating new right of ways and filling in those blocks with, uh, housing.

Jeff Wood: That’s awesome.

Ryan Martyn: And so what do you, uh, wanna do with this next? That is a really great question that I’m not entirely sure about. I think I would like to take these diagrams and create more realistic renderings of what’s possible. I think the whole thing is like I’m just trying to show the potential of a place.

I don’t think it’s economically feasible to do what I’m describing, but I want more people to be aware that like we could have this. Yeah. The thing that came to my mind was also like the heat island effect and like what happens if you redevelop or if you put trees there and things like that. It’s really interesting.

Jeff Wood: Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Ryan Martyn: Yeah, thanks to you.

Jeff Wood: Next up is Emily D’Antonio. Her poster is entitled Tri-Met Better Bus, improving Reliability at Greeley, and Going.

And that’s how we came to these two intersections that were by the campus. And so what was causing the delay was the two signals, but then also there’s a zipper merge to the north of. The North Signal. And so what we propose is removing that zipper merge and giving the right lane to the bus to make it a bus only lane.

And then to add a right turn except bus lane right before that signal.

Land that’s in the right of way or just res striping, repainting. And so this is just a simple repainting of the lanes to remove the merge.

Yeah. So

Which I’m kind of what this was exactly. Mm-hmm. Exactly. So it’s really cool to see this. So thank you very much.

I appreciate your time.

Emily D’Antonio: Yeah, no problem.

Next up is Daniel Lambert. His poster is entitled Pathways Transit Assistance Team, P-T-A-T-A, Trauma-Informed Alternative to Object-Oriented Security on Transit Systems.

So the, uh, picture here, the graph?

Yeah.

The blue line on the graph is trans trim originating numbers. This is the number of rides that where you step onto the system the very first time and you click your, your card. This is your originating ride. The orange line, the higher number is boarding numbers. So this is, you’ve gotten off that ride and you’ve gotten back on again.

So the idea is you’ve left the vehicle and you’ve come back on, and what you’ll notice in this line is the, the distance between the blue and orange line around 2019, as one could imagine it just. Collapsed, right. Went way down to 2021. But you’ll notice that 22, 23, 24, it really never came back. And this is a big deal.

And what I try to tell people and what’s really interesting about it is a lot of people don’t realize that the currency for transit is not the dollar, it’s not the Canadian of dollar, it’s not the yen chap. Japan is massive in their, their transit operations. It’s trust. Trust is the currency for transit.

And what you’re seeing here that this line, this in the lack of space in these numbers, is a lack of trust in the system. And part of why I say that there is a lack of trust is a failure to recognize human security. We typically send police officers onto the system to secure the system to get on and make sure the train is okay to make sure the bus is okay.

The platform is okay. What I suggest is we go to human focus security, which is get on to focus on the person, Hey, this person is, has been called in on, but let’s check on this person. Let’s see why there’s a problem and let’s, let’s focus on that problem. And one of the ways we do this is changing the way we see what we call security officers.

What we, uh, transit has over 500 individuals that heal in this, this process right now. And instead of just getting yourself a basic security officer to do the job, we instead replaced them with EMTs, behavioral Health, clinicions, and Peer mentors. Now, peer mentor is with somebody who has lived in the houselessness or with drug issues or with mental health issues that they’ve since kind of come to terms with and grows themselves out.

Of that’s what a peer mentor is and they come on and they can understand the situation that they’re talking to this person about. And it is a fascinating program. And Denver has run this kind of program called Scar Fascinating. The results are online. You can actually look at all the results that they found.

Um, San Diego uses the same kind of model where they bring on mental health clinicians and EMTs and they actually. Uh, work with these folks. Sit down with ’em. Hey, let’s find you a place instead of sitting on the bus, just back and forth. Come with me. Let’s, let’s get you a place to go. So this is the idea of getting away from, uh, what we call, uh, crisis intervention Team modeling, which is law enforcement focused.

Let’s get away from that object oriented security. That is kind of the deal. One of the things you’ll notice is the picture of the law enforcement officer. You’ll notice that these uniforms here, they don’t look like law enforcement officers, and this is a really important deal when you’re talking about talking to somebody who’s involved in trauma.

When it comes to law enforcement, they’ve been constantly arrested and they dealt maybe with violence with law enforcement officers. This kind of imagery changes that model a little bit and allows that person to come in contact with this person and actually help them and look like they’re there to help.

And of course the color of the poster is purple and, and kind of a keel color. This is the, uh, international color of mental health awareness. And this is the idea is you engross that into the project and you involve that so that people can see you’re not law enforcement. You are something else. You’re here to help.

So that’s kind of what I’ve got.

Uh, for instance, EMS calls, um, fire calls when it comes to, um, health issues on the trains and on the buses. I can’t find that. Uh, when we talk about law enforcement on the system, Portland Police Department has done a pretty decent job of getting their information out there. But in CSL Mah County and Sheriff’s Office, they don’t really have the numbers to show exactly what’s been happening on the system.

So it has been really difficult to get a data analytics model based around what’s going on and actually look at what the problem is to create a better solution. And I think that would be one of the biggest frustrations that I found on the system. And the most surprising is what seems like it should be transparent isn’t.

One of the things I’ve found. A trim were to take on a project like this, they would probably save something like $30 million a year. And it’s not only good, but it’s cost saving. That’s what’s fascinating. Awesome.

Over the Willamette River,

Yeah, so we talked to a lot of, uh, businesses, cultural organizations and social services in the neighborhoods around the street to see what they were currently concerned about and what they were worried about happening during the reduced traffic. We found that people had a hard time crossing the street from the north of the south side going for example, from downtown to what’s known as Old Town Chinatown.

Um, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, both of which have a lot of social services, a lot of low income people, and a lot of needs that may not be met when there’s the confusion of construction added to a really busy street. Or when traffic goes down, just a complete change of what they’re used to.

There was also a concern that the points from east to west along the street, um, which connect two of the biggest tourist draws in the city, which are Paul’s books and. Voodoo donuts are not very in image for people wanting to go from one to the other. Where essentially the street right now is a funnel that gets people east and west really quickly.

There’s not a lot of space for cars, bikes, or other ways of getting through. So what we did was take a look at 30 years of ideas for the street, what people who live and work and need the services in the area, um, had in mind for the street, um, over the next five years and beyond. And came up with some plans for how we could activate, um, some of the space that can be reclaimed when there’s less traffic and lanes can be turned into, for example, pocket parks, temporary plazas, um, addition of bike lanes that connect to what’s going to eventually be a parked around the central city called the Green Loop.

It’s an important street. But it’s still a dangerous street. And it’s still a street that doesn’t bring people to it for anything besides going through it.

I think it would be the best if, you know, the city can take things that people who live and work in the area would like to see there and, and put it there in a phased approach where. You know, quick and easy things like res striping streets, adding bike lanes painted on, or even just adding some more greenery can prove that maybe in the long term after the bridge reopens, all the traffic that currently goes through there won’t be necessary.

So

But I flipped it around and looked at the employment location to see what kinds of populations have access to these employment locations. And so in a nutshell, I guess the reason for that is that there might be more policy angles there that we’re not looking at, like it might depend on the clustering of employers with like.

Food service jobs have a lot of like mismatch in terms of the times that transit runs there. So, uh, if there’s a clustering of, there’s a lot of small employers, the solutions might be different from like a large. Employer and transportation and warehousing like an Amazon warehouse where you might be better to partner with that employer.

Map at the block or the, the census track level. Like the block is actually a better size. Um, and so I’m interested in how you used it and how it like worked with the idea that you’re putting together, because sometimes it could be a little tricky.

Especially for larger employers, but it kind of gives us an idea of where things might be. And I usually with loads data, people use origin destination data. So they’re looking at the home and pairing it to where the worker lives and where they work. And I just looked at just the workplace and that’s because if you’re looking at that like paired data like that, you’re looking at where trips that are actually being made.

And there’s a bit of a survivorship bias there where if someone is not able to access a work location at the time that they need it, that’s not a job opportunity. So I’m looking at just the employment area and seeing are these places accessible to Metro’s, equity focus areas where Metros identified equity populations.

Even if it’s a 24 hour accessibility model, it’s still kind of be sort of a snapshot. So I’d like to like look at certain case studies where there might be a need. For shift workers and see what accessibility looks like throughout the day and maybe like ground truth that with actual qualitative data about what are people’s shift times and what other people’s needs.

That’s

sharing.

And finally, Maddie Belden. Her poster is entitled Development and Data Sets.

That isn’t grant-based. Um, and trying to standardize metrics across these three grant programs and figuring out how we can match up data evaluation and communication to data justice principles so that our communication evaluation of grants aren’t just done internally. They’re also really tied to community and their values.

And asking these recipients in their own words, what the impact of these grant placemaking program activities were. Because how the grant program works is that applicants from around the region can apply based on their own placemaking activities that they wanna propose around the region. And then if they get it, they get to facilitate the program and report back on what they did with the grant money.

And so it’s really interesting quotations at this. This previous intern created with community about what the impacts were in their own words, rather than trying to put it in the words of a grant program that’s administrative by a regional government. So it was really interesting, and then I continued to do research externally after that on what data justice is and how it’s applied.

At other, um, regional governments, if, if that was a thing which I wasn’t actually seeing. Um, so trying to see how, um, nonprofit organizations apply data justice lenses to their communities and to their work. And then also looking at data justice in terms of big data sets, which is a lot different from the more small data sets that I’m working with here.

Grantees information and evaluative information. Just being able to see all the people who have contributed to the work of this team over the past few years and being able to synthesize it together. It’s been like a really fun brain exercise of like how these things are all interconnected and how they can all contribute to making the community investment team more equitable.