Gabe Klein: The Future of Personal Transportation

Trafton B.

April 8, 2011 - 11:08 AM

You're probably tired of hearing about these public lectures that I've been attending, but I have to write about them because they're so dang interesting. Last month I wrote about two lectures by Van Jones and Richard Louv put on by the Oregon Humanities Center.

Wednesday night, I was able to hear a lecture by the former Director of the Washington DC Department of Transportation (DDOT), Gabe Klein. The event was co-sponsored by the UO Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI) and Live Move, also known as the UO Transportation and Livability Student Group.

During Gabe Klein's all too short tenure in our nation's capital, he introduced a car and bicycle share, expanded the H Street Trolley line, and added more Circulator bus services routes. He also increased the DDOT's use of communication 2.0, i.e., Facebook, Twitter, blogging and other social networking websites, to incorporate public interest into the Greater Washington area public service sector. Klein was practically a godsend to the "New Urbanist" community that seems to be popping up in metropolitan areas nationwide. This New Urbanist movement can be categorized as a newfound appreciation for livable, sustainable cities and a demand for mass transit, bicycle, and pedestrian friendly policies. Hence the reason SCI and Live Move invited him to Oregon.

Klein touched on his time at DDOT during his lecture, which was aptly titled "The Future of Personal Transportation," and he also discussed his thoughts about transportation planning as it has been in the past and what he hopes it looks like in the future. He started the lecture by showing several old photographs of streets in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago from the turn of the 20th Century. What's crazy is that these streets used to be planned for mixed-used transportation. There were shots of pedestrians, cyclists, horse-drawn carriages, and trolleys all sharing the same roads. Then he showed pictures of cities like Los Angeles and Dallas with highways 14-lanes abreast and bumper-to-bumper traffic as far as the eye could see.

The point he was trying to make was that it's time we start planning our streets like we used to. It's time transportation planning went back to the future. No more planning our streets and cities strictly for automobile use. It's time we take those same ideas from the early 20th Century and update them to create complete streets that can be shared by bicycle, pedestrians, busses, light-rails, etc.

Suburbia was the post-World War II American dream. I think my favorite slide of Klein's presentation was a quote by author Bill Vaughan that read, "Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes trees, then names the streets after them." One critical oversight in the development of suburbia, however, is that it's built entirely around the automobile, which was fine and dandy when gas prices were less than a dollar a gallon, but that's no longer the case.

The future of planning in America will not revolve around the automobile. Americans shouldn't need a car to get to work, to drive their kids to school, or to pick up groceries at the store. Cities need to be people-sized as Klein said several times on Wednesday night.

Klein left us with a few words of wisdom and anecdotes that he picked up while working in DC, which I appreciated greatly as I too find myself searching for jobs in the planning world. Nothing easy is worth doing. Work as if you're not afraid of being fired because it's more important to be invested in the results of your work rather than the job itself. He also offered a favorite proverb of his, which is that you should ‘make as many mistakes as possible in as little a time as possible, and try not to repeat them over and over again.' And, finally, there was Richard Branson's personal motto, "Screw it, just do it."

There you have it. One more lecture in my waning weeks of undergraduate study. As you can see I'm trying to squeeze the most out of my final months in Eugene. I've been trying to balance work and play, of course. After leaving the lecture I headed straight to the Eugene City Brewery to meet up with some friends for Bingo Night. I will miss these mid-week nights of intellectual presentations followed by social gatherings centered around silly games and craft beer. Actually, if there's any one night that sums up my time at the University of Oregon, that might be it. Dang, I'm going to miss this.