The Bottom-Up Revolution
Megan Ramey has advocated for kid-friendly transportation for over a decade, culminating in her role as the Safe Routes to School Manager for Hood River County, Oregon. Megan and Tiffany discuss the importance of walkability and bikeability for children, and Megan shares lessons she's learned from advocating in cities as big as Boston and towns as small as Hood River.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany. I'm excited to be bringing you another conversation today. Part of what it means to make our cities and neighborhoods more resilient, to make them stronger, partly means to challenge policy and hopefully change infrastructure, but I think it also means to try and change culture. One of the most powerful ways I think we can do that is by working with members of the younger generation, connecting them to new ways of being and moving around their city.
I think we've seen the power of this in the famous bike bus videos that have been going around. Today we're going to talk to someone who is doing this in her town, and I think really understands this. I'm excited to bring this conversation to you. Megan Ramey became the Safe Routes to School manager of Hood River County, which is in Oregon. She took on this role in 2022 after 10 years of kid-centric transportation advocacy. In this role, she helps implement Safe Routes to School infrastructure plans, raises money for those projects, teaches children how to ride safely, and engages in dialogue with various stakeholders to help them see the value of making her town a safe place for children to ride and roll.
She has a fascinating history and story as to how she came to love biking and how she came to this line of work. I'm looking forward to sharing that story with you today. Megan, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution Podcast. I'm looking forward to talking with you.
Yay, thanks for having me.
And my cat Benny has appeared, which is wonderful. Well, Megan, let's start off with a little bit of your story and your journey. You're going to talk about a couple different stops on your journey to Hood County. It's called Hood River County, right? Is that the name of a city, or is that the name of the county?
Hood River County is the county, and then Hood River is the city where I live.
All right. So you're originally from Madison, Wisconsin. Someone recently was on the show—I think it was Liza—and she gave a shout out to Madison. She thought it was a really great place for biking. Now I'm even more inspired to come visit it one day. So you're originally from Madison, lived in Georgia for a bit, studied abroad in London, and then spent several years in Boston before moving to Hood River. Can you share about that journey, and maybe how those places and your experiences in those places shaped your view on mobility and what you're doing now?
Yeah, so from the time I was born in Madison to my current home of Hood River, I have lived in communities with such various transportation cultures. I'm a resident of four different states: Wisconsin, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Oregon. I was born in Madison, but we left really quickly for Milwaukee, and I remember as a four-year-old not being able to play outside or leave the yard.
Then we moved to Wisconsin Rapids, which is a paper mill town in central Wisconsin, and I was given unfettered freedom. My school bus stop was on a lagoon, and in the winter, I would shovel it off and figure skate on it before boarding the school bus. I would also walk across a frozen lake to go talk to the ice fisherman. It was pretty ideal.
Then when I was 14, we moved to Peachtree City, Georgia, which is a 1950s suburb of Atlanta. The town features about 100 miles of golf cart paths, and I used my bike to wander endlessly on all these trails. But two years later, I turned 16, got my driver's license, and that all changed.
Towards the end of my college term at the University of Georgia, I took a work abroad to London and used the tube to get around and walked everywhere. I remember my mom, when I came home, said that my legs looked fantastic. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is positive reinforcement." I got in my car, and I felt incredibly lonely for the first time in a long time.
Then we moved back to Madison after I graduated to work for Lands' End and also get my MBA. Madison is my birth city, and the culture was so easy to just bike around. It's a platinum biking city. It was like I was literally coming home to the lifestyle that I knew fit me.
Then we moved to Boston in 2008, and it was a complete culture shock. The city was then ranked fifth worst in the world for biking. I remember cursing under my breath as I was biking down Mass Ave. I immediately became an advocate without intending to. I didn't know I was supposed to fight for things, but there I was, surrounded by the best of the best. Together, we brought about a renaissance that is now visible in the city.
My daughter was an Obama baby, born nine months after the election, and she was like gasoline to my urgency to change the city. Like London, Boston was a very walkable city, and that's where I learned to love walking for transportation. Now we are in Hood River, after a very thoughtfully designed Excel spreadsheet to identify what our most livable city would be. I rank-sorted 40 cities based on a car-free life near the woods. Hood River has about 8,000 people within a one-mile radius of the city border. I've lived in such diverse places, and it's shaped who I am and how I advocate for transportation.
I also grew up moving many more times than I can count. Most of those moves involved deep reflections on mobility. I remember tuning into that side of the experience when I left home to go to college and ended up in New York City. Then I would go back to where my parents were, and the shock would start to hit me. I'd be like, "What is this?" When I moved out of New York City to Asheville, there was no public transportation. I had to get a car and get a lease payment and everything. I just remember swearing under my breath every time I made that payment, because I was like, "This is crazy."
I think once you have these experiences, but people don't always connect them. When would you say you first tuned in to the bike ability side? When did you really come to care about that and connect mobility to how you were experiencing each place?
Yeah, I think there were two big moments. One I didn't know was going to be a core memory until later, till the second one. But the first time was as a kindergartner in Wisconsin Rapids. Remember the lagoon where I was figure skating? I missed the bus, and my babysitter was like, "You need to get to school. I don't care how." So I looked at my bike in the garage, took it out, and rode to school without asking permission. I was just doing what I was told: bike to school.
My teacher was completely mortified that a kindergartner would bike to school. Even though it was the early 1980s, it should have been totally normal. My parents and the babysitter got in trouble, but I just remember feeling so much independence and resilience without knowing how to articulate that.
Then fast forward 15 years to when I was a junior in college, using my car to get everywhere around Athens, Georgia, doing star-shaped patterns over Atlanta where everything takes an hour to get to. I was biking to class, and it was raining, and I hydroplaned into a car in front of me. Everybody's totally fine, but my car was totaled. My dad was like, "Yeah, you're not getting another car. Here's your bike."
When he gave me that bike, I had to figure out how to get from my house with my bike over a long distance to campus. It was about five miles. I used the bus to put my bike on the bus and cross that longer distance, then I would bike around campus. That was so memorable to me because I could instantly picture my kindergarten self being resilient and feeling so much more connected to my community, even though I didn't know that back then as a kindergartner.
After that experience in Athens, Georgia, I never went back to relying on a vehicle for transportation. That was like a big Robert Frost moment for me.
Can you talk about becoming a mom and how that shaped this journey for you, especially since you moved to Boston and then started advocating? I know a lot of people get passionate about biking, but you're passionate about biking and children biking specifically—empowering children to be able to move around their city safely on wheels. Can you share a little bit about that side of the story?
Yeah, becoming a mother, knowing my childhood experience and what I wanted my daughter to be gifted with, but also seeing what my mom experienced as both a working mom. My dad worked, and my mom was doing her master's at the same time. They had three kids, and I just remember I had the best childhood ever. You would never know that they were working all the time. So I wanted to design that into our life, where my daughter not only had the independent mobility that she deserved, which would bring her joy, but that I was free to be a mom, to take care of myself and take care of our family.
That was in Boston in 2009. I remember feeling so isolated right after becoming a mother. Taking the stroller on the bus was more free than anything, but I was in the throes of postpartum depression. Now that I think about it, she had incredible colic. So I was like, "Kyle, my husband, I need you to harness the Burley trailer, harness her car seat in the Burley trailer." She was five months old, and that opened up a world of freedom for me as a mother.
As the postpartum depression faded, the fog lifted. Even though I still wasn't sleeping and she wasn't sleeping, at least we could get out and explore Boston. That's when I was biking a five-month-old around a city like Boston, all over the neighborhoods. I was like, "This is unquestionably the worst city for biking in the US." So I started putting her on my chest in a Baby Bjorn, going to all the community meetings about infrastructure. I was on the Boston City Bike Committee and also the Cambridge Bike Committee. I spent a lot of my free time as a mom advocating.
Before we go on, what was that experience like in Boston when you were advocating? Can you share some of the most important actions you took and what were you asking for from the city? How did you translate what you were noticing and feeling and experiencing into something that was actionable for the city to respond to?
The best I could do was tell my story. I remember one very vivid memory. My friend, who is now the executive director of MassBike, was very active at Boston University in terms of advocacy. The city of Boston was planning a streetscape change for Commonwealth Avenue. It's a mega street with the Green Line running through it, six lanes of vehicles, parking, and they were going to put in a cycle track.
I remember it was pouring rain, and Galen Mook—shout out to him, he's a dear friend of mine—said, "I don't care how you have to get here. You have to come, and you have to bring your daughter." She was maybe four years old then. I was like, "Okay, it's pouring rain." We got the Burley trailer, went five miles away from the house, just drenched with all the Gore-Tex on. I walked into a huge auditorium full of people, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I don't have time to wait for all these people to comment." Galen was like, "You're on first."
I had to quickly articulate what I wanted to say. I brought her up on stage. Luckily, she wasn't shy. I told the story of when I was first biking down Commonwealth Avenue with her in the back, there was a driver who cut us off and honked at us. It was super aggressive, and I felt fearful. Then I said, "Compare that to her biking to school this morning, where a driver rolled down their window and said it was the cutest thing they'd ever seen. Not only did that driver have that experience, but they told somebody else who works at a market, and that person at the market also recognized Annika from that story."
I asked, "What do you want to leave your community with?" I got a round of applause, and that was the community meeting that helped us get the cycle track on Commonwealth Avenue. For me, I think more stories need to be told as mothers and parents of what type of city should we be creating for our children? Absolutely, for our family.
Yesterday, I had my child at the playground by the river here in Waco, and I saw a dad on a tandem bike with his little girl. He was carrying her backpack, and they were clearly biking home somewhere, which is pretty rare for Waco. I just saw that snapshot. On one side is the river with the running path, and on the other side are two lanes of traffic where motorcycles were roaring down. Guys were coming out as the sun was going down with their low-riding pickup trucks, revving their way through.
All the children at the playground froze. Even though they're far away, the noise is so loud that they all stop. You can tell they will only go so far, even though it's a huge patch of grass. The trucks are so loud they scare the kids. My son was constantly tracking all the traffic. I saw that dad go by with his little girl, and I just thought, sometimes the question I feel we need to be asking is: What are the activities you actually want to see in your town? What do you actually want to see when you're out at dusk at five o'clock with your child? Do you want to see loud trucks and muscle trucks roaring around and motorcycles? Or do you want to see parents with their kids getting home safely, in a way that's building memories for a lifetime, with so many other benefits we don't even have time to go into?
I think giving your community that option, challenging them to think like, "What do we want? Let's have a conversation about what we actually want?" can really help reframe the conversation in a powerful way. We've touched on this a little bit with you sharing about your experience as a mom and your experience growing up. But can you just share what resonates with you personally about empowering children to ride around their communities?
Yeah, to the core, it's about raising free-range kids. I call them free-range kids. Why do we need autonomous vehicles when we can have autonomous children? Let their parents be free-range themselves. My daughter just turned 16. She's ridden 26 bikes in her life. She now rides an e-bike, has been for four years, and gets herself everywhere. She doesn't have a need to get a driver's license, and she is fully independent and mobile.
I'm reading the "Life After Cars" book right now. They just came to town to do their book talk, and there's one part in the chapter about cars ruining childhood that I thought was so memorable. In 1979, this guy named Lewis Bates Ames asked parents of first graders, "Can they travel alone in a neighborhood, four to eight blocks to the store, school, playground, or a friend's home?" That's such a great question for parents of a first grader, to set a tone of what we're empowering our children to do. It's the free-range lifestyle dream.
Jonathan Haidt wrote "The Anxious Generation," and Lenore Skenazy is the free-range godmother. They did a study asking children what would it take you to get off your device? They had a bunch of questions or answers for them to select from. Overwhelmingly, the biggest choice was freedom to play in my neighborhood. I think to the core, why I love empowering children to walk and bike is their overall well-being and happiness. They can be independent and find their own play, and have that amazing childhood.
Yeah, I'm hoping to have Lenore on the show soon. Actually, I reached out to her not too long ago. As a mom to two boys who are still pretty young, I think about this all the time. I think about how are they going to get to participate in this city? Because it's so overwhelmed by cars, there's nowhere for them to literally roam. Where would they go?
Just having a vision of what does childhood look like for them, especially as boys who are going to want to have adventures and go roam. I don't know what little boys like to do, but I'm sure they don't want to sit at home all day, hopefully. Thinking about that, it just makes me so sad because I'm watching Levi, my two-year-old. He's watching the world around him, and the world around him is mechanical. It's all these machines, all these cars. I don't want him to grow up thinking of the world as primarily mechanical. It's trucks, machines. It should be people.
I try to get him to people-centric places, and it's hard because children are not being raised with the culture of inclusion. When they see little children trying to come play with them, they get very shocked, and sometimes almost disgusted. They're like, "Who are you? Why would you come play with us?" It just makes me think this question of mobility is partly about giving them agency and independence, but I think it's teaching them a certain way of relating to society.
To be free to roam means you have to have your manners. You've got to know where you live. You have to know how to engage with strangers and other people, other children. I just feel I could talk about this forever.
Yeah, it's captured in the Japanese show "Errand." Kids have to talk to adults to do their tasks.
It just makes you think like, what is our vision of a healthy, functional adult participant in society? How can we be positioning children for that at responsible ages? I think this question of giving them the freedom to get around is really about giving them the freedom to start learning how to participate in society at large. You're right, it's so empowering. It gives them that sense of resilience and agency, like they are part of this too. I think that's a good thing. Children should have that.
So let's talk about what you're doing now. You're the manager of the Safe Routes to School program. Can you tell us how you came to that role? We'll talk a little bit more about what you're working on.
Yeah, so this is my favorite little story: the bike train that could. I had been bugging my daughter's principal—shout out to Mr. Kelly Beard—about ways to increase walking and biking to school and enable children that freedom. In 2020, like during the height of COVID, he came to me. I was this known entity that had been essentially bugging him. He said, "I'd like to create a bike parade around the school so we can see the children. It's been like six months, and I would really like to see them. The teachers would like to see them. How can we do this?"
I said in all caps, "YES," before knowing how to do that. I had led many kid bike rides through Boston. When I moved to Hood River, I organized our first ever open streets event. But I still went to the web and was like, "How does one organize a bike parade?" Then I came upon a 2010 Street Film by Clarence about Portland's neighborhood greenways. In that was a featurette about something called a bike train. It made so much sense to me. This bike train would follow essentially a route and pick kids up along the way.
I copied that and organized two bike trains that had an origin in different neighborhoods, and they met up. It was like one giant bike train that went around the school. All the principal and the teachers were cheering. Some of them were tearing up, and I was crying because it was this huge occasion of coming back together after being so isolated for a while.
When school resumed in person, the principal came back to me and said, "We need to do that every day. I'm afraid of all the parents that are going to be driving their kids to school because they don't want to put them on the bus. So I want them to have options." I was like, "Absolutely."
I put together a group of volunteers. We organized the bike train to go both to school and home from school every day of the week. We did this for nine months. It wasn't just a special day of the week; it was every day as transportation. I had a core group of about 20 kids, about 10 parent volunteers, and I was able to find a 20,000-dollar grant to fund that.
Five years later, I'm in this job. I wrote a grant that ended up paying for my position. Halfway through writing the grant, I was like, "I really want this job." We've raised 10 million dollars for Safe Routes to School programming and infrastructure, and I call it a dream job. So thankfully for the bike train, and what's so fascinating is that street film—the bike train organizer in it is Kyle Johnson, and he's now a very good friend of mine. I didn't know who it was back then, but the world works in such crazy ways to bring us together and inspire each other. Also, Sam Balto, who was a friend, saw the Barcelona Bike Bus right around this time I started the bike train. Then he made the decision to host a bike bus. Now you see what happened with that?
Yeah, so tell me about what you're hoping to achieve through this role. What would you say are your goals and what do you spend most of your time working on?
Yeah, so I did a little bit of research. I was reading the "Life After Cars" book. In 1969, 40% of kids biked to school or walked to school. I think we need to get back to that spot—40%—but also like Finland, where 80% of kids bike or walk to school. They're cold, so there's no reason we can't do this. The Netherlands has 75%. I was looking at Fort Collins and Boulder. They're two cities with a very high bike-to-school, walk-to-school percentage, and they're around 30%.
I'm saying 50% of kids should have the ability to walk or bike to school. The two ways I try to get to this is both through education and infrastructure together. Kids need to know, just like learning how to swim, they need to learn as a core life skill how to bike. Not only how to physically ride a bike, but how do they bike and walk in a very dynamic streetscape that is not friendly to them right now? That's why I'm also focusing on infrastructure.
We have Safe Routes to School plans now for all eight schools, with over 100 infrastructure opportunities. Now I have to find the money so we can improve the infrastructure. Through education and reducing all of those safety barriers for both kids and their parents—most importantly, their parents are the ones that will ultimately make the decision—hopefully we'll get to that 50%. It's not going to happen overnight. It'll be about 10 years. But I've got to start from somewhere.
Yeah, so a Safe Routes to School plan for people who might not know—can you just give a quick overview of what that is? What does it involve?
So through the Oregon Department of Transportation, they have a grant program. If you don't have a Safe Routes to School plan, they work with Alta Planning to come into the community. They survey parents based on what their barriers are. Whether it's stranger danger (which is usually the top one), there are infrastructure safety issues. There are all these reasons why parents don't let their kids walk and bike to school. But then getting down to the nitty-gritty, like "this intersection is why my kids won't walk or bike to school" or "this street is a barrier for us."
It's cataloging all of those barriers and coming up with a list of anywhere between 10 and 30 opportunities for infrastructure improvements. They range from a full two-way cycle track to a school street. It's just a great way for all the multi-agencies—the city, the county, the parks district, the school district—all to come together and say, "This is the way forward."
That's really neat. It's really neat that it gives the opportunity for that interdepartmental collaboration, because I know that's critical to making these plans work. What strategies have you relied on the most to advance this goal of reaching that 50%?
Yeah, so first, and I should have mentioned this before, we live in a community that has between 20 to 50% poverty levels and 50% Latino population. Equity is always on my mind, especially when I see parents in vehicle drop-off lines. I know that everybody has a different reason for the way they do things, but what I think about is that it seems to me like sitting in a car in a vehicle drop-off line at school is like a poor tax. Not only are you losing your time, but you're losing the ability to connect with your community. Your kid is, and it's this thing that adds up over time, both on your mental health and your kids' physical well-being.
The funny thing about that is we live really close to school. Every day, about three o'clock, you start seeing the new system they've created where all the parents put a number tag in their car. The kid has a number tag that identifies them. So an attendant watches the cars as they come in and calls out the number that's pulling up on a radio. This lady has a megaphone, and for like an hour, you just hear her calling out numbers, and the kids come running up to their car. I just think that's hilarious. Every time I pass one, I just pray the Lord will spare me from ever sitting in such a line.
But what you're saying about being a poor tax and thinking about all the opportunity costs associated with this culture—I think about the irony that this is supposed to be an ultimate sign of wealth and prosperity. A working adult sits in a box of steel for an hour because their child can't get home any other way. This is supposed to be a sign of prosperity? This looks like a breakdown. Especially about moms, they're just chauffeurs all day now, and this is supposed to be an ultimate sign of success. This is crazy.
Yeah, I would say the more organized the system, the worse it is. I've never heard of that system before, and it makes my brain just kind of crumble, because the more thought they have to put into a system like that, when they could be designing a system where the kids could naturally walk, bike, or take the bus—they keep chasing this vision, which is not healthy for society.
Harkening back to Sam Balto, schools are a second place in our community. They should be almost like a church, where the community gathers, trades stories. It's like a beginning and an end of a day. Why are we creating an environment where parents almost borderline hate each other because they're not moving fast enough, or the kids are being valeted into their cars? It's not the society that is indicative of wealth. Just like you said, it's not financial wealth, but it's definitely not community wealth.
Yeah, I love that idea of almost thinking of it as the community well, or like the water cooler but better. These touch points where you get to connect with your neighbors, people you may not see anywhere else. It really could be maximized to be a place to build social ties, rather than what it is now, which is a place to build social tensions. Sitting there mad with all these channels of rage with cars.
I tend to not place blame on the people that are in those lines. But what can we do to help them get out of the lines? So that's one thing I think about from an equity perspective. But also, do they have a bike at home?
I run a nonprofit that gives bikes to kids. I just got a Ruby Bridges grant to supply rain jackets to any kid who needs to borrow one for the year. So then a parent doesn't use rain as a reason why they have to drive their kids or not let them sit at the bus stop because it's raining. They have a jacket that they can put on. I'm waiting to hear back on a grant to fund an e-bike lending library. Curious parents can check out an e-bike for two weeks, and then if they like it, they can buy it with a rebate that I'll give them.
I really look at that as a way because a lot of parents can't cross the chasm in their brain of spending four thousand dollars on an e-bike. Why would anybody ever make that decision when they don't have any experience with riding an e-bike and all the magical things that it can do? But if they ride it, I know it could be a car replacement for them.
I think so much of the reason I started this episode talking about culture is because I feel that's a huge part of the conversation. It's not just a modal shift. It's a culture shift. There can be accurate and inaccurate associations with different modes of transportation. Have you run into that where people feel there's a perception that riding the bus means you're poor, or riding a bike means you're hipster? These weird cultural associations with these things? Helping people see, let's boil this down to the basics. This is about letting you lead a more productive life if you're open to other ways of getting around town, rather than just assuming that driving is the only valid option. Can you speak to that a little bit—the cultural associations with different ways of getting around?
Yeah, in Hood River County specifically, it's so crazy because you have the haves who are spending between five and ten thousand dollars on their mountain bikes, and that's normal. I'm like, "What is going on? My two-hundred-dollar mountain bike is totally fine." Then you have the have-nots who are spending three thousand dollars on a used car.
The haves look at my Urban Arrow, which was six thousand dollars, and they're like, "How could you ever spend that amount of money on a bike?" I'm like, "You spent the same amount on your mountain bike, but it's just used for fun time on the weekend. I'm transporting propane and two-by-fours and kids and kids' bikes."
Breaking down that dynamic of bikes are play toys and they can't be used for functional transportation—I think that's my biggest cultural obstruction. But it's happening. I would say in 2020 with the explosion of e-bikes on our streets, we're now an indicator community for not only family cargo bikes, but teens and tweens riding e-bikes, which is a whole other podcast.
Yeah, I think when I think about the cultural side, I'm in Texas, and my mind goes to things like the pickup truck culture. It's like, well, you don't make it, then go buy a bike. You make it, and you go buy the pickup truck or the new Dodge or whatever's trending. Kind of associating mobility as this ladder where you start with walking, then the bus, then the bike, then ultimately the big car or the big truck.
I feel part of the struggle is helping people break out of these narratives we have around different modes of transportation and rethink them. Maybe just see that we have these personal attachments, these cultural associations. It's almost like our identity is tied into the vehicles or the ways we're getting around. When you're suggesting that we change that, I think sometimes people take that as a threat. I think it's difficult for them because it means rethinking parts of their identity or how they want to be seen in their circles.
Yeah, it's a question of what American dream was I raised on? I just try and show through example and joy. I'm pulling up to places around town. I lock up my bike, go in, and I look like I just drove there because I'm wearing normal clothing. I think there are a lot more parents doing that. It's demonstrating that there isn't this association with prosperity based on transportation choice, and in fact, it's the opposite. The happier you arrive at a destination, the more likely that you biked or walked there.
So I would love to chat a little bit more. I'm going to circle back to that question I was asking you about strategies. How are you helping people become more open to biking, to making infrastructure changes? Can you share some of the strategies you use to pursue and reach your goals?
Yeah, I would say from a top-down perspective, there are two secrets of my success. One is getting kids in the street, and the second is quick builds or demonstrations. Prior to the bike train that could, there was this never-ending chicken-and-egg argument. There are no kids demanding this type of infrastructure, so why as a political leader should I invest in it? Then because of that, there are no kids walking or biking, and it's this horrible downward spiral.
That's why the bike train was such a spark, because people could visibly see the kids biking to school in a group, happy. It was contagious, and they were like, "We got to do something to help these kids be safer." Education is possible through them just doing it every day and being with their peers. They learn from each other way better than us adults. It breaks the cycle.
Getting kids in the street is one strategy. The bike bus and walking bus programs like walk to school is one way. The second way is through after-school walking and biking clubs. I have this program called the '80s Walk and Roll Club, harkening back to "Goonies"—a time like my generation, where we were one of the last to grow up free-range, having adventures in the woods, solving problems by bike.
I just ask the kids, "Where do you want to go today? What's your belly steering us towards?" They're like, "We want to go get ice cream." So we talk about the route and we walk or bike there. We talk about scary intersections along the way. Education is so subversive, and it's all tied to what's happening right there in front of them, instead of all these theoretical things that adults like to throw at kids. It's like, "What do you do when you're at this intersection?" Well, every intersection is different.
Then they have mental maps of how they get around town. The parents thank me profusely for enabling their kid to get around town. It's kind of like building in that culture of independent kids. But then, when I teach education in the PE classes, whether it's biking or walking, unless I actually get them off campus—I call these field trips—they don't experience the positive reward of the education they just learned on how to be confident on the bike. Getting them off campus is what I call "breaking out of jail," because they actually get to explore the neighborhood around their school. It's crazy how many kids don't even know what the neighborhood looks like around their school.
They're shuttled to school either on a school bus or in their parents' cars, and they never get to experience the area. Recently, I had my first foray with the high school. It was with the ninth graders. After we finished an awesome five-mile bike ride around town from the high school, we came back. A group of about five or six Latino boys came up to me and thanked me. You could tell they just had such a good time.
I realized that they never had a chance to bike around the city of Hood River because they live in the valley, and there's no safe way for them to bike from the valley to Hood River. It's just very dangerous. Getting kids in the street where they can experience it, experience their community, have a more physical connection to their surroundings, is so important.
Then the second strategy is cheap, quick builds and demonstrations to show progress, both to the community and to leaders, to say, "Hey, this is possible with very little money. We can just put it in the ground, test it, build some public goodwill and opinions, and then maybe it'll become permanent."
On that side, can you share a bit about what have been some of your successes with these ideas?
I think one of my favorite successes is just building public goodwill and showing them that change is possible. Prior to this program, there was just so much complacency. It was always like, "This is how it's always been. Even though we're the most active community in America, we're just never going to have bike lanes. It's not something that we can afford."
Building that goodwill through demonstrations—we've done three of them. One was following the Federal Highway Design Guide for rural communities. They recommend putting in side paths in the absence of sidewalks, because sidewalks cost sometimes five hundred thousand dollars for three blocks, and we don't have that money. I was like, "Let's just do a side path as a demonstration. We'll create both a walkway that's safe for kids, and kids can bike there."
It was so easy to put in the ground. Afterwards, people were like, "You could see people walking their dogs in it. It wasn't just for children; it was for the whole community." Not only that, but the original audience were middle schoolers, and we discovered that an elementary school class was using it to walk to the pool so they could learn how to swim. Sometimes you're designing something for one target audience, when the broader pie is so much bigger than you can imagine. The support you build is that much greater, and leaders can say, "Oh, we should do that all over the city," which they did.
Then the school street is my other proud moment, because it went in permanently in August, just right before the school year. We piloted that. There were at least four to five single-day pilots over two years, then a one-month-long pilot, then a nine-month-long pilot, and then finally went permanent in August of this past year. It's changed social norms on this back side of the school. Now these kids have a whole dead-end block, essentially, to walk or bike in the middle of the street and just be kids. I just love school streets so much. I think they're way underutilized.
Yeah, what would you say are your biggest challenges right now in your role?
Yeah, three things. Two of which I can't change. One is because we're a small town, we don't have money. Two is because we're a small town or a group of small towns, we don't have a dedicated transportation planner or engineer. Everything has to be outsourced to more expensive consultants.
Three is inevitably, and I'm referencing "Life After Cars" book, that you will inevitably have backlash from some people, usually people in power who feel like their voice is important to hear and they can object to improvements. But as Doug and Sarah point out in "Life After Cars," backlash is actually a very healthy sign that you're doing something right and you're getting change on the ground. So I'm working through some of those challenges. It was inevitable. It's now about how do we deal with that? Who ultimately makes the decisions—whether it's the school district, the city, the county—and how do we all get together and make sure we're marching in the same direction?
Yeah, one more question before we go to the last question. I think it's very interesting that you've been able to do this work in two very different places. You've done this work in Boston and now you're doing this work in Hood River. Can you share, as you've reflected on that, what's it been like adapting your approach, the way you approach your advocacy work in those two different contexts?
Yeah, like I said, Boston had a dream team. We had four different advocacy organizations, probably over 200 volunteer people who were passionate about biking, walking, transit, and public spaces. We would all get together and convene before these community meetings to make sure our strategy, our communication strategy, was nailed down as one powerful voice against the people who were complaining about something inconvenient with driving. We won all the time, and it's now evident in the change that's happening on the streets.
Going from that human capital of Boston to Hood River, there's no advocacy organization. Safe Routes to School is almost like a default advocacy program because you're championing the safety of children. It's just me and the volunteer parents and people that I work with. Adapting was really hard to begin with because not only do I not have a group of people to strategize with, but there's no group therapy. I don't have this built-in community of therapists where you can talk about the struggles you're dealing with, how you navigate politically around some things.
I mean, I have a ton of people in Portland that I can call at a moment's notice, but the politics are just so different. Sometimes when people in Portland are like, "Oh, just do this," I'm like, "That is never gonna work here." I think that's the biggest difference—just the human capital. I think as the program in Hood River develops more, I will see a lot more passionate people to support it.
It's almost like in Boston, you were embedding within an ecosystem of advocacy, whereas in Hood River, you're kind of starting it. You're really on the front lines. What you said about the political context is just so important, because each place is so different. You really have to learn how to navigate the unique context that you're in. Megan, this has been great having you on.
In closing, can you share a little bit about your city or your neighborhood? What do you love about it, and what are some local spots you like to recommend people check out to get a feel for local life?
Yeah, my side hustle is as the founder of Bike About, which has over 30 guides on how to sightsee cities, towns, and trails in the world by bike. Naturally, my gravy is thinking, "Ooh, what is the best place to go get a beer by bike or ice cream? What's the best bike ride in the community?"
For me, I will go to the mat saying we have the best under-10-mile bike ride in the US, and it's called the Historic Columbia River Highway Trail. It was originally the scenic highway in the US, designed for Model Ts. It's being converted back into a walking and bikeway along the Columbia Gorge. That's one spot.
Anybody who wants to come to town, I'm more than happy to be a tour guide. Then I'm in a three-block walking distance to an amazing bottle shop with craft beers and ciders. I have my grocery store that's really close by. Everything is designed for me to walk there. If I'm feeling lazy, I can bike because it's so close by. I have a yoga studio I go to, and I have four of the schools that I work with within about a mile.
We have a very intentional, well-designed life through all the light, through all the experiences that we've gone through. The city of Hood River sits on the Cascade Mountain Range. I can look out one window and see Mount Hood to my north, and then I look out the other window and I see Mount Adams to the south. Then you have the Columbia River Gorge. It's one of the most beautiful places in America. I would love to have anybody come see me and move here.
Do you have a favorite bakery or cafe or coffee shop? Like a good third place?
Yeah, I have a few coffee shops. We have a ton in this town. Our population goes to about 25,000 in the summer for windsurfing people. I immediately recommend 10 Speed, which is a nice coffee spot three blocks away. We also have Pine Street, which has amazing gluten-free options. I'm allergic to gluten, so I would love to eat that stuff, but I can't. We have amazing restaurants. Top restaurants are Love and Harmony, Mugan, which is ramen, Riverside Gorge, and White House. I'm missing one. I can't remember the fourth, but those are the top spots.
Well, Megan, thank you so much for coming on to share your story with us and to share about the work that you're doing. It's been really inspiring to listen to you for this past hour or so.
Yeah, thank you.
We always like to remind our listeners that we learned about Megan because somebody nominated her to be on the show. So don't forget to check out our nominated guest form. You can even nominate yourself if you think you should be on the show. It's how we learn about a lot of people who are doing really good work in the communities where they live.
Thank you for joining us for another episode. I think this will air right before Thanksgiving, so have a great Thanksgiving if you're listening to this, and I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership. Thanks for listening.