Peninsula Section Fall Forum Report

The Peninsula Section held an educational forum on October 21, 2021 with two speakers:

Chris Comeau, Transportation Planner for Bellingham Public Works Engineering presented on the work that has been done in Bellingham over the last 20 years to integrate multimodal and active transportation into city urban design, budgeting, and strategic planning. Bellingham has a Complete Networks and Multimodal Transportation Concurrency Programs that created better tools to integrate and better understand the multimodal level of service standards in transportation measurements, shifting away from traditional auto-centric measurements. This has led to 52% of the Bicycle Master Plan projects being constructed in just 6 years!

Jade Aguilar, Director of Research Equity at ECONorthwest presented and led the discussion on practical applications of equity in planning. Fundamentally, planning is problem-solving. If you want to understand any problem in America, you need to focus on who benefits/profits from the problem, not who suffers from it. Equity does not need to only be relevant in the “public process”. The concept of equity can be implemented in many processes within municipal government, including how budgets are managed and prioritized, and it is important to follow through with these processes and how ourselves accountable to them.

Watch the Peninsula Section Fall Forum recording below: