Bike bus leader hopes to ride safe streets message into school board seat

Rob Galanakis wants Portland Public Schools to see the forest and not just the trees outside classroom windows. His campaign for a seat on the PPS Board leans heavily on the idea that PPS goes about its business largely with its head in the sand while solutions to many problems can be found in the streets just beyond school grounds.

Galanakis, a co-founder of BikeBusPDX and software company owner who moved to Portland in 2014, biked over to the BikePortland Shed on Wednesday to share more about his vision for Portland’s troubled school district.

Portland currently has about 20 active bike buses and they’ve become one of the most powerful forces transportation activism in our town has ever seen. Galanakis is on a mission to join each one of them during his campaign and he’s nearly reached that goal. From Alameda to Lents, he’s seen a vast array of differences among them. “Each one is different. Each one has its own culture. Each one has its own differences with its routes,” Galanakis shared. The rides have also given him a chance to observe the often chaotic and unsafe morning drop-off zones in front of schools.

Asked how he’d solve the drop-off and pick-up traffic problems, Galanakis offered what he feels is a simple fix: Add more exit and entry points and disperse them across a wider school frontage zone. “When cars all funnel to one place, you can’t avoid congestion,” he says.

Galanakis is a school and transportation advocate and a relative regular at Portland City Hall where he’s given testimony on everything from PPS’s climate policy to the urban growth boundary. He has a professional background as a software entrepreneur and business owner, but he doesn’t bring a business approach to educational policymaking: “There’s a huge difference for me between the private world and public world. In the private world, you can do a thing and fail… and that’s okay. We only have one public school system. Our public school system can’t fail. We can’t let it fail.”

Galanakis has some novel ideas for how to meld land use, transportation and urban planning solutions to stronger schools. For instance, school choice policies allow families to gravitate toward better schools; but those schools are typically in places where it’s expensive to live. To help level the playing field, Galanakis wants the School Board to take a more active role in housing policy. “If you are low income, you’re less likely to live in Alameda, Hosford-Abernethy, or Mount Tabor areas — and in fact, in a lot of these areas, the only place you can afford to live is in an apartment on a dangerous, dirty arterial street where your kids are more likely to have asthma, they’re more likely to have traffic injuries, and they’re less likely to have a place to be outside,” he says. “What we really should have is broad up-zoning across the inner east side so we can build family-size apartments to allow these lower-income families to move. Why can’t they live in an apartment on Lincoln? The Lincoln and Harrison Neighborhood Greenway could have apartments…. All these things are connected, we can’t just think of housing as a thing that happens to us. It has to be a thing PPS actively advocates for.”

The central principal of Galanakis’ campaign is that PPS needs to break out of its silo and see how student outcomes are impacted by things well beyond school campuses. By pushing for healthier streets and a more humane city beyond school grounds, Galanakis believes all students will do better.

As a prime example for how PPS is trapped in their own bubble, Galanakis said the district is “One of the major impediments towards improving our neighborhood greenway network.” “A majority of our elementary and middle schools are on greenways and PPS will not restrict any driving access to their properties. This means we can’t have modal filters, we can’t have diverters, and we may not even be able to have speed bumps… If you want a connected greenway network, one of the best things you can do is get the school board interested in getting more families walking and biking.”

Here’s another way Galanakis lays out his concern that PPS needs to broaden its lens:

“PPS thinks about only what happens on their property — at the curb and in the building — and transportation for them is only yellow school busses. PPS is one of the largest landholders. It’s one of the largest employers. It’s the largest car trip generator in the city. It is this really integral entity. You’re never more than a mile or mile-and-a-half from a school wherever you are in most of Portland — and they’re just not interested in how the schools integrate with the rest of the city. So I got into it with this transportation lens, but then I realized it affects health, it affects housing, it affects climate, it affects financial stuff… that’s what got me here.”

Galanakis hopes his message of how we need a great city to have great schools inspires folks who don’t have school-aged kids or other connections to schools to vote for him on May 20th.

Watch our full interview in the video below (or on our podcast soon). For more about Galanakis, check out his website at RobGForPPS.com.