Margi Bradway speaking at a panel discussion
at the Oregon Active Transportation Summit in 2012.
(Photos J. Maus/BikePortland)

The Portland Bureau of Transportation has hired Margi Bradway to be their new Active Transportation Division Manager. Bradway, 40, comes to PBOT from the Oregon Department of Transportation where she managed the agency’s Sustainability Program and more recently became their lead staffer on active transportation policy. Bradway was also a close adviser to ODOT Director Matt Garrett.

Here’s more about Bradway from ODOT’s website:

Margi is a long time Portland resident with a background in environmental science. Before law school Margi worked for the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, D.C. on national wetlands policy. During law school at Lewis and Clark College, Margi worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Oregon Department of Justice in the Natural Resources Division. Margi was also an environmental attorney at Stoel Rives.

[Read more…]

A valuable bicycle planning and policymaking tool?

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is the first state transportation agency in the United States to ink a deal with Strava, a leading website and smartphone app used by people to track their bike rides via GPS.

Last fall, the agency paid $20,000 for one-year license of a dataset that includes the activities of about 17,700 riders and 400,000 individual bicycle trips totaling 5 million BMT (bicycle miles traveled) logged on Strava in 2013. The Strava bike “traces” are mapped to OpenStreetMap.

If all goes according to plan, the data could revolutionize how ODOT makes decisions about their policies, plans, and projects. At the very least, forging boldly into the realm of “big data” and pushing the boundaries of bicycle planning marks an important step for an agency that’s facing a very different future and actively looking to shed its old-school, highway-first reputation.[Read more…]