Last night over 100 people gathered at the EWEB building to discuss Eugene’s Climate and Energy Action Plan and it’s approach to Land Use and Transportation. Attendees were given a list of of over 100 actions that will help in the goal to “reduce total, current, community-wide, fossil fuel consumption by 50% by 2030.” In small groups at our tables we discussed the actions and created a list of our “top 10″ as well as turning in cards with our 5 favorites and 5 least favorites of the action items. There were a lot of actions to go through and discuss in the hour we had. From the experience at my table and in talking with other folks it was tough to get through the list let alone come up with a meaningful consensus of the of our top 10 during that time. It would have been nice to have had the list a week earlier with the idea that we would discuss our top 10 with the table or had a survey go out that narrowed these 100+ actions down to something more manageable for the event.

It was also interesting to note that many of the actions were items that the City is working on now (specifically items that are in the Ped/Bike Strategic Plan [.pdf link]) or planning work on (items in the Ped/Bike Master Plan). Most of the discussion at our table centered around the idea of “follow through with funding”. The city has some goals and ideas but when the rubber hits the road is the funding moving towards those goals or is it moving towards more ‘traditional’ spending. There are many items already in TransPlan that relate to our walking and biking infrastructure that aren’t being built because “there isn’t funding”. Making another plan without a roadmap for funding may get us to some of the same sticking points.

As the holiday season approaches we can think about this from the lens of buying gifts. Many of us have the best of intentions when we make purchases… we’re going to buy local crafts, buy from local shops, or maybe even make our gifts but for years we’ve shopped at the mall, online, or not found the time to make gifts and so for another year we fall back onto old easy habits. Change isn’t easy.

The city, state, and federal funding models for transportation need to change now to make the type of system that encourages more active transportation. We know the federal change will take a long time, the state too, so we have to push our local leaders to make our priorities change now! Instead of applying local dollars (and those applied for at the state and federal level) towards building more roads we need to complete our system of bike and pedestrian ways.

This Climate and Energy Action Plan reinforced to me how important having a strong Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plan will be in this coming year. We need major community and leadership buy-in to the plan and then we need the financial support to back it up. If we create a MAJOR pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure system in Eugene we CAN have a major impact on transportations effect on the climate and our communities energy use.

For those interested in the action item that were discussed last night you can find them in this pdf. I look forward to the wrap-up and review by the Project Team and Advisors on last nights meeting and then I look forward to the “follow through with funding”.