Vanessa Garrison didn’t set out to build a health movement. Growing up in Seattle’s Central District, a historically black neighborhood, Garrison just wanted her household and her community to be healthy.

“It was a challenge for me to develop solutions that work for the women I love,” Garrison said.

Those solutions, however, did set off a movement: GirlTrek, a community-based walking movement that has reached 250,000 black women and girls across the country. Garrison co-founded GirlTrek and serves as its chief operating officer.

> Garrison will tell her story at the Ann Niles Active Transportation Lecture Oct. 19 at Portland State University. Reserve a space if you plan to attend.

“Seattle is one of the most active cities in the country, but my household was completely inactive,” Garrison said. “All the women in my family were really experiencing health challenges due to chronic disease.”

Those problems ran deeper than simply inactivity. Obesity and inactivity often have roots in concerns about safety and other community issues built on historical trauma and systemic racism. A fitness-only approach, Garrison reasoned, would fail to overcome these powerful forces. 

With friend Morgan Dixon, who would become her GirlTrek co-founder, Garrison took inspiration from liberation movements over the years. Harriet Tubman, especially, was a model. 

“In our solution, we chose walking, not primarily because of the physical benefits but because it’s something that, throughout history, in the black community, has been really effective for mobilizing people for change,” Garrison said. 

“Harriet Tubman walked herself to freedom, to liberation.”

The examples were everywhere. The Montgomery bus boycott, in which walking proved a conspicuous fulfillment of the pledge “We will not ride.” The powerful marches throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Gandhi’s Salt March. The Soweto uprising against the racist South African government.

“We approached it from that lens,” Garrison said. “And then we saw the impact of walking on obesity and anxiety. It was this super powerful activity: it’s affordable, it’s accessible—and we thought ‘we’re really onto something!’ ”

In 2011, Garrison and Dixon sent an email to 100 friends and family: we’re going to start walking for 10 weeks. Join us and we’ll send you motivating messages each Monday. 

They finished with a plea: “Don’t let this movement stop in your inbox. Forward this to someone you love.” 

550 women responded. 

Garrison and Dixon had tapped into something. “At the end of that 10 weeks, the number of emails and phone calls we got was so overwhelming,” Garrison said. “Women were in tears, telling us this was the first time in their life they had stuck to something, that their doctors had been telling them for years that they’re going to die if they don’t do something.”

Garrison and Dixon weren’t prepared to respond to this outpouring. “We said ‘Whoa! This is too much information. We’re not doctors!’ ” Garrison said. 

Both had other jobs. “But we also felt we had a moral responsibility. This is a sign that the need is so much bigger than we realized.”

Neither knew of existing walking advocacy organizations to turn to. “It’s actually one of the problems,” Garrison said. “For all the best intentions of the ‘walking movement’ space, the people in our communities don’t know it exists.”

So they started with their communities, and from scratch: how do we meet and connect with people so this doesn’t feel like just another program?

Each month, GirlTrek unveils a high-visibility, themed walking campaign based on black history and culture, making it easy and fun to join in. Then they train women to be leaders, first on walking teams and then as community organizers. 

As GirlTrek groups organize around content relevant to their communities, the groups look dramatically different from one place to the next. “That’s the heart and soul of GirlTrek,” Garrison said.

“The women in Chicago are motivated by the bigger issue of gun violence in their community and how coming together makes their streets safer. Jackson (Mississippi) is very faith-based and people are walking after bible study and church. GirlTrek tells them their body is a temple and walking honors this temple God gave them,” she said.

The Washington, D.C. group gets deep into legislative politics. The Oakland, California group draws on that city’s activist history. 

“GirlTrek does not have the solution to the problems of every community,” Garrison said. “But we do know that every community has the resources.”

So far, more than 75,000 women have taken the GirlTrek pledge to start walking in their neighborhoods. The bigger number, 250,000, have connected through social media. Garrison has set a goal of inspiring 1 million women by 2018. She also aims to see walkers make a habit of walking by completing at least three monthly challenges.

Garrison hasn’t forgotten her own family. “The hardest thing you can actually do is to convey to the people around you to change their behavior,” she said. “In doing that, most people sabotage their own personal health.”

There, again, she has Harriet Tubman as a guide.

Tubman had earlier found an escape route from slavery and tried repeatedly to convince her husband and two of her brothers to join her. “Eventually, she did the smartest thing any woman can do,” Garrison said. “She left by herself.

“All around you are super negative influences, whether they realize it or not, and you have to make the super hard decision to leave those people behind.”

But Tubman’s story doesn’t end with her escape. “Why she’s famous is she started to go back,” Garrison said. “She got her family.”

Understanding that history, each pledge to walk, each community gathering, each woman starting to identify as a healthy black woman, carries the symbolism of crossing the Mason-Dixon line. 

“Every single day, we bring more family members across the health line.”

RSVP now to reserve a spot. More information on the talk is available at the Ann Niles Active Transportation Lecture page.

Seleta Reynolds of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation treated attendees of the Ann Niles Active Transportation Lecture to a provocative, entertaining presentation Oct. 6. Reynolds, the head of a 2,000-employee department, offered a perspective on striving for equity in a huge, diverse city. 

TREC’s Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation program, or IBPI, Reynolds filled the Billy Frank Jr. Conference Center at the Ecotrust building in northwest Portland Oct. 6. Her presentation ranged from Vision Zero to autonomous vehicles. 

The Niles lecture series serves as a legacy to Ann Niles, an advocate for livable neighborhoods in Portland. The lecture also coincided with the kickoff of a two-year campaign to create the IBPI Innovation in Active Transportation Endowed Scholarship, designed to help Portland State attract and retain the best and brightest students. 

In Los Angeles, making sure transportation decisions benefit all residents is a constant and evolving challenge, Reynolds said at the lecture. All communities need to be at the table for discussions that affect them. The key, Reynolds said, is to “listen quietly and speak with humility.”

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2052","field_deltas":{},"attributes":{"height":"315","width":"480","style":"width: 400px; height: 263px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid black; float: left;","class":"media-image media-image-left media-element file-media-large","data-delta":"1"},"fields":{}}]]Doing so can make help sort out the sometimes competing claim to public resources such as streets. “Who has permission and who is trespassing on these streets?” Reynolds asked. Vision Zero, the concept that all transportation deaths are preventable, changes the discussion. “The most vulnerable user is the one who trumps,” Reynolds said. 

That mindset is helpful, but not sufficient for equity concerns. Traditional ways to get around are being joined by newer technologies, Reynolds said—technologies that can upend cities if policymakers aren’t up to speed. What’s needed, Reynolds said, is a two-pronged approach: infuse equity into new shared-use mobility options while at the same time promoting and thanking people for walking, cycling and using transit. 

Allowing new transportation models, including ride-hailing apps such as Lyft and Uber, to operate in an unregulated environment turns over stewardship of a city to the market —which doesn’t have the same concerns about transportation serving all residents. Once those services, and newer technologies, become established, it’s much harder to compel them to advance city transportation objectives. Those negotiations have to take place at the outset, Reynolds said. 

The lecture came at the end of an active day for Reynolds that including meetings with TREC staff and students and Portland Bureau of Transportation leaders. Miguel Figliozzi, a civil and environmental engineering associate professor and TREC researcher, opened his freight logistics class to welcome Reynolds and other transportation students. 

Los Angeles, Reynolds told the students, moves more vehicles with the same amount of infrastructure than any other city in the world. That’s in large part to an advanced traffic control center called ATSAC, the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system. 

Transportation in L.A., despite its proficiency at—and reputation for— vehicle mobility, has always included more than automobiles, Reynolds said. “People in L.A. are wanting to use streets differently,” she said. “They are giving up cars and are hungry for other options to get around.”

The Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI) opened the Ann Niles Transportation Lecture series Monday, August 26 with a talk by Jean-Francois Pronovost, the vice president for development and public affairs at advocacy group Vélo Québec. The Ann Niles lecture series serves as a legacy to Ann Niles, who was a strong advocate for livable neighborhoods and served on many boards and committees related to transportation in Portland. OTREC and IBPI are proud to be part of an ongoing collaborative effort to make Portland a more livable city.

Pronovost was preceded at Monday's lecture by OTREC director Jennifer Dill, who opened the talk with remarks about Niles' spirit of advocacy and passion, and the opportunity that Portlanders have to change their city for the better. Jean-Francois Pronovost has been instrumental in building the world’s longest bicycle greenway, the Route Verte, which runs 3,100 miles through the province of Quebec. He described the process of building partnerships with nonprofits, local businesses and community groups in order to make the greenway a reality. Pronovosts's enthusiasm for bicycling was infectious; his presentation included highlights from Vélo Québec's annual rides, including a kids-only ride with no parents allowed, as well as photos from a province-wide celebration to mark the completion of the trail. His talk underscored the principle behind all of Vélo Québec's greenway efforts: Biking is fun.

Pronovost is convinced that building bike-friendlier cities is achievable with collaboration. Infrastructure, he said, is the key. Although Montreal already sets a high standard with its existing bicycle infrastructure, Vélo Québec is continually looking for ways to improve it.

During the question-and-answer session that followed the speech, several people wanted to know about the practical differences between Montreal and Portland, and how a fully connected greenway could be achieved in the Pacific Northwest.

Pronovost is vice president, development and public affairs for Vélo Québec, where he works on the focus, strategy and development of new projects and partnerships.

From 1989 to 2010, he was the executive director of the association division of Vélo Québec. In 1992, he acted as Chief Organizer of the first world-wide conference on bicycling, the Conférence Vélo Mondiale Pro Bike•Velo City, in Montréal. The Technical Handbook of Bikeway Design is among the many technical publications he has edited. Since 1995, he has been involved with the development of the Route Verte, a 5,000-kilometer bike route across Québec, and with the launch of several active transportation initiatives in collaboration with municipalities and the school network. 

Read Jean-Francois' interview with BikePortland here.

(First published by BikePortland.org)

Portland has a network of neighborhood greenways, and they're great. But Jean-Francois Pronovost's is 3,100 miles long. That's approximately the distance from Portland to Nicaragua.

The Greenway (Route Verte in Pronovost's native French) is a bike route network running all over the Canadian province of Quebec. On Monday, the vice president for development and public affairs at advocacy group Vélo Québec visits Portland to share lessons from this project and others in the first annual Ann Niles Transportation Lecture, a major new series produced by Portland State University's Institute for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation.

The event is free, though space is limited to 240. On Thursday, BikePortland spoke with Pronovost to learn more about his life's work, the best parts of Quebec bike touring and how his hometown of Montreal managed to replace 320 auto parking spaces with a downtown protected lane that carries 9,000 bikes per day. Questions and answers were edited for space. 

Can you describe your most famous achievement, the Route Verte??

The Route Verte [pronounced with hard Ts and silent Es] is now 5,000 kilometers all over the province, linking the major city centers. The most interesting thing is that partnership that has built over 18 years, which is still going on. Tons of organizations, hotels, lodging facilities, that sort of thing.

Do you know how much money gets spent in a year by people on the Route Verte??

A few years ago when we measured that with university researchers, we were $134 million ($127 million USD). That doesn't include bikes and accessories – it's only travel expenses.

In his campaign last year, Portland Mayor Charlie Hales called for more emphasis on big, inspiring ideas like a bike trail to the Oregon coast. Did Route Verte begin with advocacy from people at the local level, or at the provincial level?

?It's very rare, but it was actually a decision of the prime minister of the province. He decided it was a way to help regional development and to help young people be involved in a big mobilization.

I talk to a lot of people in the US and Europe. Their first priority is not to link to every territory and every country. It takes some perspective to see all the benefits that you could have linking every region, every city, every municipality together. In little rural communities, the bicycle was not the agenda. But with the Route Verte, they were asked to be part of the movement, and that was their first experience to see how to include bicycles in the community.

Let's shift to talking about cities. Montreal pioneered the use of physically protected urban bike lanes in North America. Lately, there seems to be an almost religious debate within the U.S. bike community over whether these should be widely used. What do you think?

?I think it's less a debate than it was a few years ago. I remember in the 80s we had the first parts of the Montreal bicycle network being built. People were saying, "No, that's not the way to do it, bicycles have to ride in the street." We were really glad to see the administration here build these kind of facilities, because it was one of the reasons why we find so many people on their bicycle in Montreal. It's not the only reason of course, but it's been over the years a major incentive to ordinary people. Many cyclists don't need. But many, many people need.

Is it something that we can implement everywhere? Probably not. It's not the magical recipe. It's something you have to adapt in the context you are working in. But the general idea is to create environment where the ordinary people will feel comfortable. And we don't even talk about "safety," because safety is a concept that is really different from one person to another. Comfort – it's a feeling. You feel comfortable.

Lots of major bike projects lead to a removal of auto parking or an auto travel lane. What can you say to those who worry that these changes will hurt businesses or cause congestion??

I hate to say it, but merchants are often complaining. They complain for everything – they complain for the weather. I know that it's tough to do business these days, but when you are in a neighborhood where a lot of people walk and bike, a lot of people who come to your shop will come by walking and biking. For example, in downtown Montreal in 2008, when the city implemented the bike path on the De Maisonneuve Boulevard — it's a big arterial street in the business district — they remove 320-something car spaces.

We have evaluated that in a corridor with 200 meters on both sides of the route, there were approximately 11,000 parking spaces. So 300 in 11,000 – you know, it's almost nothing. The association of merchants was complaining of course at the beginning, and after a while everyone realize that it didn't change anything. And now you see that facility in downtown, where you have traffic of almost 10,000 cyclists a day. Everyone is happy. It's a major improvement for everyone who wants to travel downtown by bicycle.

What's the best thing about biking in Quebec that someone can't find in Oregon??

Oh, geez. (laughs) I like biking in Oregon. I've been three times at least, mostly on the coast. What is interesting with the Route Verte is the connectivity. I'm able to leave from downtown Montreal with my bike and travel all over the province. We have 500 hotels that are certified "Welcome Cyclists." So that means you arrive there and they are not scary about you. You arrive and you are welcome. They have special meals for you. So that's very fun. And the geography's very different – the St. Laurence River, the old villages, the French culture, the mix of the culture in Montreal – I think it's fun to try at least once.

If you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing to make you a better bike advocate, what would it be??

We never do enough partnership and building relationship. Because it is the key to be able to influence the decision-makers. It's a work that is taking so much time to try to bring people all together.

What about biking most inspires you to work on its behalf?

I think it's because it's so simple. You can change a lot of things with the bicycle. You can change the way that people think, you can change the way that people feel, you can change the way the neighborhoods are friendly. A simple thing that can do so many great things.

Pronovost's speech is 6:30 p.m. Monday, Aug. 26, in Lincoln Hall at 1620 SW Park Ave.

The Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation has received a gift to support an annual transportation lecture at Portland State University. The gift, which establishes the Ann Niles Transportation Lecture Endowment, was finalized last month.

Created by Philip Niles in memory of his late wife, Ann, the endowment will bring a speaker each year to address transportation and planning issues for students, faculty and the community. Ann Niles was a strong advocate for livable neighborhoods and served on many transportation-related boards and committees in Portland.

Ann Niles grew up in Grants Pass, Ore., and graduated from Reed College in Portland, where she met Philip. She earned a graduate degree in library science from the University of Minnesota and began her career at the Carleton College library.

Ann and Philip retired in 1999 and returned to Portland. Ann developed a second career in urban development and transportation and worked with the city of Portland and the Pearl District Neighborhood Association. She chaired the Pearl District Transportation Committee for eight years, promoting better sidewalks and crosswalks for pedestrians and better bicycle routes and parking throughout downtown Portland. Ann also represented the Pearl District on the Portland Streetcar Citizens Advisory Committee and the advisory committee for Portland’s transit mall revitalization.

Details on the lecture series, including information on the first lecture, will be released when available.