Former Metro President & Transit Center ED David Bragdon

As a veteran of Metro Council (our elected regional planning authority) — including a seven-year stint as president from 2003 to 2010 — David Bragdon has been around the block when it comes to Oregon transportation politics. And for the past decade he's been executive director of TransitCenter, a nonprofit foundation that funds and conducts research and advocacy to improve public transit across the U.S. Before that he led a planning office for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Suffice it to say, Bragdon has a mix of experiences in advocacy and government that I feel BikePortland readers could learn a lot from. So when I heard he was leaving his post at TransitCenter and was making a stop in Portland to visit family, I figured it was a perfect time to invite him into the Shed for an interview.

We ended up talking about a range of issues including: how advocates can influence government, what PBOT should look for in their hiring of a new director, PBOT's budget woes, why he doesn't trust ODOT (which he refers to as the Oregon State Highway Department), TriMet and transit governance, and more.

Links:

David Bragdon Wikipedia entryODOT suffers from incompetence and dishonesty at highest levels, former Metro President says (BikePortland, 2015)A People's History of Recent Urban Transportation Innovation (Transit Center, 2016)Winning Transit (TransitCenter, 2019)