 My name is Cara Wildrick. I'm the executive director of Portland Trails. Thanks for coming, everybody. Thanks to Space Gallery for hosting us again. Thank you to CTN 5, Community Television Network for filming for the third year in a row. And after tonight, you're going to want to go back and look at 2013 and 2014's videos, and they are on CTN's website as well as our website at Trails.org. Thank you to Legion Square Market and Standard Baking Company who provided the snacks, and staff already got a little bit of time with the snacks earlier today. So don't be shy. Feel free to fill up on snacks. So this is our 24th anniversary, and I'll be the first to admit that 24 is a little less sexy than the 25th anniversary. But you still have a year to figure out what you're going to give us for our silver anniversary. So 24, by the time you hit 24 years of age, you're starting to think a little bit more long term. Now not everybody. I can't vouch for everybody here, but you start to know you probably should be saving some money for the future. You start to think about what impact you want to have. Portland Trails as an organization is in a similar place as far as we know we need to start saving for our long term future. We now have a 70 mile trail network in Greater Portland. 70 miles of trails do not take care of themselves. And it takes the hands of not only the two staff and the 16 board members but all of you and 2,000 volunteers each year. And about $200,000 of money every year to maintain our current trail network. So we're thinking long term, like all good 24 year olds are, and thinking about what might come in the future. And at 24 years of age you start to know who a person is and maybe they don't even know who they are themselves. But you start to know about the fire within them and what pushes them forward every day. And I think Portland Trails has really found its fire. And its fire is in every person that's here and every volunteer that is on the trails. Tonight you're going to hear from some incredible people. And regardless of their age you're going to get a sense of the roots that ground them in a life of making change and in a life of contributing to their communities. And tonight you're going to get a glimpse of the fire. And so cheer loudly for the fire within each of us because that's the fire that is Portland Trails. I want to introduce our master of ceremonies, our emcee with the most, Bruce Hyman. Bruce is an advisory trustee. He's also the bike pad coordinator for the city of Portland and winter hiker extraordinaire and a lot of other things. But tonight he's going to be our emcee and he will help us get ready for each presenter and let us know when it's time to be quiet and guide us through the intermission as well. So we'll have five presentations. We'll have an intermission. That's time to meet these cool people that are here in the room, play a little cornhole, get a drink and then come back together for the final four. All right. Thank you. So welcome. Who's ready to have some fun? So this is quite unusual. I've never been actually asked back to anything before I did this two years ago. And so this is just wildly strange for my being to actually be asked to return. So we'll see how it goes, maybe better, maybe worse, but you'll be the judge of that I guess. So, so welcome to the 15 by 15 Portland trails and Carol gave most of the ground rules in terms of what the presenters will be doing. We're going to ask each of the presenters to ring the bell to start the time clock. Because as Kara said, they're each going to have 15 slides, 15 seconds per slide. So your job is to is three things. Cheer wildly for each presenter and let's practice a little bit. Cheer wildly. Here we go. Okay. Here we go. So then you're going to, while they're presenting in between your wildly cheering, you're going to listen attentively. And then during the intermission, your job is to discuss passionately amongst yourselves, some of the ideas, some of the inspiration that you've heard during these presentations. So it's a pretty important job. The nine presenters have, I think Jamie's done it at least once or twice, but the other eight, I don't believe have done this. So they'll be kind of new to this and they're going to do great. So intermission is the time for you to get a drink and discuss what you've just heard and seen with the other attendees. We're going to hear five presenters before the intermission. After intermission, we're going to hear four more presenters. So if you haven't done it already, please turn the ringers off of your cell phone. Please don't text anybody unless it's like, wow, we think we've got a superstar presenter and you want to line them up for CNN or somebody like that. But that would be the only excuse for doing that. And I'm going to ask each of the presenters to speak closely into the microphone so that both you and cable viewers can catch it on the tape. So we're going to get going. So let's just practice the Cheer wildly one more time before we get going. Okay, I think we're ready. Our first presenter was just up here, so hopefully she didn't go too far away. Kara Woldrick. She's the executive director extraordinaire of Portland Trails. She's the perfect fit at the perfect time for this organization. We've been blessed with previously spectacular executive directors and Kara certainly fits that bill extraordinarily. So Kara grew up in a much warmer place where outside time was a daily occurrence. At seven years of age, her favorite hobbies were climbing trees and having picnics with her dog in the backyard. Things have not changed much in the last 30 plus years. Riding bikes, kayaking, trail running, skateboarding, cross country skiing. They are all vehicles to experience the natural world firsthand. Kara is convinced that places shape people as much as people shape places. She is currently digging into Portland history to determine the essential ingredients that make such a compelling city for her and others who are shaped by such a different landscape. Kara Woldrick. Well, I finally wisened up because I'm the one that figures out the schedule. In the first year I did this, I did it right after Rob Levin's family with the cutest five-year-old possible. And so then I had to follow after that and I was like, oh, I'm not going to go after the cute kids again. All right, am I close enough to the mic? All right, more cowbell, huh? Portland Trails transforms greater Portland into a healthier community for people-powered transportation, conservation, and recreation by creating and maintaining a network of trails and green spaces that connect people with places, our new mission. We now have a brand new five-year strategic plan that will guide our efforts. There are no large direction changes, but we're intentionally focusing on some specific areas so that we can most effectively create a greater, healthier Portland. There are times we're going to lead and there are times we're going to draft. We have uniquely positioned ourselves and created an infrastructure that enables us to be strategically opportunistic. We are nimble and responsive so that we can make a difference. We're 1,000 members, 3,000 volunteers, over 200 local businesses. Portland Trails is over 100 acres of conserved land, a 60-plus mile trail network, and learning school grounds at every public school. We will enhance and maintain a network of trails that fosters a healthier community with the focus on getting people to the places they want to go, whether that's the Transportation Center, a grocery store, school, library, or the ferry. Because people's habits cross town boundaries, we're working with residents and leaders in Westbrook, South Portland, and Falmouth, a trail network that is guided by the people who use it, builds bridges between neighborhoods, schools, and ecosystems. For recreation, we heard you at those community meetings. You want to connect with our largest open space of all, the water. We will work with other groups to create blue trails on the Presum Scott and Four Rivers, as well as Casco Bay. We will continue to play a leading role in land conservation with an emphasis on reducing the impact of motorized vehicles, decreasing car trips, and increasing wildlife habitat health in Portland. Portland Trails is a respected voice for the transformative impact of people-powered transportation. We work with developers, the city, and community groups to use innovative approaches that respect the past, but create a future Portland that is prosperous and healthy. Placemaking is now an intentional and stated part of our work. We will create desirable, accessible destinations throughout the trail network. Greenspaces, trails, and green school grounds create community identity. What is Portland without the Batcove Trail, the Presum Scott River Preserve, the Eastern Prom Trail, and now, Nason's Corner Park? These places and spaces are the core of the urban fabric. We will advocate for strategies that improve the health of people and the economy. What if Exchange Street allowed delivery and service vehicles only in the early morning and the evening, so that people, businesses, and cafes could use the public space during the day? We will continue to create mission-related events and pop-up projects to surprise and delight and bring the community together for healthy activity, fun, and a bunch of silliness. In all of our work, we're engaging residents in the process of defining shared goals and priorities for land conservation, trails, and active transportation. This is People-Powered Community Transformation, and this is Portland Trails. In 2015, we'll be working on these and many other initiatives with our People Power. Join us as a member, a volunteer, a supporter, or all three. Together, let's connect people, neighborhoods, schools, and ecosystems, and make this a greater Portland. I think we're off to a great start. The Callan family. Dave and Emily. Nathan and Madeline Callan. Come on up. The Callan family strives to make adventure a part of regular life. The kids, now 8 and 10, have already dragged their parents along on weeks-long bicycling, sailing, canoeing, cross-country skiing, and backpacking trips. Is that true? Yes. They sleep in an igloo at least once a winter in a tent multiple times a summer. Do you build the igloo yourself? Awesome, awesome, awesome. Most recently, they spent five months walking 2,185 miles from Georgia to Maine along the Appalachian Trail. David is a land use and conservation attorney and board member for the Maine Appalachian Trail Land Trust. Emily farms in Dresden, Maine, and the kids work hard at being kids. Here's the Callan family. 70 years before Portland Trails was born in the hallway at City Hall, Benton Mackay dreamed of a trail that stretched along the Appalachian Mountains highest peaks. It would be 30 years before the first hiker walked its length in one trip and another 65 after that before our family walked from Georgia to Maine. Dave and I grew up in outdoorsy families and together we decided to make outdoor adventure a central part of our family life. Here we are partway up Katahdin in much younger years. In those days, a back country trip was a success. The parents were having fun 10% of the time. The more opportunity we gave them, the more our kids outstripped any preconceptions we had of their abilities. It didn't take long before they were hiking the same long days as the other adults on the trail. I like not having to shower much on the trail. I wanted to go four states without showering but my parents wouldn't let me. Sometimes my socks got so dirty they'd stand up on their own. Other times the mud was deeper than it looked. Our parents like to sleep in tents but my brother and I would rather hang out in hammocks. Along the way we bought hammocks late enough to carry on our own. That meant we could finally have our own bunk bed. Almost every minute of every day together was a whole lot. Getting to a place with no distractions meant we could really focus on where we were and who we were with. Despite the near parental presence, the trails open spaces gave the kids a much greater freedom than they get in their off-trail lives. We watched them develop an independence and self-reliance beyond their years. My brother loves to fish. We even made fish tacos out of a rainbow trite he caught in Virginia. On Mother's Day he taught me how to class this fly rod and together we hauled in countless sunfish and let them all go. We saw some crazy animals. An emu jumped out of the bushes in Massachusetts. My mom was worried about protecting Maddie. My dad was worried about getting a good picture. We later learned it had escaped from here by farm. A trip like this is more than just a collection of stories. It was 2,000 miles of growing and connecting as a family. I never got tired of sharing a mountain view with the people I love most in the world and continue to try to bring these moments into our daily life back home in Maine. Being outside with our own kids has led to many close friendships with like-minded families we've met along the way. Here Nathan's oldest friend joined us for 144 miles in Maine. Kids always love the challenging parts like fording streams. It's not always fording streams. Here they are with smiles on their faces standing knee-deep in water flooding the trail itself. With the right attitude even flash flooding can become part of the adventure. These smiles even lasted for more than 10% of that day. One morning my mom made us dump out the hot chocolate we were drinking because she found a dead mouse flooding in the water she had used to make it. Everyone spit out their drinks except for my grandfather who said it's probably not the first time I've had dead mouse coffee. Just as Benton Mackay's vision of the Appalachian Trail was a place of respite for the civilized worker near the urban centers of the east. Portland Trail seeks to preserve green spaces for public access and connect people with places. We must all work to save our wild places just as we must all work to get out and enjoy them whenever and however we can. So from our family to all of you, go find your wild places. Do something hard, dream big, make adventure a part of your life. Okay Sam, this is your Kara moment I guess. Sam Saltenstall. Sam is a walker, a biker, a sailor, and a gardener and a Portland Trails member. He taught school for 40 years, German in high school, then third and fourth grade. He loves both music and humor and for the last two years he has produced a show on Peaks Island called the Fairy Home Companion. Sam has used his retirement to become kind of an energy nut. About five years ago he got hooked up with the Island Institute as a volunteer instigator of energy initiatives on Peaks Island. Sam believes that we all have a responsibility to use energy thoughtfully to minimize the changes happening so rapidly to the natural world that we enjoy and take for granted. He hopes that some of the community energy work done on Peaks Island is something some of you might consider to undertake in your own neighborhoods. Here's Sam. Last fall I joined four other main Islanders on an energy focused trip to Denmark's Samso Island. The program was a joint effort of the Island Institute and the College of the Atlantic. Our headquarters was the Energy Academy, a beautiful efficient building staffed by our hosts, the people who successfully engineered an energy revolution on Samso. All of Samso's electricity, consumption, and 70% of the heat for their buildings now comes from sustainable energy sources. The Island is CO2 neutral. How did they do that? And could we do it here? We Islanders were each partnered with our College of the Atlantic friends to work on the proposals we had brought with us. My focus was to help Peaks residents and our Island School reduce heating costs through efficiency measures. We spent our time on Samso learning how their leadership overcame the obstacles they faced. We biked around the Island to see the renewable facilities they had built. How did they achieve energy independence? First, they took stock of their natural resources. What could they make energy with? Well, they had wind, lots of it. So they erected 11 land-based turbines and later 10 offshore turbines. They also built solar and made use of farm crops at district heating plants like this one. It burns hay to heat water which is pumped around the village to about 300 homes. Island farmers get paid for the hay and the money stays local. We don't have a viable wind resource here on Casco Bay to do what Samso did and rocky old Peaks doesn't have room to grow hay or blast trenches for hot water pipes. But we do have three outstanding resources that we share with Samso. Energy efficiency, the sun, and the human resource of working together to harvest the first two. Our community has gotten a lot done over the last two years. Collaborating with the Island Institute and a skilled energy auditor, we have weatherized over 100 homes on Peaks thanks to an efficiency main rebate program. We have put together over 900 storm window inserts at community bills. These inexpensive inserts pay for themselves from fuel savings in about one heating season. There is a great little nonprofit up in Rockland that helps us to do this. We've formed heat pump purchase groups to get discounts through group buying power and in January we delivered 1,100 LED light bulbs to Island customers inexpensively thanks to efficiency main. We need to make our school much tighter and replace its old boiler and we are developing plans to install a solar electric system that could generate more than half of the school's power. Think about your neighborhood, your community, what could you do? What resources do you have? How could you help to reduce the pollution that threatens the outdoors we love as Portland Trail members? Call me. I would like to be one of your resources. Thank you. Great job, great job. So now we have nine King Middle School students, why don't you come on up? So I'm going to let each of you introduce yourself. Not sure how we're going to quite do this, but logistically, but we'll give it a shot anyway. So we'll start here and we'll work our way across. Why don't you introduce yourself? Eva Giaquinto. Emeline Avignon. Alyssa Mbrenno. Sophia Nolan. Divina Gaviri. Keen Mohamed. Joe Harrington. Samuel Nguroonziza. Kaji Ali. Josek Mohamed. All right. So these are some of the best and brightest from King Middle School. They represent the eighth graders and they lead a double life. Over the last five months, they've worked with community experts to carry out extensive research on cities. They examined livability and transportation throughout Portland and proposed ways to improve life in the city. They invented ways to lower carbon emissions through improved energy generation and green design. However, despite their professional work, they didn't lose sight of their life as teenagers. They are athletes, actors, dancers, performers, and leaders. They sleep a lot. They often support for their less savvy teachers and parents. Throughout their work, they focus on Portland and have come to find out the amount of carbon dioxide we release is astounding. They are here to present their ideas and provide information on ways to reduce this. Or as Taylor Swift says, I had the privilege of being one of the so-called experts in transportation and was just blown away by how engaged the students were in this module on future cities and really look forward to their presentation. They really nailed it at their city hall presentation as their kind of culminating presentation. So I'm looking forward to tonight as well. I'm not sure how you're logistically going to do it. You're kind of in a row and you're going to cycle through. Okay, great. Remember to ring the bell when you're ready to start. We all know what it is. We all somewhat know what it will do. And we all have an understanding of why this happened. But what we need to know is how to fix it. That is why 10 middle school students are standing before you. To reverse the roles and tell you what to do. For our expedition, Smart Cities, we created a more efficient, smarter Portland. We have studied this topic for four months. We made models of specific parts in Portland that would need improvement and presented ideas at city hall. Environmental problems in Portland are often ignored. Sea levels have risen 8 inches over the last century. Water temperatures have been rising an average one degree every 100 years. But two years ago, they rose 1.5 degrees. Here are some ways we can prevent this from continuing. In order to reduce CO2 emissions further, we suggest requiring all homes to be completely powered by solar energy. As it is a fact that the roof of a house can produce twice as much electricity than is needed with solar power alone. Car release extensive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. Every time this has made global warming a problem people contribute to every day. Public transportation is the answer but it must be adapted to fit the future's need. Adapt to be more efficiently, more user friendly and less harmful in terms of energy use, our trend would be powered by electricity. The goal would be to replace the needs for cars in Portland and to transport people throughout Portland efficiently. Many cities are now looking for innovative ways to improve mobility. We propose a tunnel project that would house 295 as it passes along the Portland Peninsula. This project would cost $3.1 billion and would take three years to build. This tunnel would run from Libbytown to East Bayside and would feature walking and biking trails to promote pedestrian transportation throughout the city. The project would also pioneer a technology to convert CO2 from cars to biodiesel. The city of Portland needs to be pedestrian friendly in order to lessen the needs of cars. If we take a look at the Frank and Arterial, sidewalks are too small and this is reinforcing the need of driving instead of walking. We suggest to narrow the roads and widen the sidewalk to solve this issue. It is a known fact that cars contribute greatly to the overall carbon emissions of cities. However, on average cars are parked 95% of the time and take up one third of all land area. We propose an idea to solve this issue, an underground electricity producing parking garage which would generate electricity from geothermal and solar sources. This energy would be used to heat the facility and would provide people with the opportunity to charge electric cars. On top of the garage would be a park that would help cultivate community and recreation in the city. As of 2014, only 5% of Americans ride the public bus on a regular basis. This can be largely attributed to the lack of convenient and appealing bus stops. If we up the ante of our stops, we can make the busing experience more enjoyable, increasing ridership. These improved bus stops would include features such as weather protective seating and interactive route map which would be mainly powered by onsite solar panels and space for advertising, effectively covering the cost these stops would demand. Efficient trains, solar panels, biodiesel, innovative parking garages and bus stops. It all sounds great, right? The problem with people, including us, is that we hear all these great ideas but once we leave this room, we forget. We don't realize how these problems spend farther than our classrooms. So we ask you all to not forget. To carry this information forward and to not only educate ourselves but all of Portland. Because improving Portland is the step we can take in reversing the damage that has been caused worldwide. I think our future is in safe hands. That was spectacular. Thank you very, very much. It's great. So please make sure to engage these wonderful students during the intermission and let them know how much you enjoyed their inspiring presentation. Last but certainly not least before the intermission, we have Jennifer Claster. Jennifer is a main licensed landscape architect at Wright Pierce here in Portland. After five years of living in the West End, she moved to South Portland last year and has pretty much mastered the commute, the new commute. Much of Jennifer's professional and volunteer work in Maine is focused on improving conditions for bicycling and walking, including the planning and design of municipal streetscapes, shared use paths, and wayfinding systems. In her free time, she enjoys practicing the accordion, hiking, cross country skiing, talking with friends, and cooking from scratch. A native of the mid-Atlantic region, she is happy to call the Portland area her home. Don't quite know what this SOPO represent. Is that the new... We'll go with it. Here's Ms. Jennifer Claster. My talk might weave and ramble like the bike lanes on this slide, but stay with me as I share some of the projects I've worked on in my personal and professional license I moved here about five years ago. This is not one of them. When I travel, I prefer to walk and bike to experience other cities, and I often come back with ideas for things better and perhaps more colorful for bicyclists and pedestrians here in Maine. Closing Congress Street for First Friday Art Walk is something I worked on with the Bike Pet Advisory Committee. The idea was to see whether temporary street closures like this and like another one that I've also helped organize on Baxter Boulevard might make it easier to consider making automobile traffic off other streets at other times. This is from the Councilor Ride last spring. And maybe to build new streets where the distinction between vehicular space and pedestrian space is not so cut and dry, which I've advocated as part of Portland's Complete Streets Working Group. That's in Reykjavik. Some of my professional work involves planning, like this master plan for a signed network of bicycle routes crossing the Portland Peninsula, including local priority routes as well as regional and national routes. This was done with a group of other consultants led by Woodworth Associates. And this network would extend outward to Bitterford and Freeport, developing routes for a regional bicycle wayfinding system and prototype bicycle sign, again with Woodworth Associates. And that's the prototype sign in the background during a field test this last year. Or envisioning a multimodal future for some of the region's most significant corridors. In this case, Route 302, Forest Avenue, and Broadway, stretching from Wyndham to Southern Main Community College in South Portland. Sometimes I work on developing construction documentation and administration for DOT funded transportation projects, like this shared use path that's going to be part of the Kennebec to the Androskog and Bike Path. Or this really huge granite crosswalk that I did the construction documentation for in Bath that was designed by a landscape architect named Frank Cushing. This may not look like much now, but probably by the end of the summer, it's going to be home to a public edible landscape. It's adjacent to Fox Street and Anderson, and it's something I'm working on. Oh, darn it, because let's face it, Portland could use more free outdoor places to play for kids and adults, like this bring-your-own-mini golf course I saw when I was on a trip someplace. Maybe we could do something like this in Congress Square. Otherwise, we're reduced to playing parking garages as musical instruments. Did anybody see our city-drift piece this summer? That's me in the pink jumpsuit with Megan Grumbling and Paul Haley on parking garage. I would like to turn next to realizing some ideas for getting more out of our public spaces, whether for growing food, having street parties, taking up urban runoff, or just hanging out. Most of what I do involves creating opportunities for people to engage with their environment in a more intimate way. Thanks to Portland Trails for all the work you do to make life here more enjoyable. Thank you, Jennifer. Let's give a big round of applause for our first five presenters tonight. Fantastic, fantastic. So first couple of announcements. I want to once again thank Space Gallery for hosting us this evening. What an incredible community resource Space Gallery is for this and other sorts of events. Also to CTN once again for filming tonight. The video will be available on their website and the Portland Trails website soon. So there's a few ways that you can stay involved in projects that you've learned about tonight. Portland Trails obviously got into the web thing early enough that they grabbed the Primo website, Trails.org. So go to their website early and often. You can join us for one of our discovery treks so that you can learn about some trails and green spaces that you may not have explored yet. GORP is the party that celebrates simple Maine living at Urban Farm Fermentary. It's going to be on Thursday, June 25th, so put that in your calendar. Further down in the calendar, mark down the 10K trail to Ale. That's September 20th this year and the registration launch party is Thursday, April 23rd at the multiple Portland Pie locations around the area. And really, really, really most important of all is to become a member of Portland Trails and stay in touch with us, volunteer. You're the volunteers of the heart and soul of the organization and really incredible energy is what makes Portland Trails what it is. You can sign up to volunteer at the back table there and again go to Trails.org. So our first presenter on this second set tonight is Cara Wilbur. Cara is a director at the principal group, a firm that focuses on creating authentic places. Their work takes place at the intersection of urban and building design, planning and development and finance to help shape remarkable places that inspire, possess authentic character and stand the test of time. Cara is a founder of Build Maine happening this year on May 21st which focuses on creating a cross-disciplinary conversation on investing more strategically in our built environment and it's in the Lewiston Mill complex. Last Fall's was just an incredible convergence of ideas and energy. I would highly encourage you to attend this year. It was just a fantastic event and hats off to Cara and her co-founder for that event. At that event, Cara introduced hundreds of people to the best yogurt in the whole world and I'm sure she's got something else up her sleeve or in her cooler for this year. She loves to walk and bike around Portland and organize street parties to meet her neighbors. Cara likes good beer but has a terrible time finishing one. She used to be a hot shot college water skier in Florida. She is as passionate as she is blunt. I can attest to that. She cares more about cities and about Maine cities and towns than most anyone you'll ever meet. That I can also attest to. Here's Cara. I don't know who added on to my bio but thank you I guess. Can you hear me? I'm going to talk about streets as places and extensions of our trails and our walking systems through our urban places and where we've gone in the past 50 years and how we can get back to a little bit more of this kind of situation. In the past, our streets were these messy, crazy, interesting spaces that everyone had access to and used and respect and eye contact were sort of the name of the game. And then engineers got to the point where they were controlling the design of our streets and it became this very logical but divided space that was dominated by cars and we have these streets designed for 45 miles an hour but people are asking you to go 25 which seems kind of ridiculous. So Jeff Speck came to Build Main and talked about how we need to take back some of the space from the travel lane and give it back to pedestrian and bikes and focused on this 10-foot lane being the new standard for our urban places and even AASHTA which is the organization that engineers look to for their guidance accepts 10-foot lanes as a reasonable amount of space for vehicles in some environments without decreasing capacity or safety. And so basically you can accomplish this by taking some of the space back from the streets from the cars and giving them to the pedestrians and the bikers. And we know that the narrower you make the travel lane the slower the car goes and then if someone does get hit by a car they're less likely to die and yet we still are designing roads in our urban places that are designed for 35 miles an hour and faster. And so this is kind of a joke but kind of serious but if you're building 12-foot lanes you're basically killing people including some babies potentially so it's something we should probably start talking about more seriously. Another thing that is happening in our streets is that we're still putting up a lot of traffic lights in urban areas where we know in Philadelphia they took them out and pedestrian crashes were reduced by 68% which is pretty dramatic. And they kind of attributed this to the local habit of trying to speed up through the red light which we all know is not really a local habit but a pretty national and common practice. Another way that we can start to rebalance streets is by taking some space like we talked about before and putting them into bike lanes and we know that this has been studied that if you build protected bike lanes the number of bicyclists dramatically increases in that case it tripled and it also contributes to retail success and in New York they've been doing these before and after studies and finding that business is increasing by as much as 49% in some cases. And this is really an issue of social justice there's a lot of people who feel comfortable biking in the traveling but not everybody and so it's really about creating spaces that feel good for kids and for all populations to feel safe biking in the streets. There's a movement called tactical urbanism that is looking at taking back some space from streets and doing it temporarily with paint and reflective tape and this is actually in Portland where tactical urbanism has been done and this was an example of a curb extension that lasted for a week demonstrating that you can take some of the space back and if I can do it you can do it too. So I'd like to get some more energy around some tactical urbanism projects here in Portland. I may or may not have been there with Kara when she did that but don't tell anyone. Our next presenters are two main college of art students Makayla Fearing Fairbanks and Molly Pollock. Makayla is a first-year student at the college. She is from Minneapolis, Minnesota and really likes traveling, fashion, printmaking and dogs. I like her already. Molly is also a first-year student at the college. She likes printmaking, plants and Pringles. So here we go, I'm really intrigued now just based on their bio. I'm Molly and this is Makayla. We are students at Maine College of Art. All first-year students take a class that works in tying art in the community together. We were in the class Portland Walking Library and worked with the Portland Trails. Our focus in the class was how we could incorporate the trails and Portland into our art. We went on walks around different parts of the city with Jamie from Portland Trails. We then made zines and postcards from these walks. One of our first assignments was to make three handmade books that focused on the private and the public sides of walking. It was a way for us to start thinking about walking as more than just a way to get from point A to point B. The first walk we went on with Jamie was to the eastern prom. The trail runs along the coast and offers a different view of Portland. It was a new experience for most students in the class who had never seen this area of the city. My first scene focused on different perspectives of the eastern prom. The story comes from the eyes of a beetle and a bird to get both a close-up and an aerial view of the trail. When walking on the east end, what caught my eye the most were all the different flowers. I wanted to show the simple beauty of them. I scanned the actual flower petals and also took Polaroid pictures. Our second walk was through the west end to the western prom. The trail offers a relaxed setting with beautiful houses, lots of trees and lookouts to various parts of the city. For my second zine, I wanted to focus on the passage of time and how there are various ways to get to the same spot. I took a walk to the same tree every day for a week. I mapped my path with arrows and took a Polaroid of the tree once I got to it. Biking through the western prom is one of my favorite things to do in Portland. Naturally, I made a zine about peddling through the prom. Using instant photos, I took on my ride to capture what I saw around me. Our final set of zines were created in groups. The goal is to create our own trails within Portland. The themes ranged from good spots to hang out in Portland to where to get the best coffee. My group's theme was a trail of breakfast. We all picked our favorite places to have breakfast in Portland such as Marcy's Diner and then formed it into a trail. My spreads featured my little brother enjoying breakfast. My group wanted to focus on bringing people on a path to see parts of Portland they wouldn't think of looking at. Our path goes between buildings and through parking lots. In each spot we hit a fairy house we had made from found materials for people to find. The last thing we did as a class was to curate our own exhibition at Mecca in the Zantad Gallery. This gave us the chance to show what we had been working on, what the class was about, and gave Jamie a chance to see what we had done. The exhibition showcased our zines, buttons we made, postcards we had worked on throughout the semester, and a string map of the places we had walked. All in all, the class was a unique and diverse way to become familiar with Portland and all its trails. We'd also like to thank Jamie for walking the trails with us. Great job, ladies. If you haven't seen it in the most recent Main College of Art program or magazine that they put together, there's a great article on the history of community engagement that the Main College of Art has done over the years and it's just a great primer on how to integrate art and really creative students with community. So next we have Thomas Nosall. Come on up, Tom. Tom is a Rhode Island native who recently moved to Portland after studying in Montreal for seven years. During high school in Rhode Island, he generally viewed walking and bicycling as a last resort. I really find that hard to believe, but I guess I'll take his word for it, just based on what I know about now. His second year in Montreal, he bought a bicycle and the way that Tom viewed and interacted with cities changed instantly. He devoted his undergraduate studies to transportation engineering in his graduate program to exploring how to collect and analyze bicycle and pedestrian count data. He hopes to join the ranks of those helping to make Portland more conducive to walking and cycling. Here's Tom. Thank you, Bruce. Thank you, everyone. I'm going to cheat here with a quick preface. This fall I got to borrow some equipment and counts, bicycles and pedestrians, and I installed it throughout Portland, so this is a little taste of what I saw. So we start with the Neighborhood Byway Network, which is a series of lower traffic streets with traffic calming and wayfinding signage that serve as alternative routes to busier streets like Brighton, Woodford, and Stevens Avenue. It's nice. And on the Neighborhood Byway Network is Neven Street, which has a contra-flow bike lane. So it's a one-way street, but the contra-flow lane allows cyclists to travel in both directions legally. And so last autumn I put a bike counter on Neven Street for about two months, and all you really need to know for now is that those two black tubes and that metal box count every single bicycle that goes by, and it also tells me what direction they were going in. So on the busiest day, 103 cyclists were counted, which I thought was pretty huge for that area, and I asked Bruce to guess what that number was, and he said 7.8, so you can see how having the real data is useful. And what I also thought was really neat is that cyclists were clearly using Neven Street as a two-way street, as intended, and we also saw in the data really clear AM and PM peaks, so it's being used for a lot of commuting, which is interesting. Next we go to Tukey's Bridge, where Portland Trails maintains a bike and pedestrian counter that captures the Back Cove branch there, and where I put a counter that measures the side path leading to Washington and Veranda. And so through October, the Back Cove counter averaged 850 people per day with a peak of over 1,500, and my counter averaged a little over 100 per day with a peak of about 150, so really heavy demand on the bridge. And you may have heard that PACS in the city will be studying the feasibility of some major improvements to Tukey's Bridge, and the first task for the consultants will be analyzing the existing conditions. So that's where these counts can kind of come in, because I think demonstrating such serious demand for the existing facilities can help justify improvements, and we can also do a follow-up count to see if the improvements encourage even more people to walk and bike. So next we go to the Franklin and Oxford Street Desire Path, where I put a counter, a pedestrian counter, for a good chunk of the winter from November to just before the big snowstorms came. And so even in those chilly months, the peak day saw 207 pedestrians and an average of over 100. So as if it wasn't clear already, there was really high demand for those Franklin crossings. And a lot of you probably know or have been involved in some of the work that's been going towards improving Franklin, and I think pretty much all of it has called for better crossings of Franklin. And so I think having data like this can certainly help build a case. And so I hope I have started to convey how counts can help us evaluate existing projects, plan for future projects, and justify and advocate for improvements. And I'll close here in a second with some count-related inspiration. This is a contra-flow bike lane in Montreal where I studied and the last time I had a bike counter on that, we were seeing over 6,800 cyclists in a day. It was crazy. And this is a cycle track in Montreal where you can see from 2008 to pretty much now, counts increased dramatically. So hopefully with the PAX counts here in Portland and Portland trails, permanent counters, we will be observing similar trends. Keep up the good work. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Tom is definitely a very promising young engineer and he's got some great ideas and stuff to keep the genie in the bottle, keep the Tom genie in the bottle sometimes. Last but not least, we have Jamie Parker. He's the renowned trails manager of Portland trails here. He's been the trails manager for about a decade after starting out as a volunteer. Pay no attention to the Portley guy second from the left, but that's Jamie on the right there. That's our most recent expedition this past weekend. He feels lucky to live on Monroe Hill where he and his wife, Leah, are raising two free-range kids. Jamie enjoys the challenge of year-round biking in Portland, but has yet to convince his family that this is a fun activity. Other challenges he enjoys are bushwhacking, and we had to seriously contain that enthusiasm this weekend. Stick to the trails, Jamie. Stick to the trails, Jamie. Public meetings, rock climbing, playing boggle, circumnavigating everything. Attending middle school track meets, urban skiing, trying to get the band back together. I'm practicing Jamie, I promise, and hitchhiking. Jamie has hitchhiked over 2,000 miles, but only 100 of those miles were in Maine. He thinks hitchhiking is the most efficient form of transportation on the planet, and wishes it was more socially acceptable. Jamie and we just got back from a winter camping trip in the White Mountains, so he may still be thawing out a little bit, of a leeway tonight. Here's Jamie for the last presentation. Thank you, Bruce. Thanks everybody, and I'm not sure what to make of the fact that Cara knowingly put herself first and then put me last after all those incredible presentations, but somebody's got to be the fall guy and I'm happy to do that for Portland Trails, so those were really amazing presentations. Let's remember back to 2014, way back when the water flowed, flowers bloomed and we were barefoot and carefree. It was a great year for Portland Trails. We built some new trails, including a new link to Smiling Hill Farm, the Rosedale Street Trail over Fall Brook, which connects Cancow Woods directly to Payson Park, and new trails at Burley Mile Pond in Falmouth, where Portland Trails acquired 25 gorgeous acres at the mouth of the Przemsket River. And as always, we did not do this alone. In 2014, we hired Daniel Bishop as our volunteer coordinator. He worked with over 900 volunteers to remove invasives, build and maintain the trail network and monitor our conservation easements. So welcome and thanks to Daniel. We bought a new mower there too. The Schoolground Greening Coalition continued to do great work in partnership with Portland Trails, projects at Longfellow, Falmouth, Ocean Ave, South Portland and more, and included one of our biggest school projects ever in the nation's corner park next to Breakwater School. This is place making. In partnership with the school, the city and the neighborhood, we created a park for the community. This brings people together, activates a public space and helps give nation's corner more identity. And place making can be small things too. We added this granite bench right next to nation's park after seeing a mother and child sitting on the ground waiting for the bus the day before. So with a little furniture, this becomes a place. And place making is events like closing backs or boulevards to cars just to see who shows up, like those two sketchy characters on the right up there. Or the parklet that we created on first Friday just ad quarters and shrubs and benches and dancing neon hula girl. And we'll do more of this in 2015. But back to the snow, what's strange about the top picture? Time's up. It's the only Portland Trail I've seen all year about any tracks on it. People use our trails all day, every day, year round to access places for work, play, beauty, and a connection with nature. And we're providing more of this access all the time, like Burley Mile Pond there on the top and this mystery landscape on the bottom, which could just be Portland Trail's big announcement for 2015. So stay tuned. Sadly, Mr. Toothie here is gone. But we will be improving and reopening the jack path on Monroe Hill this spring. And we will continue to work with neighbors, developers in the city to maintain and improve access wherever we can, including on April 18th, breaking ground on a new trail spur on the upper right there, connecting Anderson Street to the Bayside Trail. We're working in partnership with many small businesses along that trail to make this happen. And we'll also work with the city to complete the second leg of the Boyd Street Trail shown below and left. We received a grant to improve the Four River Trail to Thompson's Point, a better link to the Transportation Center for people on foot or bikes. And this is part of our ongoing efforts to improve safety and access while protecting beautiful places. We'll continue to advocate for a more walkable city as we work with our partners to remove barriers and improve infrastructure that meets all of our needs. So we don't have to hop Jersey barriers or dodge cars to go where we need to go. And as we plan for the future, we do have some big dreams. We're looking at a bridge over the Stroudwater River. This would extend the trail upstream towards Gorham with a spur to connect to schools in downtown Westbrook. Maybe it'll look like this. And maybe someday we'll have a glowing trail like this one in the Netherlands inspired by a starry night. Because as we've seen with tonight's presentations, the Portland Trails community dreams big and has a bright path ahead. So thanks everybody for coming and being a part of Portland Trails and first of 2015. Thank you. Let's thank all nine of our presenters. Wonderful presentations. Very inspiring and hang out and chat. We'll see you next year. Thank you very much.