I’m in this business because as a teenager in the 1970s, I lived through a revolution in a place called Portland, Oregon. In 1972 Oregon passed its famous land use laws, intended to protect agricultural land from car-based sprawl, and in the next few years Portland took a series of dramatic steps to establish a new direction.

The city demolished a waterfront freeway to replace it with a park. It set aside two streets through the center of downtown as a transit mall, where transit wouldn’t get stuck in traffic. It canceled a long-planned freeway project that would have torn up valuable old neighborhoods. It began planning the light rail system that we now know as MAX. And it made a series of smaller changes, block by block, policy by policy, that launched the city on a new course. Rarely has a city changed direction so fast, or so profoundly. Experiencing this transformation as a teenager — commuting by bus across the city through a downtown that grew more vibrant by the day — taught me to believe in the possibility of rapid and fundamental change in how a city imagines and builds itself.

In a small way, my career as a public transit planner has been about creating and managing these kinds of change. I’ve led the redesign of many bus networks, developed long-range strategic plans for transit, and written policies that guide the design of transit and its role in the city. During my year in Vancouver I had the privilege of working with talented architects and urbanists on visions for new town centers. For several years I worked with the City of Seattle Department of Transportation on a range of great projects, including a downtown transit plan, a citywide long-term transit network, and policies on how the city would optimize those streets for transit.

I’ve lived for long stretches, usually without a car, in San Francisco, Vancouver, Portland, Sydney, Paris, Oxford, and in a leafy suburb called Claremont east of Los Angeles. I began this blog while living in Sydney but moved to Vancouver in April 2011 and back to Portland in December of that year. I now run my own firm, Jarrett Walker + Associates.