Community Transportation Acts Archive

Abstract

The Community Transportation Acts Archive is a planning and design approach for advancing transportation planning based in the experiences of individuals with mobility challenges and/or transit reliance. “Community transportation acts” are actions taken by residents—whether within systems or informally—to address mobility needs not met by existing policy and service. In the pages that follow, I introduce the process for building a place-specific community transportation acts archive for the Greater Portland region of Maine and outline the value that such an archive provides to the public and transportation planners.

The Greater Portland Community Transportation Acts Archive (the Archive) draws attention to residents’ challenges in transportation, their impact and influence on transportation planning, and their visions for transportation in the Greater Portland region of Maine. The Archive comes together through reparative archiving, an archival approach based in critical studies that focuses on the records and stories of individuals and groups with underrepresented perspectives in existing historical narratives. Reparative archiving draws from Black studies, Indigenous studies, queer studies, etc. and encourages expansive and inclusive record collection and interpretation practices. I hypothesize that engagement with the Greater Portland Community Transportation Acts Archive—by the public and planners—will contribute to new and novel transportation initiatives in and around Portland, ME that better support mobility for those with the greatest transportation barriers. This thesis documents the first test of this hypothesis—my own engagement, as a planner, with the Archive—and presents a prototype archival product ready for further testing as part of upcoming Greater Portland planning efforts.