About Streetsmart

About Us

Transportation connects people to the places that are essential for their well being. We believe that transportation systems can create and support healthy, just, and climate-resilient communities.

Yet, for many people, destinations are too far from home, transit is not reliable, walking and bicycling are impractical, or the streets are not safe. Rather than connecting people to opportunity, lack of adequate transportation is a barrier to reaching employment, schools, health care services, and social networks. Vehicular emissions expose communities to air pollution, increasing their risk of asthma and heart disease. Transportation is also the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the US, driving climate changes that will disproportionately affect many communities of color.

Streetsmart is an incorporated non-profit organization with the aim of embedding climate change, public health, and equity issues into transportation decision-making so we can realize our vision of healthy, just, and climate-resilient communities. We do so by building alliances among diverse partners for transportation reform, advancing best practices in transportation that fully account for impacts on communities, and highlighting evidence-based strategies that meet community goals.

Streetsmart supports the Planning for Health Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership (PHEAL) principles.

Executive Director

Contact Kelly at kelly [at] thinkstreetsmart.org

Kelly Rodgers, MLA, LEED-AP, has 20 years of city planning experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors working in sustainable transportation, green infrastructure, and community design. Kelly is a member of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Transportation and Public Health (AME70), is the Vice-Chair of the ITE Transportation and Health Committee, and serves on the advisory board of the American Public Health Association’s Center for Climate, Health, and Equity. She also serves on the steering committee of Planning for Health Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership (PHEAL). In addition, Kelly is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at Portland State University who is researching the use and influence of health indicators in transportation. She has a graduate degree in a landscape architecture from the University of British Columbia and an undergraduate degree in urban and regional planning from Miami University.

Board of Directors

Nader Afzalan, PhD, with 20 years' track record of managing, researching, and implementing projects that intersect technology and city planning, has consistently worked with professionals from academia and industry. These experiences have resulted in managing and implementing land-use and transportation planning projects in the U.S., China, and the Middle East and the publication of over 30 articles, including policy reports and peer-reviewed journal papers.

Gretchen Armijo is an urban planner with public health expertise who has specialized in healthy community design in Colorado over the last decade. Gretchen served as the first Built Environment Administrator for the City of Denver's Department of Public Health and Environment, where she worked to improve health outcomes through community design with tools such as Health Impact Assessment and Health in All Policies. She also served as an urban planner at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the City of Aurora and Douglas County.

Jessica Lord is a software engineer at Glitch, Inc. and lives in London, England. She's an advocate for open source software and is active in that space. She transitioned to software engineering after a fellowship with Code for America, a program for building open source software for cities. Prior to the fellowship Jessica worked as an urban designer for the City of Boston and has a degree in Architecture from Georgia Tech.

Steven Lavrenz, PhD, RSP2I is an assistant professor of Civil Engineering at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He is a subject matter expert on transportation safety and health, traffic operations, and smart communities. Dr. Lavrenz’s research work is focused on safety in multimodal transportation and ITS environments, including conflict and surrogate safety analysis for vulnerable road users. Dr. Lavrenz previously worked for the Institute of Transportation Engineers in Washington, DC, where he led the development of resources in Complete Streets, Vision Zero, and transportation and health. He received BS and MS degrees in Civil Engineering from Iowa State University, and a PhD in Civil Engineering from Purdue University.

Garlynn Woodsong is a geographer, urban planner, and real estate developer working to support smart growth and urban planning, with efforts that range from scenario planning to regional transportation policy and bicycle planning to missing middle housing. Garlynn is advancing the state of practice in planning with his lessons learned, including those from the first adaptive re-use triplex and fourplex projects that he recently completed in Portland, Oregon. He has previously worked for industry leaders Calthorpe Associates and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Many thanks to Denver Igarta, Complete Streets Supervising Planner at the City of Portland, Oregon, who served as an inaugural board member of Streetsmart.

Advisory Board

Brian Campbell, FAICP is an urban and regional planner with 35+ years of experience as a professional planner in Oregon. He is a past member of the Board of Directors of the American Planning Association, currently serves on the Board the Oregon chapter of APA, and is a Fellow in the American Institute of Certified Planners. He recently chaired the development of APA's Climate Change Policy Guide.

Ed Christopher began in career in urban transportation in 1979 with the Chicago Area Transportation Study, and since worked for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the Metropolitan Planning Specialists for the Federal Highway Administration’s Resource Center. In 2015 Ed retired from Federal service and has been doing transportation consulting since. Ed is the co-chair of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Transportation and Public Health.

Andrew L. Dannenberg, MD, MPH is an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle where he holds faculty appointments in environmental health and in urban planning. His research and teaching focuses on examining the health and equity aspects of community design including land use, transportation, urban planning, architecture, and other issues related to the built environment.

Nico Larco is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon, Director of the Urbanism Next Center, and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sustainable Cities Initiative, a nationally and internationally awarded, multidisciplinary organization that focuses on sustainability issues as they relate to the built environment. Professor Larco’s research focus includes sustainable urban design and the impacts of emerging technology on cities. The Urbanism Next Center, which he leads, is focused on how technological advances such as autonomous vehicles, new mobility, e-commerce and the sharing economy are changing city form and development.

Shawn Leight, PE, PTOE, PTP, works to develop transportation solutions that support community values by forging relationships and advancing forward thinking solutions. He is the vice president and a principal owner of CBB Transportation Engineers + Planners, where he manages day-to-day project delivery and business development efforts. Shawn is heavily involved in professional organizations that support the transportation engineering industry, serving as the President of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) in 2017. Shawn obtained a BS degree in Environmental Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point and a MS degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Andy Likuski, with a background in software development and urban planning, has created urban design and planning software packages for companies such as Sketchup and Calthorpe Analytics. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer for State of Place, a start-up that quantifies the value of urban design. Andy has a master’s in urban and regional planning from Tufts University.

Neil Maizlish, PhD, MPH is an epidemiologist with over 30 years of experience in quantitative research methods, statistics, and health informatics in local and state government, academia, community clinics, unions, and the private sector. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the Public Health Institute, where he focuses on the development of healthy community indicators. Previously he was a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Davis, where he modeled the health co-benefits of active transport as a greenhouse gas mitigation strategy.

Deborah Salon, PhD is an Associate Professor of Transportation in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University and Associate Director of the TOMNET University Transportation Center. Salon studies transportation in cities with the goal of better understanding of how these systems work, and how policies and smart investments might improve them.