This project was designed to outline transportation chapters of a planned written history of Oregon land use planning, written in ways that would make the transportation planning profession relevant to a popular audience. The writing would focus on stories from the profession, and on historical facts and events in Oregon transportation planning history that would surprise or enlighten popular reading audiences. Technology transfer would occur through publication of one or more written pieces of work.

The result is a topical and historical tale entitled "A Brief Portrait of Multimodal Transportation Planning in Oregon and the Path to Achieving It, 1890-1974."

Sources told stories with enthusiastic reference to past transportation events. The structure chosen was an interwoven collection of topical essays, arranged chronologically but skipping sideways, sometimes backward or forward, from stage to stage – national, metropolitan, state governmental, local – but always moving forward in time. The tale presented here takes the reader through tumultuous early years, up to the moment in 1974 when statewide planning goals, including Goal 12, the transportation goal, were adopted by the Oregon Legislature.