Episode 9: Laura Goodfellow

CascadiaCast

This episode of CascadiaCast is with Laura Goodfellow. A runner since middle school, she started combining her workouts with transit routes when she moved to Seattle and took advantage of citywide and regional connections. With marathon training, most of her runs are six to eight miles but often reach into double digits. She has started attending Seattle's pedestrian and transit advisory board meetings to get the inside scoop on local projects.

"What makes it fun is I don't have to take long, expensive vacations to faraway places because a weekend feels like a mini-vacation," Laura says. "I go on this running adventure to Vashon Island, to Bainbridge, or to Gig Harbor."

We talk about the urban marathon circuit, pedestrian safety, the state of Seattle transit, King County's new Trailhead Direct service, and multimodal funding constraints. While it's easy to get lost in project details, Laura says, "What's important to me is pushing the shift of seeing transit as desirable." For example, "To get from a meetup, people would offer me a ride home...they thought, 'that poor girl, she has to ride the bus home'. I know it's very generous of them, it comes from a place of kindness. But it also reflects that our society sees transit as an undesirable last resort."

Follow Laura on Twitter and check out the Seattle Transit-Oriented Runners group on Facebook, Twitter, and Meetup.com. She was also recently profiled in a blog post by Sound Transit.