As anyone who’s driven to Cannon Beach on a summer Saturday can tell you, parking and traffic can be an issue. Finn Johnson chatted with us to discuss the ways in which he’s working to reduce the extra congestion in coastal communities as Stewardship Manager for Oregon Coast Visitors Association (OCVA). A big part of his work? The new North Coast Express, a seasonal transit option that connects Portland to some of the Oregon Coast’s most visited destinations. Providing scenic and flexible service to Astoria, Seaside, Cannon Beach, Rockaway Beach and the Tillamook Creamery, the North Coast Express offers a car-free (AKA stress-free) way to experience the North Coast Fridays through Sundays through the end of August.
Can you tell me about your role as Stewardship Manager?
I started working with OCVA in a climate action role through the AmeriCorps RARE program in 2022. My scope was to implement OCVA’s Mitigation, Adaptation & Resiliency Plan, so it was really about the intersection of climate action and tourism: how can we reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from travel to the coast and protect the natural assets of the coast, biodiversity, ocean life, coastal forests? And that role has evolved to destination stewardship and management—essentially, rather than focusing on how to increase tourism to the North Coast, I’m focused on making existing tourism have less impact on communities and the coast itself. I do this through what I’d call a focus on co-benefits, or those projects that are win-wins for communities and the climate. Getting cars off the road, as with the North Coast Express, reduces GHG emissions as well as traffic and parking pressure.
What issues does OCVA hope to solve with the North Coast Express?
There are very limited car-free transportation options to visit the North Coast. There are no airports. No trains. There just isn’t a focus on car-free visitor transportation—and that causes problems. The North Coast serves several drive markets, including 2 million people who live in Portland, and they all drive their own cars to get there. The highway gets backed up in the summer, and the tiny towns of Cannon Beach, Seaside and Astoria experience traffic and parking pressure. The North Coast Express will get cars off the road to reduce that pressure, lower GHG emissions and also increase accessibility for folks who don’t drive or own cars. The service is geared toward the day tripper because they’re an important market, and they’re the ones who drive there and back in a single day—and the ones looking for limited public parking spots.
Get cars off the road; that’s what we always hear from the Travel Oregon Resident Sentiment Survey and it’s what we hear from the North Coast Tourism Management Network. Traffic and congestion create acute negative impacts in our coastal communities.
The North Coast Express is a pilot project, so the main goal this summer is to gather data to determine feasibility. Let’s figure out who’s taking the Express, if it’s reducing impact and whether or not it should continue on a permanent seasonal basis. The more people who take it this summer, the more information we’ll be able to gather.
What else can you tell us about OCVA’s resiliency work and commitment to sustainability?
OCVA has been focused on three broad categories of work in the sustainability space for the past couple of years. The first is transportation—ways to reduce the impacts of how people travel. The North Coast Express is a flagship project in that category. We’ve also created a travel impact calculator so visitors can measure the impact of their travel and donate to Tillamook Estuaries Project, a riparian restoration project for carbon sequestration, to offset those impacts. Electric Vehicle (EV) travel has also been a big focus for OCVA. We’ve been working to help get businesses access to Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) EV charging rebates and are engaged in EV charter planning where there’s demand to ensure EV chargers are in place.
Another body of work is the Ocean Cluster Initiative that aims to keep Oregon seafood local. We know that localizing supply chains can have major impacts on sustainability and resiliency. Reducing vehicle miles traveled to store, process, package and distribute local seafood would be enormously impactful.
Finally, we’re working to protect the biodiversity and natural beauty of the Oregon Coast because those things are tourism assets in and of themselves. We do that by financially supporting organizations that are protecting and conserving the coast. The big project we’ve been working on to that end has been with Kind Traveler and the Every Stay Gives Back program, which is a partnership between hotels and nonprofits on the coast. Every stay results in a donation. And because we know that storytelling is important, OCVA has deployed a Strategic Investment Fund to promote conservation and sustainability organizations. There is impactful work happening, but the storytelling piece isn’t always there so we realized that’s a role the tourism industry can play. From my perspective, there isn’t an industry better suited to do that.
What has the support or feedback been on the shuttle so far?
There’s a general sentiment that Oregon is lacking transportation options for visitors to get to the coast. Every single conversation about negative resident sentiment on the North Coast centers around traffic and congestion, so our community partners are very supportive of this initiative. We’ve also had positive feedback from the media and others who’ve experienced the trip. This is a learning summer, and we’ll be paying very close attention to how folks respond to the North Coast Express and whether it’s a viable way to reduce tourism impacts on the North Coast.
What else are you working on? What are you most excited about?
In addition to the work already mentioned, we’re excited about honing our communications around sustainability and the way we talk about tourism’s role in climate action. We just released our 2nd edition of our Mitigation, Adaptation & Resiliency (MAR) Plan. We’ve gotten a lot better at understanding our role and have honed our language and communications strategy to make it clear why tourism has a stake in climate action and how to operate in that role. The updated plan localizes climate impacts on the North Coast so we can employ them with precision to mitigate impacts. The times we’re living in now call for adaptability, and I’m proud of how OCVA is adapting. It’s not easy to work on climate action at the moment, but we’ve laid the groundwork to be great climate communicators and are looking forward to continuing to employ that.
What advice do you have for an organization that’s just starting out in this space?
A big focus of my AmeriCorps RARE role with OCVA was trying to communicate why tourism, as an industry, should be part of the climate conversation. In a nutshell, people travel to see beautiful places, and climate impacts are changing those places. So, first we figured out how to articulate that in a way that would resonate with our communities. The second thing was the implementation of the plan. When the MAR was first published, we were determined not to get caught up in measurement efforts. We knew there were things we could do right away that would make a difference and realized we didn’t need to spend a lot of money on baseline metrics to gauge our progress. We know people drive to the coast because there aren’t other options and that reducing cars on the road reduces emissions. So, we started working on car-free transportation.
At OCVA, we want to be a resource for our industry partners and to share our plans and learnings. You can read through our Resiliency Dashboard and think of ways to apply it in your region. Even small changes can have an impact. Riders can decrease their travel emissions by nearly 80%, reduce parking stress and enjoy a scenic ride to the coast. The buses are equipped with Wi-Fi, bathrooms and comfortable, accessible seats. There’s storage, too, so you can even bring your surfboard.
The North Coast Express runs Fridays through Sundays now through Labor Day, and you can book your ticket here.
Travel Oregon is proud to support the North Coast Express through a collaborative investment and encourages day trippers and weekenders alike to take advantage of the car-free (and stress-free) ride.