Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, now a top official at Lyft, said the ride-hailing giant doesn’t want to fully replace public transit but rather sees a future where it will have vehicles, bikes and scooters a “within steps” in every community.

Foxx, who was the nation’s top transportation official during the Obama administration, was the keynote speaker at The Street Trust’s annual Active Transportation Summit in Portland on Thursday.

Ridership at public transit agencies in many U.S. cities dropped in recent years, a trend attributed by transit leaders to a variety of factors like the rise of Uber and Lyft, stifling congestion in major cities and frustration with the reliability of bus and train service.

The former city council member and mayor of Charlotte told stories of growing up in the North Carolina city to a packed ballroom at the Oregon Zoo. Raised primarily by his grandparents, Foxx relied on buses to get around town, and he described how the bus opened up the possibilities to him. He used the example of riding the bus from his predominately black neighborhood to Charlotte’s science museum.

“Transportation is more than getting from A to B,” he said, “it’s literally about connecting communities.”

Foxx took a job with Lyft last fall, where he is now the company’s Chief Policy Officer. He was also scheduled to appear at a Lyft marketing event to tout the company’s initiative to allow passengers to choose a hybrid or electric vehicles from the fleet.

Foxx was introduced by U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Portland, a transportation wonk and former city commissioner credited with sparking the urban streetcar’s revival. Foxx saw that first hand in Charlotte where he pushed to expand the city’s system. He praised Blumenauer for his leadership nationally, and Portland, which Foxx said he considers the “transit capital of America.”

Lyft is working to pass a bill in Salem that would allow ride-hail companies to operate across Oregon. Currently, Lyft and its chief competitor, Uber, can’t operate in all Oregon cities.

Portland transportation officials and the Street Trust, the nonprofit advocacy group that pushes for safer walking, biking and transit access, have criticized the legislation introduced by State Rep. Susan McLain. The chief criticisms, they say, is that it would preempt Portland’s existing regulations.

Foxx said that while he understands there’s “tension” over the bill, he sees the effort to bring ride-hailing to all of Oregon as an issue of economic equality. Transportation costs are typically the second highest for families, behind housing expenses. “For many people on the margin,” he said, “having access to a per-trip model could be much cheaper and give them more economic freedom [than owning a car].”

During his speech, Foxx took pains to explain Lyft has no interest in replacing public transit altogether, saying its founders see the company as “complementary” to public transit.

Foxx, who said he grew up surrounded by freeways in Charlotte, said that while some people may be nervous about the increasing role of technology companies like Uber and Lyft in reshaping how Americans get around, he doesn’t believe that building more roads is the way to solve cities’ gridlock.

Jillian Detweiler, the executive director of the Street Trust, asked Foxx what he did to embed environmental justice into transportation decisions while he was in the federal government.

Foxx touted some of his accomplishments, such as pushing back on Alabama for shuttering DMV offices in black communities and forcing the state to offer those services again, but he said he wasn’t about “to get as far as I wanted to go,” when it came to righting past wrongs.

He said the nation is still reckoning with its decades of freeway building and its effects on minorities and low-income communities.

“We’ve literally drawn people in and out of the mainstream using physical structures,” he said. “Unpacking that is a terrible challenge.”

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.