Last week in Portland, Ore., advocates for sustainable transportation — from rail to bikes and everything in between — got together for the 16th annual Rail~Volution conference.

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With the federal government recently handing out substantial grants for major transit infrastructure projects — $47.6 for an Atlanta streetcar, $26 million for a streetcar in Salt Lake City — these are heady times for the Rail~Volution crowd. This video from Streetfilms captures the mood. (Disclosure: I used to work for Streetfilms’ sister organization, Streetsblog.)

“What’s going on today in the United States today is pretty exciting, in places like Salt Lake City and Denver,” says Jeff Wood of the advocacy group Reconnecting America. “I’m calling it the transit space race. Basically all these folks are competing against each other to build the next biggest system.”

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