The city's daily newspaper urges Wi-Fi rollout: I grew up in Eugene. This is a fairly conservative paper in a pretty liberal town. And there's no sock-puppet talk here. Just a concern about keeping Eugene, a kind of island in the middle of the state with a large liberal-arts university, on track to keep the economy humming. They don't suggest city-wide Wi-Fi, but downtown Wi-Fi for free, which is a good starting place to understand usage.
Eugene's downtown used to be cited by city planners because in the 1960s, they converted from a street-based downtown to a pedestrian-only one. Streets were paved over. Remarkably, shoppers and businesses slowly fled downtown into surrounding areas and the Valley River Center Mall a few miles away on the other side of the Willamette River. A few years ago, the pedestrian mall was ripped out and life has slowly returned to downtown.