Who Needs Maintenance? Marion St. Bridge rates much worse than Skagit Bridge

How is it that "shiny and new and expensive" so often trumps "repair and maintain"?

Skagit River Bridge Collapse:  Seattle Times

During their most recent published inspections, the Skagit Bridge was rated 57.4, but the Marion St. Bridge rated only 29.7 and the Center St. Bridge rated almost the same as the Skagit bridge at 61.8.  These bridges are in need of repair!  So why the rush to plan and build a new bridge?

Marion St. Bridge = 29.7 rating; Skagit Bridge was 57.4

We need a bridge because we need a bridge...It's a glorious tautology!

Yesterday the Statesman came out with a draft for the Sunday editorial "lessons from the Skagit bridge collapse."  Mostly it's about the Columbia River Crossing, but it talks about Salem, too.  Or around Salem.

Ellis Lawrence-Designed Mausoleum Deserves Consideration this Weekend

Memorial Day is on Monday, and as you consider your own memorials and obsequies for departed family and friends, it's also nice sometimes to wander a little, to pay respect as we can to those we don't know.

One significant site in Salem that seems to languish and may not get enough love is the Mount Crest Abbey Mausoleum in City View Cemetery.  Designed by one of Oregon's most important architects, it is nevertheless off the beaten path.

The exterior is a little severe, and the massive doors are hard to swing open.  It might take a little courage to pass through them.  The interior is all classical, row-on-row of identical crypts, symmetrical and ordered.  It is a place for the modern refrigerium.

The promise for the mausoleum was "a better way," more scientific and civilized.

December 20th, 1913

Tonight's I-5 Bridge Collapse Reminds us to Preserve and Maintain First; Third Bridge Can Wait - Updated

This is terrible. Tonight multiple media are reporting that a section of the I-5 Bridge over the Skagit River has collapsed.

Some have suggested that it is the bridge on WSDOT's list of "structurally deficient" bridges.

The bridge seems to have been built in 1953.

As we consider a giant bridge and highway for $800 million, this is a reminder that the Marion Street Bridge is also rated "structurally deficient," and the Center Street Bridge just above the threshold for "deficient."

We need to focus on repairing, preserving, and maintaining before we think about building a new giant bridge and highway.  Really.

Update, Saturday, May 25th

So now we have some facts. From the Seattle Times:

Year built: 1955

Number of spans: 4

Materials: Concrete cast deck; steel trusses

Average daily traffic (2007): 70,526

Trucks: 12% of total traffic

Sufficiency rating: 57.4

Superstructure condition: Fair, 5 of 9

Substructure condition: Satisfactory, 6 of 9

Deck condition: Satisfactory 6 of 9

Source: National Bridge Inventory 2010

It was "functionally obsolete" rather than "structurally deficient."  By contrast, the Marion Street Bridge rates 6/5/4 and 29.7 - the Skagit was 5/6/6 and 57.4.  The Marion St. Bridge is rated "structurally deficient."  The particular design of the Skagit Bridge also meant that it was "fracture critical," and liable to failure at a single point - like a truck strike might create.

Monday's Third Bridge SJ Story Shows Shift from Regional to Local Traffic Talk

In Monday's front page piece on the Third Bridge, it seemed like talk of local traffic and development issues were finally gaining traction over talk of regional transportation issues. Nevertheless, there's still a lot more explaining and analysis to be done between now and June 24th.

Would it kill the paper just to print a graph of the actual numbers? Doesn't have to be any explanation, even. Just let people decide for themselves whether bridge traffic is increasing, flat, or declining, and whether any shift started before or after the recession?

But the framing in the piece on this is easily questioned - more can be done than "he said, she said":

When the recession hit in 2008, a slowdown in construction might have been at least partially responsible for decreases in traffic over the Marion and Center street bridges, said Mike Jaffe, a planner with the Mid-Willamette Council of Governments. Some bridge planning opponents cite that flat line as an indicator that an additional crossing is not necessary.

Here's data from the Federal Reserve, that bastion of goofy, alternative lifestyles:

Driving and Recessions - Matthew Yglesias at Slate

Nationally and in Salem, the decline started before 2008!  In OSPIRG's recent report on the decline of driving, they include a chart that shows easily what is known, and what we all agree is the past data, and a series of scenario projections. That's a much more even-handed approach to letting the data speak.

OSPIRG chart shows multiple scenarios

Overbuilt Capacity: The Problem with Parking Today is Tomorrow's Problem with the Third Bridge

There's a hornets' nest for you! The paper came out Sunday with an editorial in favor of metered parking.

As far as these things go, it seemed like a reasonable and fairly nuanced piece in favor of a gradual, flexible, and incremental approach.  The SJ got it right!

The main advantages of street parking meters would be:

• Producing adequate revenue to pay for city parking operations and upkeep of the city parkades. As a result, the parking tax paid by downtown businesses would end.

• Enabling downtown visitors to purchase street parking for longer than the current two free hours.

• Shifting more drivers to free parking in the city parkades, thereby opening up more street parking.

It's a complicated conversation because there are two matters, and analysis sometimes slides too easily between them.

One matter is the dynamic of supply and demand - making sure that someone can find parking when they want it.

The other is revenue for the operating and capital expenses for parking.

Metered parking addresses both supply-demand and revenue.

Some say, "oh, I won't come downtown if I have to pay" - but the current plan would retain free parking in the garages for people that find "not-free" a deal-breaker.

Downtown remains something of a fragile and not-quite healthy ecosystem.  We should all want to be careful with it.  At the same time, whatever it is we've been doing, isn't exactly working.  A strong reason to think hard about metered parking is that free parking isn't working all that well.  Downtown isn't healthy, free parking hasn't made it healthy, and while change is difficult and sometimes scary, it's hard to understand why people see free parking as an effective key for downtown health.  Maybe an excess of free parking is part of the disease.  Metered on-street parking will contribute to a more lively streetscape, a more attractive downtown, and in the end attract even more people.

Mid-Century Modern in Salem: Four Buildings Better than the Bank

In Jeffrey Tumlin's talk last month, one of the very last things he mentioned was the role of beauty. He didn't give it much air time, and he admitted that it was a problematic topic due to differences in taste among individuals and beauty's resistance to being quantified and measured.

That Belluschi Bank:  Not Lovely.
A cold, sterile, box, and unfriendly at the sidewalk

An elusive quality, beauty doesn't work its way into policy and planning very easily.

Step 9 in Jeff Speck's Walkable City

The notion's in the air, happily enough.  Though Jeff Speck doesn't use the word, his criterion of the "interesting" walk suggests he'd agree beauty is an important ingredient.  Something "friendly and unique" is often going to be something attractive, even beautiful. His Step 7 on shaping spaces and step 8 on street trees, also point to the aesthetic dimension of walking and perception.  So even if he doesn't mention beauty outright, beauty is lurking in the background of several of his points.

Back in February, in a comment on a note about the Belluschi Bank, Jim threw down a challenge,"What building have we built in Salem since 1940 that is as good as this one?"

Salem doesn't have a lot of mid-century architecture, and in addition to needing to think about the virtues of simply reusing existing building stock, we are also now at the point asking how much of it we should be preserving as historically or architecturally significant.  It is, unfortunately, also an era that has produced some terribly ugly things, and the general style cues don't very often say "beauty." More often they say instead things like "order" or "function," or "exposed," and it might take effort to see something interesting or even beautiful.

With the Saul Zaik home tour in Portland, the Gordon House tea getting press for Mother's Day, mid-century has been in the air lately - since Jim threw down a good question, here's the start of an answer!

Save the Date! Downtown Mobility Study Final Open House June 12th

The announcement for the final Open House of the Downtown Mobility Study is out.

Mobility Study Open House, June 12th, 4-6pm

From the City:

A third and final public forum to present draft recommendations will occur on Wednesday, June 12, from 4- 6 pm at the Salem Library, Anderson Rooms. Please join us to review project details, recommended phasing, and costs. Computer-generated imagery of some projects will be available. Presentations will occur at 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.

Will the 3rd round recommendations do better than they did in round 2?

Informed rumor suggests two-way conversions are losing ground, alas.

We'll just have to see!

More once the poster boards and other materials are posted.

(For all notes on the downtown mobility study see here.)