Friday, April 20, 2012

It's Out: River Crossing Draft Environmental Impact Statement

As promised the draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Salem River Crossing is out today.

Folks will have until June 18th to comment on it.

It's around 1000 pages, I'm told, and having only 60 days to digest it all is intimidating.* But there's no bigger project, nothing in transportation more important.

Here's the individual chapters and executive summary. Here's a summary and previous posts on the blog.

Here's a video on induced demand that's been floating around and widely praised.



And since the pro-bridge photos focus innocuously on cars in traffic and on congestion, here's one for scale and impact.



* So near to Earth Day, as one wag has pointed out, it's also supremely ironic - Orwellian and Kafkaesque, perhaps, as well.

1 comment:

Doug's Transportation Ramblings said...

Here's the "evaluation" of the impact of the new bridges on walking and bicycling:

"There would be no changes to the pedestrian and bicycle facilities on the existing bridges. The proposed bridge would include, in each direction, a 10‐foot‐wide raised sidewalk facility (separated from the paved way by a barrier) and a 10‐foot‐wide bike lane/shoulder adjacent to the far right travel lane. This would have a beneficial effect because it would increase the facilities for bicycles and pedestrians.

There is no mention of the re-routing of pedestrians and bicyclists necessitated by the freeway-style ramps, particularly on the east side. One has to wonder whether the people who write this crap ever get out of their motor vehicles.