Kroc, Pods, Transit at Area Commission for Rankings Thursday

Thursday the 3rd, the Mid-Willamette Valley Area Commission on Transportation meets to consider the applications for lottery funding under the ConnectOregon V program.

Locally there are two bike/ped projects and one transit project among the 11 total project applications in our region.

Maybe the most interesting thing is in the transit application:  If there's one thing that's clear in the South Salem Transit Center application materials, it's the massive disconnect between land use and transportation.

Proposed transit center on South Commercial

While the area proposed for a transit center site is along the Commercial Street corridor, the big new employment areas highlighted in the application are well off it, on the other side of I-5.

A new cluster of jobs and homes
on Commercial in purple,
but away from other clusters in red and blue.
Notably the others have little housing.

These areas do not have housing, grocery stores, restaurants, or other services nearby. They are car-dependent islands, and even if you took transit, you'd still want a car on your lunch hour to go anywhere meaningful! Without your friends to drive you, you're stuck.

Kroc Center path in red (rotated 90 degrees - north to right)

About the Kroc Center Path and the Bike Pods of Oregon there's little new to say.  Last month the Oregon Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee did look at and rank 36 bike/ped applications.  The Kroc path ranked 15th and the Bike Pods 21st - solidly in the middle. A set of Eugene bike/ped bridges ranked first and a Tualatin trail ranked second.

Top ranked bike/ped project:
Eugene's bridges connect streets and bike paths to transit

I don't even know what a Salem project similar to the Eugene proposal might look like:  First you'd need something to correspond to the Fern Ridge path, then you'd need a couple of bus rapid transit lines...and THEN you could come up with a set of bridge connections across a barrier.

In the end the project illustrates just how far behind is Salem.

For more on the bike pods, see here and here, and for more on the Kroc see here. For notes on last month's economic assessment, see here.

(The local packets can be downloaded for a few days from the ODOT ftp site. Usually they don't hang around, however.)

MWACT meets at 3:30pm on Thursday the 3rd at 100 High St. SE, Suite 200 above Bar Andaluz and the former La Capitale.