Amendments to Transportation System Plan also at Planning Commission Tuesday

In addition to the matter of the proposed Goodwill in West Salem, on Tuesday the 15th the Planning Commission will also hear about a suite of proposed amendments to the Salem Transportation System Plan. As the Staff Report introduces them,

The currently proposed amendments are primarily housekeeping. They include:

1. Updated to the introduction (regulatory context, population and employment forecasts, and travel characteristics);
2. Updates to existing conditions in various modal elements; and
3. Recommendations to support the Chemawa-I-5 Interchange Area Management Plan (a regional project conducted with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), the City of Keizer, and marion County).

This package of proposed amendments will include changes to the following elements of the Salem TSP: Introduction, Street System, Transit System, Transportation Demand Management, Intercity Passenger Transportation, and Freight Movement. Most of the changes are textual edits; however, there are a few minor policy and map amendments. Staff is planning on presenting a package of more substantive amendments focused on changes to the capital project lists and priorities in the future.

As far as I can tell there's no great change of any significance (see correction just below), though the drift of a number of the edits nods to multi-modal change but may actually retreat from substantive change or action.

Not sure the interior shows this same modal balance!

Instead of a drift away from drive alone trips, there's a drift towards them.

Update and correction:

In the comments Jim points out, and then over at N3B they expand on, an edit whose probable significance I missed and which is actually quite consequential.

Untethering projects from "anticipated revenue sources"

Very early in the introduction there is a paragraph on the "planning horizons." The current TSP says "proposed invements in the 25-year plan are matched to anticipated revenue sources." 

The revision proposes to strike this sentence, thereby opening the TSP to "wish list" kinds of projects that have no "anticipated revenue source," and surely the greatest of these is the Third Bridge.

So this edit is something of a Trojan Horse.

But (other than this) mostly it's updating, with a lot of passages like this:

From SAFETEA-LU to MAP-21

The Federal transportation laws have new bill names since the last revision, and all the language about SAFETEA-LU is lined out and replaced by new language about MAP-21.

(But guess what! This is already out of date, and presumably new language about the FAST act will replace the proposed language for MAP-21.)

Some of the outdated regulations are more interesting. Here are vestiges of an old benchmark program - and seemingly now in our prevailing regulatory scheme we don't actually have metrics to assess progress we may or may not be making on transportation.

Oregon Benchmarks no longer relevant

There's also a fascinating section on reducing vehicle miles traveled that is being struck.

A large deletion on VMT reduction

It says:

The State Transportation Planning Rule requires that our metropolitan region first work to hold VMT per capita to "no growth" over the first 10 years of the plan, then achieve a 5 percent reduction in daily VMT per capita after 20 years of plan adoption, with a total of 10 percent reduction within 30 years...it will be even more strenuous an effort to meet the 20 percent reduction by the year 2025...it will be difficult to achieve these reductions without a serious commitment from the community to substantially change its driving behavior, agree to pay more for gasoline and parking, and to make significant land use revisions to the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan.

So did we just give up on this? Why is this being deleted? Has a new regulatory scheme rendered this out of date? Or does the deletion simply reflect the lack of political will and community interest?

When we talk about "hydraulic autoism" here, the volume/capacity measurement is one of the key analytical pieces and ways that hydraulic autoism is formalized into our legal and regulatory scheme for transportation in Salem.

Volume-to-capacity is measurement for a firehose, not a measurement of value created by a street. In an environment whose governing analysis and metaphor is proper to a firehose, it's no wonder walking is made difficult.

A few paragraphs after the table it has a key admission:

It is important to note that even if the Salem-Keizer region is able to build all of the projects contained in the Regional TSP and many from the Salem TSP, we wil still experience more than a threefold increase in the mileage of congested streets during the P.M. peak travel period by 2035 compared to 2009. Thus, we will be unable to build enough capacity into the system to handle all the peak hour traffic demand expected in the coming years. While it is important that these projects be built to reduce congestion, we cannot completely build our way out of congestion.

And this is maybe my favorite edit in the whole thing. It used to read, "we cannot completely build our way out of congestion!" But now a more quiet period mark will do.

No more exclamation point. The symbolism says everything.

That is perhaps evidence that we do not feel urgency about reforming our transportation system and instead are resigned to MOAR CARS.

In the section on transit, which dates from 2005, there is a sad edit in which we go from "The City shall support attempts...[to] expand levels of weekend service" to simply "The City shall support attempts...[to] provide weekend service."

The revision also strikes a passage about increasing parking costs.

Because Rideshare went from the City to Cherriots, the chapter on Transportation Demand Management is in for a lot of revision.

And in the back where there's a discussion the amendments conformance with the Statewide Planning Goals and the Oregon Transportation Plan, I'm not persuaded these amendments actually address these goals in any substantive way. I don't see new policies in these edits that "aim to reduce energy consumption...[and] demand for single-automobile trips."

I don't know that all this matters a whole lot. But if the tidying-up process might have tended to highlight walking and biking and transit, instead it seems to retrench on our prevailing autoism.