On Council's agenda for Monday is a suite of applications for the State's All Roads Transportation Safety funding. The City proposes a couple of enhanced crosswalks at important intersections.
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| Between Eola and Glen Creek, Doaks is a high speed rural road with hills and curves |
But the City should think bigger about safety on all roads. On FB an advocate said this week:
With the recent tragic high-profile traffic death on a high speed-limit road (Doakes Ferry is signed for 40 mph), it's long past time Salem follow best safety practices and move to 30 mph or below on all high-traffic streets, and 15-20 mph on neighborhood streets.
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| via Placemakers |
Lawful travel at 40mph is still too fast for any urban street where there are other users of the road not in automobiles.
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| Eugene's "twenty is plenty" campaign |
A citywide "twenty is plenty" campaign would be a good response and tribute to Selma Pierce.
About those crosswalks, the City is proposing two new ones:
- Silverton Road NE, between 17th Street NE and Beach Ave NE - serves transit stops and Marion County Health and Human Services Treatment Services located at 2045 Silverton Road NE
- Market Street NE at 25th Street NE - serves transit stops and is located approximately 500 feet east of the existing signal at 23rd Street NE and approximately 850 feet west of the existing signal at Park Avenue NE.
Both of these are big streets, hard to cross, and the enhanced crosswalks will be helpful. But they are also higher speed roads, and a general speed reduction will also make them safer. (You may recall that a new crosswalk itself was not enough to protect Josephine Watkins a year ago.)
Also in the ARTS application is a proposal to change traffic signals for left-turn pockets.
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| Even as we debate police reform, the new station is pretty exciting. December 3rd, 2018 and November 2020 |
Bullets for the rest:
- There's information and action on slices of right-of-way the City needs for the intersection work on Broadway at Pine Street. (See previous discussion on right-sizing it here, here, and here.)
- A general update on the Police Station, which after some earlier budget increases and supplements from Urban Renewal funding, appears now to be coming in under the final budget, so the City can say they expect "approximately $600,000 in projected bond savings." Once the number is final, City Staff will come back to Council with proposals for using the savings.
- A round of tax abatements for low-income housing.
3 comments:
As a separate, but related, matter on the Police Station, a couple of readers have expressed dismay at the "improvements" made to the complex intersection - a charlie foxtrot really - with Front, Division, and Commercial. By making an eastbound turn onto Division from northbound Front (not the hard right turn south onto Commercial, but a veer right), the City removed a bike lane segment and enforced a sidewalkification of biking. This is not in fact an improvement, no matter what cheery rhetoric the City uses to describe it. We'll return to this later in another post!
(Shoot, the City quit updating the construction cam, so the image is probably from some time in November rather than yesterday morning. Updated the image caption.)
One of the items that had been merely an information report on a planning decision morphed into a notice of appeal. A partition into two lots on Kurth Street, just south of Belcrest cemetery, is being appealed because the condition to make two half street improvements (it's a corner lot) is thought to be disproportionate to the size of the development. It has seemed like these half-street improvements are routine, and it may be interesting to follow this appeal.
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