The Policy Committee for our Metropolitan Planning Commission meets on Tuesday the 24th to adopt the new Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan.
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| Ticketable: On Commercial between Hoyt and Rural |
The MPO did not in the end incorporate more of an emphasis on system speed and legal, lawful posted speed, which are often too high and too lethal for an urban area. They focused more on speeding above the posted speed.
Previously:
- "Salem-Keizer Transportation Safety Plan needs more on Speed, not just Speeding"
- "Public Comment Calls for more Attention to Speed and Speeding in draft Safety Plan"
The edits from the August draft to the September final version are mostly small.
Perhaps the most consequential set of edits undercuts the document as any kind of "action plan."
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| Merely a "guiding framework" |
The plan doesn't actually commit the MPO or its members to doing anything. It is mainly aspirational, merely a "guiding framework" and list of "recommended strategies." It's more hope than plan.
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| "It will take many years" |
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| "Actionable plan" or just "recommended strategies"? |
An actionable plan would be something more like, "we won't fund projects unless they employ these best practices and countermeasures for safety." And "we are going to do these specific things in this specific time frame." As it currently is, the MPO weighs "safety" in scoring project applications, but this notion of safety is non-specific and "safety" has sometimes meant speeding up traffic in decongestion measures. But safety for whom? Speed kills.
So the document as a whole is much less substantial than it might have been.
Safety plans also have to toggle and balance between the specific and general and between single instance and pattern.
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| Name the dead! "bicycle-involved" is too abstract and sanitized |
Still, the plan would be improved by more specific reference to those killed. A footnote on a discussion of High Street mentions as outside the 2017-2021 data "a more recent bicycle-involved fatal crash." That is wholly inadequate to the particulars of the crash and its people. Excessive abstraction is not helpful here.
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| Portland traffic deaths named (2018 report) |
For example, a Portland report form 2018 locates crash victims and gives them a name. They are not merely numbers and statistics.
The rhetoric of "kinetic energy" remains odd.
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| "dangerous kinetic energy transfer" is a ridiculous description of a crash |
And interestingly they edited out "safer land use" from the "safe systems approach." This might have been a chance to coordinate and integrate transportation better with our housing and climate crises.
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| Edited out "land use" |
There's lots of words in the MTSAP, with a large proportion on process and other exposition, but it remains to be seen how actually effective it is. From here it looks like more words than deeds, an instance of PR more than course-correction on policy, funding, and construction.
Also on the agenda is adoption of a TIP amendment for the RAISE grant for Front Street.
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| $2.7 million for "analysis and preliminary engineering" |
The Cannery project is at the Hearings Officer later this week, and in that Staff Report are drawings for Front Street. Here are three clips. (In another post there may be more to say!)
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| No walking and biking east side of Mill Creek bridge |
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| Big involuntary dismount threat from rail grooves! |
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| No bike lane on west side between Market and Gaines |
First off, what's the $2.7 million for if there's already this level of preliminary design? Aren't we putting the cart before the horse?
Secondly, for all the talk of improving conditions for walking and biking, these drawings are not friendly for walking and biking. There are the east-west crosswalks with beacons, but the north-south movement remains problematic. In fact, biking may be more difficult if these drawings were followed in construction. At least now the unimproved road section with few instances of striping offers flexibility for people in cars, on bike, and on foot. The proposal in the drawings is much more rigid and creates new discontinuities and hazard. For example, the northbound bike lane in the middle clip is too close to parallel with the gentle turn of the rails; any bike lane alignment should be more perpendicular to the tracks. In the bottom clip there is an eastside, northbound bike lane, but no westside, southbound bike lane. It looks like a mess!
Until there is a continuous path along the river, Front Street is a useful connection, and that looks to be compromised.
Sure, the railroads and our 19th century legal framework for them is an enormous difficulty. But if we want to improve Front Street for non-auto travel, and if we want the new developments not to be car-dependent, it's very hard to see how it all fits together. The way the Cannery drawings fit with the RAISE grant deserves more discussion.
SKATS PC meets on Tuesday the 24th at noon. The agenda and packet, including the revised MTSAP, is in the calendar item.
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