Bike Turn Lane, Exclusionary Zoning, Families for Safe Streets - Bits

The contractor continues to make progress with the striping for the new crossings on middle Commercial. The bike crossing between Alice and Vista is filling in, and it's odd!

Left Turn Lane from Liberty to Commercial

The original concept drawing showed only one bike lane.

Concept: Crossing in front of the landscape median

What appear to be the changes:

• No buffer lines
• An inside through bike lane, which also has a stop bar
• An outside turn bike lane for the jug-handle turn
• The dual bike lanes may narrow the auto travel lanes some, and have an indirect benefit there
• But the through bike lane terminates south after just one block, so it is rather pointless in that regard. Until there is a bike lane on Liberty from Vista to Browning, this stub is not helpful.
  

There appear to be some trade-offs here, and the logic of the new striping detail is not exactly wholly legible. It seems overcomplicated. We'll see how it turns out in practice. Maybe what seems confusing now will resolve into clarity later.

• Most recently on the project, "New Buffered Bike Lanes on Commercial an Improvement, but not Game-Changer."

October 3rd, 1924

Over at our Strong Towns group, there's a bit of talk about exclusionary zoning, and it uses a Portland exhibit, drawing on Portland materials. But we have evidence for it right here.

Before the actual enactment of Salem's first zoning scheme in 1926, the Reality Association was preparing the way in discussions during the fall of 1924. In October 100 years ago, they are very clear that part of the reason for and "benefit" of zoning was "there are a few classes of foreigners and undesirable citizens that should be kept in their own section of the city." (We'll come back to this in more detail another time.)

• See previous posts on the history of Salem's early zoning here, with notes on early building restrictions and then the first scheme of 1926.
  

via Bluesky and Nextcity

Over at Nextcity, historian Peter Norton makes a comparison between the presence of the Vietnam War Memorial and our current absence of memorial for our growing toll of traffic violence.

Families for Safe Streets is compiling now a map of the sites of those killed.

Families for Safe Streets

It doesn't have any entries for Salem yet. 

One of the criticisms here of our new Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan is it is silent on individual identity, preferring to submerge the stories of those killed into aggregate statistics.

Larger-scale patterns of hazard and death are important, but so are the individual stories of those killed. Our current safety discourse neglects the personal side. Even with an employee of the COG/MPO killed in a crosswalk just below her offices, the "plan," really just a list of recommendations and hopes and not actually a plan, chooses not to include grief and loss, and so enacts a kind of erasure.

Norton writes

Families for Safe Streets knows the first step is to publicly acknowledge the losses and to name the fallen. Members use photographs and names to turn statistics into people and to bring pressure to bear on the policymakers and the voters whose decisions can make streets safer. By bringing members together, Families for Safe Streets turns their individual stories of private loss into a common, public purpose of necessary change.