Scenario Planning Project Publishes Outline of 2050 Baseline Assumptions

The Scenario Planning project has published a summary of the baseline assumptions and projections for 2050, a "Reference Scenario Documentation."

Our default assumptions won't cut it (we already know this)

You will not be surprised to find that even with ODOT-friendly modeling and assumptions, our current plans are not enough. (See image header at top of blog from 2020's "preferred scenario" in Our Salem!) We are ostensibly on track for a 10% reduction in VMT and we need a 30% reduction.

The analysis is a little odd, though. The zones in the analysis are very coarse with Salem having five zones. Far out South Salem is included in the same zone as the close-in, streetcar-era grid of the area around Bush Park. It would be good to see more discussion of methods. Maybe this is wholly defensible. But it looks like it's not fine-grained enough for truly useful modeling.

Very coarse areas for analysis

But you may recall what an informed critic said nearly a year ago:

it is so high level ("strategic") that it largely tells us what we already know: our existing plans will fall far short of meeting GHG and VMT goals, and if we do lots of things differently (pricing, land use, investing in transportation options, driving cleaner cars, etc.) we can get at least close to those goals.   This is pretty much what we learned more than a decade ago from the STS, Metro's "Climate Smart" plan and efforts by a couple of other MPOs. What scenario planning leaves unanswered - and puts off to some future process - is proposing and evaluating ways that we might actually double or triple non-auto mode share or actually plan for 30% of all housing in climate friendly areas.

This current document is merely the baseline, and further scenarios will be published that suggest greater change, but the level of specificity here in this baseline document suggests the later refinements will be equally coarse and will not meet the critique that "this is pretty much what we [already] learned more than a decade ago."

Drilling into the details, there are other vague moments. This "share of households in urban mixed use areas" has no footnote or discussion of how its values were developed. Who knows how reliable it is! It may trade on the City's desire for the CFA/WaMUA tightly clustered downtown. During Our Salem there was real question about overbroad inclusion and definition of walkable neighborhoods, also. This definition is key to the analysis, and even in a summary document it deserves much closer discussion. (On the surface it looks like the more conservative State estimate is used rather than the City's.)

There's no footnote or explanation for these values

They choose a weird metric for transit, one based off service miles instead of off boardings. This prioritizes potential and theoretical service than measuring actual use and usefulness.

Don't boardings/capita matter more than service miles?

It should be embarrassing we are still planning for new arterial lane miles.

This delta should be zero! (Or even negative)

At the end is a table with the assumptions, and there might be more to say about it or the values later. The significance of this baseline, reference scenario may not emerge until further iterations in new scenarios are published.

2021, 2050, and % change (some columns and rows omitted)