Update on Zombie Son of SRC Silent on Climate

It was disappointing to see a total silence on climate and emissions in yesterday's front page piece on the Zombie "Son of SRC."

Front page story with insets from Washington Post
and an earlier OPB story published in the SJ

Maybe they'll come back for a more detailed analysis, but it reads more like a story placed by one of the bill's sponsors, an instance of PR rather than something more sober and incisive. Sure there's a little he-said, she-said balancing with critics, but the main framing seems hopeful, "Maybe it's back!"

But there are so many additional lines for context. 

On ODOT's great priority, a replacement bridge on I-5 over the Columbia, ODOT is running into strong headwinds on funding alone. ODOT is running out of money and may not be very interested in funding a new bridge here.

See:

• At the Oregonian, "ODOT looks to DMV fees to plug deficit; bigger budget problems loom"
• At BikePortland, "Funding picture for ODOT’s Rose Quarter freeway expansion looks bleak"
  

Even apart from the problem of funding, our climate goals call for less driving, not merely the fuel conversion to EVs and maintaining the same amount of driving (or more). 

via Twitter

Some transit advocates have argued that conventional fossil fuel buses, supported by the right road configurations and land use, are still very useful.

Others have looked at the metals use in batteries and suggested that merely replacing our cars with large EVs creates real problems.

Placing the SRC in the MTP and Review of Cherriots Plan: At the MPO

Finally some reckoning for the failed Salem River Crossing. The Policy Committee for our local Metropolitan Planning Organization will consider vestigial elements of the Salem River Crossing in revisions to Chapters five and nine of the forthcoming long-range 2023 Metropolitan Transportation Plan.

Incorporating the SRC "No Build" decision in MTP

The changes generally shift the discussion from the relative definiteness of the "needs and gaps" chapter to the more speculative and uncertain nature of the "outstanding issues" chapter. On balance this is good! 

NY Times today

But there's still no real acknowledgement of the Climate Action Plan and our need to reduce driving and VMT. The passive fatalism of "It is expected that...trips traveling across the bridges will increase...." is a denial of our need to manage actively and positively to actual reductions in car trips across the bridges and everywhere in the Salem area.

We aren't yet managing to plan for reduced trips

I hadn't seen an updated chart of bridge traffic counts recently, so that was helpful.

Latest on bridge traffic counts

But we still treat the counts as if we are helpless to alter them, and cannot manage actively to reduce them. Traffic as a rising tide against which we are helpless. Well, that's not true.

MWACT Smuggles Hope to Revive the SRC into New Funding Request

The Mid-Willamette Valley Area Commission on Transportation, MWACT, meets Thursday the 3rd, and the one item of real interest is a revision to the priorities for the new round of Federal funding.

You might remember the letter that our Metropolitan Planning Organization, SKATS, sent. (And on the OTC meeting.)

MWACT has mainly highway expansion in mind.

They also added a new item in the last week or two, with hopes for a revival of the SRC.

Zombie hopes for the SRC

But significantly, neither SKATS nor the City of Salem shares this sentiment.

January 20th, City Manager Update

Here are the priority lists as of January 19th, the day before the OTC meeting on the 20th.

City Council, August 24th - Nonsense on Broadway at Pine - Updated

Council convenes on Monday and on the agenda we see the autoist disconnect between driving, climate, and safety.

What is now the annual burning:
Yesterday's front page in San Francisco

We'll zoom out a little and start with climate. The slow-moving train wreck that is our approach to climate is going to dwarf our problem with traffic violence. If our forthcoming Climate Action Plan is to be effective, it will have to influence, even determine, traffic planning. Currently we plan our roads as if there was no emergency on climate.*

Yesterday here in Salem

Interior page today here

Two weeks ago Council tabled the matter of widening Broadway Street NW at Pine Street. The Oberys, Angela and Gary, had raised questions and Council wanted more information.

City Council, August 11th - Broadway, Cemetery, Grant School

Council convenes on Monday, and there are three interesting transportation items on the agenda.

Broadway at Pine Street and Counting Lanes

Deceptive language:
Edgewater at Rosemont with four lanes, not three

One of the items concerns the intersection on Broadway at Pine Street:

Shall Council authorize the City Manager to execute the Intergovernmental Agreement with the Oregon Department of Transportation for Right-of-Way Services for the Broadway Street NE at Pine Street NE Improvements Project?....

The Broadway Street NE at Pine Street NE Improvements Project will modify the left-turn signals to protective permissive (flashing yellow arrows); reduce the four-lane roadway to three lanes with a center turn lane between Salem Parkway NE and Pine Street NE; and install a right-turn lane on the northbound leg of Broadway Street NE at Pine Street NE

The City is using deceptive language for the project. It requires a very elastic notion of "reduce" to say that the City will "reduce the four-lane roadway to three lanes with a center turn lane...[and] a right-turn lane." When you count the lanes on a nearly identical cross-section on Edgewater at Rosemont in West Salem, if you count the center turn lane as a lane, you should also count the right-turn lane as a lane, and that yields a total of four lanes (the in-bound, opposite direction lane is assumed).

By including a right-turn lane in the project, this is no longer a 4/3 "reduction" from four to three lanes! It is instead a 4/4 equivalent and no net reduction on this segment.

For more on that, see the note from last month here, "City Poised to Oversize Broadway at Pine Street; Engineer offers Counter."

Cemetery Connection

Councilor Nordyke proposes some next steps on the prospect for a connection at the Cemetery between Candalaria and Fairmount neighborhoods. (Mont/mount is confusing with Rosemont and Fairmount!)

ODOT Asks for Zoning Change near former SRC Site - Updated

The City's published a Hearing Notice for a zoning change on a block immediately adjacent to the proposed SRC eastside bridgehead. The applicant is ODOT and their agent is the Angelo Group, who was an SRC consultant.

The SRC was proposed to use Hickory and Pine here.

Innocent or nefarious? Hard to say, but it will be very interesting to read the full Staff Report when it is published and to learn more about the proposal.

SRC in blue and bridgehead footprint (and changes) in grey,
lots proposed to be rezoned in red
(Description of Preferred Alternative, January 2019)

But even aside from any possible entanglement with a zombie SRC is the fact that it would be a subtraction of land zoned for apartment housing, and therefore the proposal deserves extra scrutiny, since we have a shortage of that according to the Housing Needs Analysis.

More to say later.

Update, July 28th

The Staff Report is out, and it is one after another instance of "Staff does not concur" for Findings. They recommend denial.

A strong recommendation for denial across the board

In this case, the obvious analysis is in the Staff Report, and it does not seem necessary or very interesting to drill into it.

Salemites Decisively Reject Reviving SRC in Council Elections

In the Council races this year attempts to revive a Zombie Salem River Crossing were important, but still probably secondary to other issues, particularly the Pandemic, the economy, and homelessness.

But even with the issue in a strong fourth position, voters trounced the slate of candidates supporting a zombie bridge.

Voters trounced the pro-bridge slate of candidates
(SJ piece on Elections spending,
Voters Pamphlet statements on SRC)

You might have a different reading on the details, and maybe the emphasis here isn't quite right.

But on the whole, voters in Salem were not persuaded to support a revival of the SRC process or to devote great resources to auto capacity expansion.

The results instead suggest the City should move more assertively on Climate Action, and on better walking, biking, and busing.

Early results appear to give candidates in three of the four races commanding leads, Virginia Stapleton in Ward 1, Trevor Phillips in Ward 3, and incumbent Vanessa Nordyke in Ward 7. Ward 5 remains close. I suspect Jose Gonzales will prevail, but this is far from certain. Most notably, in Ward 3 Phillips defeated long-time incumbent Brad Nanke, who had voted for many years on Council with a distinctly libertarian-conservative philosophy.

Wooo! The SRC Record of Decision is Finally Out: No Build

It and the rest of the Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision are here.

I don't think there's anything else to add. (If a closer reading of some of the ancillary documents turns up anything over the weekend, I'll update this post.)

Go have a beer, glass of Champagne, soda, cider, whatever celebratory gesture suits.

(And if you're new here and wondering what is an "SRC," you can read about the whole thing here.)

Addendum, Saturday

What all is included in
"previous approvals are vacated"?
(From the "Reevaluation of the SRC DEIS")

I haven't finished reading the materials, but some questions remain. While the ROD is for No Build, the City has never made explicit what other things the LUBA decision for a remand unwound:

• What is the status of the UGB expansion? Has it reverted to the outline of pre-2016?
• What is the status of the TSP amendments? Ones directly about the SRC should be deleted. Some of them were not directly about the SRC, but harmed non-auto transport generally and should also be deleted.
• Are there other code or regulatory amendments in the package from December 2016 that need to be deleted or revised?

And while formally there is a Final Environmental Impact Statement, in substance it is empty. They revised the traffic model from 2031 to 2040, concluded there was no meaningful difference, and then said, "this FEIS does not include individual responses to comments on the build alternatives found in the 2012 DEIS for the Salem River Crossing project."

In choosing not to respond substantively to critique and comment, they left intact the framework for a giant bridge and highway. All the ingredients for a Zombie remain.

Council should undertake a more thorough extirpation of SRC remnants and its virus!

Addendum 2, Monday the 30th

Well, here's a remnant bit. The MPO just announced an amendment to the TIP, and it is an acknowledgement that Marine Drive will remain a collector and will not be supersized to a minor arterial to connect with a future SRC. (We may come back to this in October in comments on the TAC or PC meetings.)

Update 3, October 10th

ODOT sent out a press release today about the FEIS and "no build" record of decision, and boy is it snotty! Again, they grant none of the critique. It's all the fault of a defiant Council.

ODOT and FHWA selected the No Build alternative because the Salem City Council chose to not respond to a Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) remand of their 2016 land use actions in support of the project. Without the City addressing the LUBA remand, the project team could not complete the Final EIS for the preferred alternative.

Earlier this year, in a Salem City Council work session, 6 of the 9 council members opposed responding to the LUBA appeal. This decision had the net effect of reversing the 2016 land use actions and withdrawing City support for advancing the FEIS with a build recommendation.

The project officially started in 2006 after the City of Salem and other regional partners approached ODOT and FHWA with a request to begin the environment process to build a 3rd bridge. The partners comprised of the cities of Salem, Keizer, Marion and Polk counties, the Salem Area Mass Transit District and ODOT.

In 2014, the partners endorsed the “Salem Alternative,” which Salem City Council had recommended as the preferred alternative. The necessary land use approvals were granted by the partners and the Salem City Council adopted its final ordinance. However, project opponents appealed the City’s land use approvals to LUBA. LUBA considered the issues appealed and remanded the City’s previously approved land use actions back to the City to address.

Without the city addressing the technical issues required by LUBA, ODOT and FHWA could not publish the FEIS for the identified preferred alternative. The only option was to file the No Build Alternative thereby ending this effort to build a 3rd bridge.

Son of SRC Still Misses on Greenhouse Gases

It's framed more about distributing funding costs
and continues to talk past the central matter

It's not like funding the SRC was a non-issue. The concept was costly and risky, and Salemites asked to bear too much of any total cost. Funding was a great issue, and any real, durable solution would need to grapple with it in a better way.

But new talk about Rep. Evan's legislative concept for a multi-county task force seems to treat the cost and the distribution of costs as the primary problem. It treats the politics of funding as the main thing.

This misses our central need to reduce driving. As long as we take as an article of faith that driving, both in trip count and in total miles traveled, must always be increasing, we will self-sabotage our greenhouse gas goals. Bridge fundamentalism - we need a bridge because we need a bridge - interferes with our 21st century needs.

At the MPO: Scoring the RTSP Candidate Projects, SRC Aftershocks

The Technical Advisory Committee for our local Metropolitan Planning Organization meets today, but there's really not very much here to say on the agenda.

But - guess what?! - there's probably lots to say about last night's Council action.

Actually on the agenda, they're still talking about the scoring plan for evaluating candidate projects in the 2019 RTSP.  There's a new iteration that weighs "safety" the most. But we see how it's still shaped by autoist biases and "all other criteria," including anything on greenhouse gas emissions in the still-contested Goal 7, is minimized. It's clear it's going to take some work to reframe the whole assessment scheme for a properly 21st century transportation system. There's a whole lot of retrograde engineering and planning inertia to purge.

The latest scoring plan

As evidence for the need to purge and completely reorient? The news coverage of last night's vote is a good body of evidence: "Salem City Council on Monday night voted against helping..."

That's not a very neutral description of events.

Updated in print

In the SJ, the tone is elegiac, full of regret for the loss of a good thing:

The third bridge in Salem is dead.

The long-discussed and debated third bridge over the Willamette River in Salem died by a 6-3 vote of the city council Monday night, bringing an end to 13 years of work on the Salem River Crossing proposal and 50 years of discussion about the possibility.

“There is no other bridge than this one that will be on the table for the next 20 to 30 years,” Salem Mayor Chuck Bennett said.

There's an aphorism about journalism that's floated around quite a bit:

If someone says it's raining, and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find out which is true.

So far the journalism on the Salem River Crossing has seemed bound by autoist horizons, the assumption a new auto bridge is a good thing, that its loss is problematic. It has been content with a surface narrative of "balance": Supporters say this, opponents say that. It has been less interested in trying to determine the truth of the matter, let alone find out anything meaningful about the critique of the Salem River Crossing.

A 21st Century transportation system has to get out of the autoist frame and truly see mobility in a multi-modal way that also takes into account greenhouse gas emissions and environmental justice.

Mill's Romance Show Unwittingly Features Tie to SRC

You might know that The Mill has a Valentine's theme, "Romance," for their annual collaborative show with displays from area historic and cultural institutions.

You might not know that one of their featured images has ties to our current SRC debate!

Hedda Swart at his Wedding
from the Mill's "Romance" Exhibit
(WHC 0063.001.0062.001.007)

Here's Hedda Swart as a young man.

Apparently a Third Bridge
was his idea!
(from a January, 2017 SJ piece)

And here's Heda Swart a couple of years before he died (the photo's from 1952).

It's got to be the same person, right?!

City Council, February 11th - Showdown on the SRC

Well, here we go. Maybe this is it. On Monday Council meets and it is possible that they will take definitive and final action on the misguided and wildly expensive Salem River Crossing project.

There are also a couple of other interesting and important matters, but the SRC swamps them all.

Council should adopt a resolution embracing a No Build Record of Decision.

One of two possible letters on the SRC
(Comments in red added)

If you already "know" we "need" a bridge, if a new bridge is already one of your priors, then of course none of this makes sense. You will read criticism and opposition merely as wrong-headed, retrograde obstruction. (But this position also is usually mystified as a posteriori, arising from a reading of the analysis and facts, when it in fact is wholly a priori, a previous commitment prior to any of the arguments! The case for the bridge really boils down to a tautology: We need a bridge because we need a bridge.)

But if you did not come to the debate and analysis already with a commitment to a new bridge, it's impossible to read the evidence in a way that suggests a new bridge is anything close to the best solution to the range of problems.

There's a lot of badness here!
(from the Jan 30th presentation, notes added)

Apologists for the SRC have twisted a very weak case into a set of claims that are certainly very doubtful and in many cases almost surely false. There are also virtually no claims for it that are unambiguously positive or unambiguously probable.

Under the SRC this $15 Million Solicitation Gets Hoovered up

You might recall last month that our local Metropolitan Planning Organization was going to announce a solicitation for projects to fund. Now, it is out:

Salem Keizer Area Transportation Study (SKATS) Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) is soliciting for sponsors of transportation projects within the SKATS MPO boundary to apply for federal funds for the federal fiscal year (FY) 2021-2026 Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP). There will be approximately $15 million in federal funds available for new projects in FY 2022, 2023 and 2024 and an additional $11 million available for projects ready for contract in the FY 2025-2026 illustrative years; although, it is up to the Policy Committee’s discretion to program funds for those years. Projects eligible for funding must be within the SKATS MPO boundary and be included in, or consistent with, the 2015-2035 Regional Transportation Systems Plan (RTSP) or the 2019-2043 RTSP (when it is adopted). Applicants must be a tax-funded public agency that can enter into a contract with ODOT, with some restrictions, to be eligible to receive funding. A minimum 10.27 percent match is required. Private entities or non-profit organizations may apply as co-applicants in partnership with a public agency.

Something to consider is that if we were to commit to the Salem River Crossing, these funds would get sucked up into the SRC and would no longer be free for other useful and important projects. Oh, the MPO might make a Potemkin show of a solicitation, but the SRC would hoover up most everything.

An important opportunity cost of the SRC would be for years to nullify project solicitations like this.

City Council, January 30th - The Wager of the SRC

The prelude to the big showdown on the SRC is tomorrow, Wednesday the 30th. Council has scheduled a work session and hopefully it will not just be a staff presentation and Councilors will be able to question, even cross-examine, staff. No public comment will be taken at this time in order to allow Council and staff to focus. (Comment will be received at a later meeting in February.)

It happens there's a big sports event this weekend, and what Council is asked to do is not so much to evaluate certainties, as it is to evaluate a wager. Sports betting is in many ways a good lens through which to consider the SRC.

• Is the SRC and its Preferred Alternative a good bet? Are its predicted outcomes a good bet? It is a good bet to come in at or near budget?
• Are there other, better bets out there for meeting some of its stated goals?
• How much of your own money would you be willing to bet on any these?

By these measures, trying to think of risk in a personal way, I think the SRC scores very poorly. It's not a good bet at all.

This should not surprise us. Very large projects fail most often. Bent Flyvbjerg is probably the world's authority on them, and he has identified a great number of problems with them. We see many of these problems here.

Megaproject expert Bent Flyvbjerg in the New Yorker

10 Characteristics of Megaprojects in his
Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management

If you think we need to consider more about greenhouse gas emissions, the SRC is not a good bet to reduce them at the scale we will find necessary, if it even reduces them at all. There should be lots of doubt here.

SRC Cost Estimate and 40% Contingency Nearly Certain to be Inadequate

On questions about earthquake and seismic resilience, the Q & A makes what looks a little bit like a move for false equivalence. They are shading matters so they don't have to face the question squarely.

In Section 20.c of the Q & A they write (and Category 5 is most hazardous, Category 1 the least) that

• The Preferred Alternative east side bridge landing is primarily Category 3; the western bridge approach is primarily Category 4, transitioning to Category 2 with some Category 3.
• The current bridge locations, east side, are primarily Category 5, transitioning to Categories 4 and 3. On the west side, the bridge landings are primarily on Category 3.

This makes the current bridge locations look worse, right? Category 5 is worse than Category 4. Of course we should build the SRC on those more stable soils!

Section 20.b and 20.c

But when you look at the map - and it is significant the Q & A omits the map and merely references one in a different and hard to find document - the whole flood plain across which the SRC would cross is Category 4. The map is dated 1996, and since then there has been a great amount of gravel quarrying and there may be an additional factor of industrial disturbance to increase these soils' propensity to liquefaction. (It would be interesting too if there is any updated version of the map.) In any case, if distance or area is at all a factor in multiplying odds of an event or multiplying the severity of an event, the larger extent of Category 4 soils make the Preferred Alternative meaningfully more risky than the current bridge crossing sites.

SRC Q & A Misleads on Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Oregon Global Warming Commission 2018 Biennial Report

Oregon Global Warming Commission 2018 Biennial Report

Oregon Global Warming Commission 2018 Biennial Report

Now let's look at how the SRC Q & A tackles greenhouse gas emissions.

The defense of the bridge hangs its hat on the notion that only by speeding up traffic can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Tailpipe emissions are the main problem. It discounts "driving less" as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce congestion. On this view speed is good. In 2040 the No Build state is modeled to offer an average speed of 13.1 mph, and the SRC once built would offer 21.9 mph. Emissions are meaningfully worse at the lower speed because of motor inefficiency and idling. It concludes, therefore, the SRC is better at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Traffic Modeling and False Precision in the SRC Q and A

The big Q & A on the SRC has several sections that use traffic modeling, but no section on the modeling itself. The document assumes the truthfulness and usefulness of a set of traffic forecasts for 2040.

I want to step back a little and ask some questions about the way we handle the traffic forecasts. Above all, the SRC team, and traffic planners here generally, both in public employment and in private contracting, pretty much everyone involved in traffic engineering, elide the uncertainty around forecasts. If there is any statistical uncertainty around the projections, you'd never know it.

There are also a couple of other ways that planners play fast-and-loose with the forecasting.

Traffic Forecasts Generally Deserve Margins of Error

As we receive the forecasts now - and they are delivered rather ex cathedra - they are full of false precision.

2040 counts from Section 13.c

2040 counts from Section 15.d

All of these numbers should have a 95% or 80% confidence interval on them. Or some other sign of the margin of error and uncertainty.

"Daunting" Q and A Casts Unfavorable Light on Planning Goal 1 and DEIS

The Q & A for the SRC Council Work Session is a funny thing. It's supposed to be neutral and even-handed, but it is not.

from the Introduction

In the introduction they admit "some of the references may not be the seminal work or the latest on the topic."

Why doesn't this Q & A represent the best state of the research on a given topic? This is a strange thing to admit from the start - unless that's an indirect admission that the document is already biased.

Q & A on Induced Demand Biased, Depends on Out of Date Scholarship

At the center of the materials published for the Wednesday Work Session on the SRC is an omnibus Q & A, a staff report arranged as a series of questions and answers. It is almost medieval in form, a modern quaestio or Sentences! It aspires to be a Summa.

You know that's an ironic setup. The report is supposed to be magisterial and neutral, but it is biased and unrepresentative. Too often it is ideologically motivated. Rather than the best of medieval scholasticism, it is the worst of it, narrow, cramped, and oriented with a determined teleology.

Here we will look at Induced Demand.

The Sources are too Few and are Biased

In the discussion of induced demand and traffic forecasting the material is shaped in order to position autoism as a "neutral" description of reality, the natural order of things, rather than a highly ideological and heavily subsidized position resulting from multiple policy decisions over years and even decades.

(Ian Lockwood, via Public Square)

Though the tone of the discussion in the Q & A is ostensibly even-handed, in the discussion of induced demand the last bit on a "preference for suburban living" gives it away. But the preference for suburban living requires heavy subsidies for the car-dependence. If "lawn and driveway" zoning weren't mandated in our vast swaths of our single-family housing districts, we might look at highway investment a little differently.

"preference for suburban living"

As it happens, the study cited here by "Professor Cervero" (it is frequently a sign of status anxiety when it becomes necessary to attach this honorific, and this is a tell) is old, from 2003, and published by a notorious autoist and anti-transit advocacy group that advocates for sprawl.

The SRC's Disconnect on Decongestion Pricing

One of the memos for the Wednesday Council Work Session on the SRC that has been published is the "Salem River Crossing Revenue Projections." I don't remember seeing the final version of this memo published before.*

And here is what might be the single most important take-away. This chart isn't from the SRC. But it is drawn from the table just below, table 5 in this "Revenue Projections" memo. The table is from the SRC's own materials, and the data the chart expresses comes from the SRC's own internal assumptions.

Just tolling solves all our congestion problems!
(Chart not in memo; all other clips here are from the memo)

As soon as we toll the bridges - poof! All our problems with congestion go away on the existing bridges.**