MWACT Meets Thursday: Lots of Crosswalks and other Safety Projects for 2024-2027 Funding Cycle

The Mid-Willamette Valley Area Commission on Transportation, MWACT, meets on Thursday the 2nd, and they have a number of interesting items on the agenda. 

Even though the membership of MWACT overlaps a lot with the membership of SKATS, the ACT is a creation of ODOT and State regulations, whereas SKATS is largely a creation of USDOT and Federal regulations. For non-specialists these expressions of the bureaucracy are largely opaque, duplicative, and Byzantine.

The ACT also represents a lot of rural area, the whole of Yamhill, Marion, and Polk counties, and often they are focused on highway matters or other roads distant from Salem. So we don't talk about them very often here.

But this month they have a lot of urban and non-auto matters of interest.

Alas, there is something profoundly remedial in the agenda items.

Do we really have to keep doing this?

The first agenda item is "Strategic Bike /Pedestrian Project Prioritizations for FY 24-27 STIP Update." Which might be great if it was really about "strategy" and "priority." But the presentation is padded with yet another instance of supplication, "why fund walking and biking."

Apparently, even with rising traffic fatalities and rising emissions from motorized vehicles, it is not a baseline or self-evident yet. That's the reality and it is dispiriting.

(In fact, outside of urban areas there are ways that walking and biking might be even more politicized now. See especially "How a trail in rural Oregon became a target of far-right extremism," a new take on the collapse of the Yamhelas Westsider Trail, which had been on the agenda of MWACT several times in the past few years. Here in 2016 is some criticism of it, which reads a little differently now in light of the news on right-wing extremism. Maybe the composition of MWACT really does need this presentation and approach. At the same time, ODOT could more firmly support walking and biking, and make it clear they are in fact a baseline, not an enhancement or amenity.)

In the minutes from last meeting they talked about the scoring for walking and biking facilities on the "Active Transportation Needs Inventory," but they do not seem to have made any changes since last time. The curves on the downtown Pringle Parkway remain the worst - but scanning the list of projects in this meeting I didn't see anything to address it specifically.

ODOT ATNI Evaluation Criteria and Prioritization

And there are a lot of projects buried in the agenda. The second agenda item is a list of projects proposed for scoping before final funding decisions. Many of these are new proposals that have not, I think, hit City Council agenda.

A bunch of new crosswalk improvements proposed

The most exciting might be a new list of crosswalks for improvement and a couple for outright creation.

Catastrophe on Mildred Lane Shows Problem with Road Design

August 2020

Front page
today

The front page today has news on sentencing in a traffic fatality from last summer.

It is framed up as the story of poor teenage judgement that leads to catastrophe and grief.

[The driver] told police he was driving too fast and that he saw the stop sign [at Liberty] and knew it was an intersection but didn’t see any headlights, so he didn’t stop, according to the state’s memorandum.

It certainly is an instance of catastrophically bad judgement, but there is also more.

Mildred Lane had a posted speed limit sign of 35 miles per hour less than a mile from the Liberty Road intersection. Investigators determined Goodwin was driving more than 60 mph through the intersection.

Mildred Lane is overbuilt. It is built to our contemporary urban standard for a minor arterial, with bike lanes and sidewalks, and a continuous center turn pocket. The car lanes are a foot or two wider than they need to be. 10 feet would be sufficient, and is safer. Even with occasional medians that interrupt the turn pocket, the street is three lanes wide. The terrain is hilly. The posted speed is high for a residential neighborhood.

Current design standard (TSP, Jan. 2020)

This design and the posted speed of 35mph practically invite speeding. It is comfortable to go faster than the limit.

Driver Strikes and Kills Person at 25th and Mission Early Thursday Morning

At one of Salem's most notorious and gigantic intersections, known to be dangerous and therefore one of the very first to get red light camera enforcement in February of 2008, a driver struck and killed a person in the street early in the morning on Thursday the 26th.

25th and Mission is a top 10 percentile
safety problem statewide

The brevity of the release from Police, as well as its language suggests there is more to the story, but also that Police may not feel any need to say more. The short release from Police is at once ambiguous and definite, the gaps troubling.

From Salem Police:

Salem, Ore. — Just before 2:00 a.m. this morning, August 26, 2021, patrol officers were dispatched to the report of a pedestrian struck by a vehicle at the intersection of 25th and Mission STS SE.

The preliminary investigation revealed a vehicle was traveling eastbound on Mission ST and struck a woman who unexpectedly entered the roadway. The pedestrian, identified as Aleta Pierre-Kelly, age 67, was transported to Salem Health where she was later pronounced deceased.

The driver, Kristen La Plume, age 48, remained on scene and cooperated with the investigation. No citations have been issued in this incident.

Even without direct language of blame, the release and its gaps imply the victim was to blame. Police appear to sympathize more with and to absolve the driver, saying that Pierre-Kelly "unexpectedly entered the roadway" and "no citations have been issued." They do not say any investigation is ongoing, or leave other open-endedness. Releases the same day of a crash and death are often less definite. As I read this release, Police are signalling that the matter is closed or near closed, and it is unlikely they will publish any updates.

Still, Pierre-Kelly is dead, cannot share her side of the story, and this frame may uncritically accept the perspective of the driver.

Meeting Structure and Rhetoric on Climate may have Invited Doubt and Delay

The City and project team have published materials from the "Economic Forum for Climate Action Plan hosted by Chamber of Commerce / SEDCOR."

It's great they reached out and initiated a conversation.

Slides 5 and 6 are pretty clear

The introductory presentation mostly looks good. They included a clear statement of sources of emissions and costs of inaction.

But then they appear to have lost focus, and asked about feelings rather than about substantive and effective actions. Rather than building support for action, the "narrative arc" in the structure of the meeting appears to have built to doubt and delay.

People like gas from fracking and other sources

After the initial presentation they presented a set of seven possible actions and asked for feedback, and then polled them. But the polling was all about feelings, whether respondents "loved" or "hated" the action.

Why the heck would you ask about feelings in this way? If we "loved" giving up our fossil fuels, we would have already done so! The reason this whole thing is difficult - that whole "inconvenient truth" etc. - is because we don't "love" giving up our fossil fuels. Very few "love" the real actions necessary to give up fossil fuels. On the contrary, collectively we demonstrate in so many ways we "hate" doing so.

Mini-Cookie Ride to visit Settlement Site 30 Years older than Jason Lee House

The Pandemic's scrambled everything and the Salem Bicycle Club's Monster Cookie has also been scrambled. Customarily in the spring, it was cancelled last year and deferred this year. This year the Monster Cookie ride slots into to the date of what would have been the late summer Peach ride, Sunday the 29th, and it is based not at the Capitol, its usual starting point, but at Keizer Rapids Park.

The Mini-Cookie Route in Keizer

In the disruption, there is opportunity, too, and this edition of the Monster Cookie has for the first time a shorter family ride, the Mini-Cookie, about six miles on quiet neighborhood streets.

Like the full Cookie, which turns around at Champoeg, the Mini-Cookie also runs through an historic site, this one from a full 30 years before Jason Lee's activity in Salem and the  Champoeg meetings.

Wallace House Park (2007 plan, not yet completed)
Possible Location of 1811-13 Fur Trade Activity

The park is the conjectured site of William Wallace's fur trading outpost circa 1812, and is among the earliest settlements in Oregon, not just the Salem area.* Soon, however, activity shifted a little north to "French Prairie," and by the time Thomas Dove Keizer arrived in the 1840s, little if anything was left here.

Beer and Buildings Featured in Latest History Talks at the Mill

The Mill's announced another round of history talks for the "zooming back to history" series.

"Finding Louisa Weinhard" - OHQ, Summer 2021

Two are of particular interest here.

History talk, Sept. 16th

You may recall back in May when Pioneering Oregon Architect, W. D. Pugh was released. On the cover are images of our Old City Hall and the second Mill building, both of which Walter D. Pugh designed. Author, former Salemite, and retired professor of history Terrence Emmons will give an online talk on September 16th.

The remarkable architectural career of Salem native W. D. Pugh and the question of why so little was known about it until now. How I came to make this inquiry. “A life in buildings” is the giveaway subtitle of my book; that is, an attempt to answer that question and to learn more about the life of W.D. Pugh, especially during the quarter century of his greatest activity (roughly 1885-1910), by searching out the buildings he designed, with photographs if possible. It also examines his later career as building contractor and road builder, all in the context of the social and economic development of the American Northwest.

And on December 16th, pioneering Beer Archivist Tiah Edmunson-Morton of Oregon State University will discuss “Women behind the pints: Oregon’s 19th century brewery wives.”

An important detail is missing from most 19th century Oregon beer history: these brewers didn’t arrive alone. Though the name over the door was a man’s, and women weren’t likely to be found in the brewhouse or serving lager in a saloon, their involvement as wives, widows, and daughters is an important, unknown, and untold story.

Edmunson-Morton has an article in the current Oregon Historical Quarterly about Louisa Weinhard (at top).

Draft Strategies for Climate Action Plan Still Evade the Heart of the Matter

The City and project team have published the first revision of a set of proposed strategies for our Climate Action Plan. The original was published in June. It seemed pretty chaotic and I wanted to wait for more clarity. The second, revised draft is still a welter, but we are approaching a deadline, supposedly with a Council Work Session next month, and so it merits some comment.

It's an awkward spreadsheet format
(and truncated here)

But before we comment, here is a really helpful typology of ways that people dismiss climate action by means of arguing for delay.

Typology of climate delay discourses

We will see several of them in the proposed strategies and actions listed in this current draft for our Climate Action Plan as well as the debate around them:

• Individualism
• No sticks, just carrots
• All talk, little action and non-transformative solutions
  
• Appeal to social justice (especially when talking about pricing parking or tolling)
• Change is impossible

So this might be helpful in identifying delaying action or talk and in assessing the list of proposed actions and strategies.