More on a Walk through the Fairview Project: On Stoops, Paths, and a Woonerf

Even though there was nobody on them, the stoops on New Strong Road were cheery. So many front porches and stoops directly greeted the sidewalks all throughout the Fairview redevelopment, and it's great to see.

Stoops on New Strong Road path

Just one block west, the final segment of New Strong Road looked to be complete, and soon would be opened.

New Strong Road is complete and nearly open!

It will be terrific to be able to walk or roll from Pringle Road into the interior without having to be in the street on Reed Road with its 45mph speed limit.

Close to the same view in July 2023

But the multiuse path already looks obsolete. If ebikes and e-mopeds are cruising along at 20mph or more, connections to the front entries to homes are conflict points. Imagine taking the final step from a stoop and — wham! — a collision with a person on a motorized kind of bike.

You might say, "well, if a person is using an ebike or e-moped they'll have sense enough to be in the street with other motorized traffic."

via Reddit

"Sure they will."

Lighting for the Elsinore at the Historic Landmarks Commission

The Historic Landmarks Commission meets tomorrow, Thursday the 17th, and they'll be considering lighting on two of the three agenda items. New signage for the Elsinore would be a great addition!

Approve new retro blade sign

The Elsinore Theater proposes a set of front entry, marquee, and facade improvements, the most notable of which would be a retro neon-style blade sign. Like the one on the Grand a block north, this would be a cheery addition to the night in downtown!

Makes the night more cheery (via Cherriots)

There are some other ornamental restoration details also, including some gothicky filigree for up high. (Here's a good early view with it.)

On these the Staff Recommendation is for approval.

You can see some of the historic illuminated marquees, including the Elsinore, in the history wrap on the vault at the Courthouse on High and Court. 

"Salem's Theatrical History"
at High and Court (2019)

But on one detail Staff recommends denial.

Walk Around Fairview Shows Problem with Walk to a Park Day

The City's "Walk to a Park" campaign last week didn't seem to generate much comment on social media. The way they promoted it is weird, and a walk around the perimeter of the Fairview project illustrated the problems.

via FB

The City published a list of "Walkable Neighborhood Parks." 

About it they said:

Salem has 93 parks, most of them neighborhood parks! In honor of this day, we've created a series of maps showing the parks available in each Salem Neighborhood so that you can walk to a park near you today! Download your favorites and take them with you on your mobile device to explore Salem parks near you.

It's just a data dump! They show all of the areas designated for "parks," including future parks, and it was unvetted by a human who might actually walk to each park area and verify that it is indeed walkable and indeed developed as a park.

This is a lot of nonsense!

The "parks" on the perimeter of the Fairview redevelopment, Braden Lane Natural Area, Reed Road Park, and Fairview Park, are all undeveloped. Fairview Park at least has some very minor signage, and might slip in on a technicality as a real park, but Braden Lane and Reed Road are not anything you'd walk to and should not count as a park. They are unsigned, lack any access from the primary roads that border them, and look more like "no trespassing" situations. 

The maps lack legends also. The dark green must be improved parks, the hatched line must mean future parks, and the lighter green some kind of "walkshed." But you have to decode this! If the City wants these to be usable, they should delete the unimproved park areas and provide a legend.

They also need to add a sidewalk layer and auto speed layer. Assessing walkability without these is useless.

2020 Sidewalk inventory (SKATS)

Reed Road Park is the most forbidding.

Walking south-ish on Battle Creek there is no sidewalk. When the sidewalks starts up again, at Southhampton the sidewalk is totally overgrown with brush and bramble.

Sidewalk hidden and totally overgrown
Reed Road "Park" in background

After walking in the bike lane, with cars zooming by at 40mph and more, you reach Reed Road and might cross into the "park," but it's totally overgrown, and there's no park signage.

City Council, October 14th - The Cannery Approvals

That didn't take very long. On the 25th of last month the "Cannery" redevelopment for the former Truitt Bros. site went before the Hearings Officer. The Hearing attracted no opposition and the project was not contested. A few people offered comments or questions on some details, but no substantive objections. Despite it being a complicated project, with the Willamette River Greenway and the railroad bisecting Front Street offering real constraints, the Hearings Officer was able to adopt the Staff Recommendation and approve the project in a straightforward way. At Council on Monday is the approvals as an information item. Since no one raised any great objections at the Hearing, any appeal seems improbable. The smooth sailing was surprising and nice to see!

Along Front Street, looking northwest
(updated project website)

Previously:

• "Questions on the Cannery Proposal" (2023)
• A little, and links to more, on an historical homage, "A Mansard Roof for the Cannery Project"
• On the disposition of surface parking, "Latest Version of Cannery Project Retreats from Walkability, but may offer More Housing"
• On Front Street, "Questions on Front Street"
• "The Cannery Project at the Hearings Officer Tonight"

Part of Condition 15 (options 1 & 2 omitted)

The 10-foot path along the river seems narrow, and the relation between the conceptual design work for the "street improvements" in condition 15 and the $2.7 million RAISE grant has not been explicated. The conceptual design work now adopted will determine elements for the RAISE grant work and narrows its possible outcomes, quite possibly in non-optimal ways. The City really should discuss this relation more. The cart sure looks like it's before the horse here.

Separately, it looks like some kind of strand lumber, mass timber, or other newfangled wood products will be used in the construction and this will be interesting to follow. 

On the whole the project is exciting.

Bullets for the rest:

• Until the City gets a handle on the short-term rentals — the AirBnB problem — the City proposes to carve out an exception for TOT monies. "Travel Salem has requested that the Code be amended so that operators of short term rentals are not...required to collect or remit the 2% fee, nor will they be eligible to object to renewal..." It looks like the owners of short-term rentals could band together and vote out the TOT! This eliminates that possibility.
• There's an update on the bond projects. There did not seem to be anything new here.
• The MU-III zoning has attracted another car dealership, this time on Silverton Road. The evidence piles up that the MU-III zone is misnamed and allows the City to inflate claims about the scope of actual mixed land use.
• There's an Intergovernmental Agreement with ODOT for more ADA curb ramps on State Highways, most of them this time on Mission Street, the Ferry/Trade couplet, and the Commercial/Liberty couplet north.
• And at last month's technical meeting for the MPO, the City shared that the "City of Salem did not receive the Safe Routes for All grant that would have improved pedestrian crossings." You may recall the ambitious list of 19 sites from back in May. Boo!
• Salem Reporter has more on the ambulance transition in, "City councilors to discuss authorizing funding for 60 new emergency medical employees."
  

Addendum, October 15th

Salem Reporter adds more in "Cannery redevelopment project gets green light from city."

The tone on the path and bike connectivity is odd.

The development will have more spaces for bikes than cars, with 439 bicycle parking spaces, and 422 for vehicles — most in a garage....

A greenway path will run the length of the property next to the Willamette River. That will provide space for bikes and pedestrians.

“We just didn’t want to have bikers riding up next to trains and cars,” Michels said.

Though it’s beyond the scope of the project, Michels said he’s hopeful neighboring property owners could eventually extend a greenway path along the river to connect the Front Street corridor to Riverfront Park.

There's just not room on a ten-foot path for a lot of bike traffic and foot traffic, especially if table dining is right there with people having to cross the pathways often. It's great there will be good bike parking, but if there's no connectivity on Front Street, it will be a total island with a bike path to nowhere.

Separately they note "Rogue Brewing has signed a letter of intent to occupy the brewery space."

(Also compare the paint scheme change between the image here and the image at SR! The mansard roof got a lot darker, and more brooding.)

1935 Eugenics Exhibit Popular, Press Talked around its Origin

Completely unrelated research turned up this dismaying episode of enthusiasm for eugenics right here in Salem in the late winter and early spring of 1935. Even though sterilization laws remained on the books and active for decades, it had seemed like general interest had diminished some after the 19-teens and twenties, with Bethenia Owens-Adair's death in 1926, but this was not in fact the case.

February 12th, 1935

The Marion County Health Officer had arranged for a German exhibit on eugenics to be displayed at the YMCA.

February 10th, 1935

The early press says the exhibit was "famous," and only that it was from Dresden, from the Deutsches Hygiene Museum.

Willamette Professor S. B. Laughlin and the Rector of St. Paul's Episcopal, Rev. George Swift, endorsed it.

Maybe it's not such a Mystery why Drivers Demolish a Sign Repeatedly

Yesterday Salem Reporter published on a welcome sign drivers keep hitting.

via FB

They say, 

Since 2021, the sign has been struck at least once a year....“There has been no official determination for why the sign is frequently damaged,” according to Trevor Smith, spokesman for Salem’s Public Works Department....The frequent damage to the sign began a year after it was built [in 1994].

Seemingly, it's a mystery why it happens.

But this is centrally a refusal to see, an instance of autoist blind spots.

Zooming out just a pinch, you see the sign at an intersection of stroads, overengineered for speed. The southbound continuation of River Road operates like a slip lane and even a highway exit lane.

Going South: Big stroads, overengineered for speed

Drivers are going at high rates of speed here.

Going North: "Do not enter" and sweeping curve
(rubble from a previous crash also!)

In the other direction, there's a stroad with a sweeping curve and the "straight" movement is into that one-way slip lane.

The spandrel, the unused triangle in which the sign is mounted, is a result of engineering roads for speed and capacity. 

Last minute lane decisions are a likely cause of at least some crashes. The problem to solve is high speed, and the solution is much slower speed. This is a drivers, driving, and car problem, not a sign location problem.

Even if the compound intersection is tricky, slower speeds allow drivers to parse the intersection and make unrushed decisions.

We might also compare it with similar "roadway departure" crashes.

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.