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.

Name the New Sweeper to Honor Salemite Herbert Hoover!

The City's running a fun contest to name the new narrow and electric street sweeper, especially useful for bike lanes and other constrained spaces.

via FB

An obvious joke that multiple people have made is on the vacuum cleaner brand.

But of course it can point also to Salemite and former President Herbert Hoover.

What better way to honor his time in Salem?!

Before he presided over the disaster of the Depression, as Secretary of Commerce he prompted new traffic laws and zoning laws, a real development in our autoism, which we are finally starting to unwind now. The street sweeper is a real detail in support of the transportation and zoning changes in our current process of reform.

Even before his time as Secretary of Commerce, Hoover was known for practical things like the European Relief and Rehabilitation Administration right after World War I. His management of food relief saved people's lives.

Before that, he was a mining engineer, all about digging and scooping and clearing.

"Hoover's boyhood days in Salem," April 3rd, 1920

And in Salem he was aloof and not broadly liked. Equally, he did not seem to like Salem.

Naming the street sweeper after him alludes to the full ambivalence and ambiguity of his career, genuinely useful, but also with a lot of crap, and only much later after his time in Salem attracting a kind of local parasocial affection by his celebrity and political prominence.

• See previous notes on Hoover here.
  

Do it, City of Salem!

Mystery of the PEP Co Warehouse Solved

The Oregon Historical Society periodically announces a new batch of digitized photos, and it is always interesting to go through them to see if there are any new Salem scenes.

One of them some time ago, a batch old photos from PGE, showed a good mystery.

Mystery Solved!
PEP Co, Line Division Warehouse, 780 N. Liberty
(Oregon Historical Society)

This photo was labeled quite vaguely,

Photograph of Salem warehouse building with automobile parked outside. A paved street can be seen in the front of the frame, and another building is visible at the left.

Where was this warehouse?!

Preliminary research didn't turn up anything and it went onto the backburner. 

On a recent walk near Boon's, historical signage on the corner of Division and High at the new-ish bank building showed a very similar picture and had more detail to fill in some of the blanks. Though the sign was on the corner with High Street, it wasn't wholly clear the older building it referenced was on Liberty Street, on the other side of the block from the sign. So we can fill in a few more blanks.

November 4th, 1927

Back in 1927 the electric company purchased the lot.

By 1929 they had definite plans for a warehouse there. A later piece suggested the actual cost was closer to $25,000 than $40,000.

Salem Reporter on Downtown should Examine Drive-to Model

Yesterday Salem Reporter published a story on downtown health, "The problems and promise of downtown Salem."

At Salem Reporter

With the photo they highlighted, the first impression was the traffic sewer of Commercial Street at its intersection with State Street. The street was the center and the buildings a little incidental.

The story summary focused on "people coming into their stores" and the photo emphasized downtown as a drive-to destination like a mall. Driving was normative. Driving is what makes downtown.

But the story undercut a good bit of that and some other themes might have been given even more prominence.

[Dino Venti is] hopeful the housing developments downtown will bring in more foot traffic. He’s also looking forward to larger developments, including The Cannery which will add 382 apartments, a brewery, restaurants and retail north of downtown.

“I’m optimistic about downtown,” he said....

[T. J.] Sullivan said that the investments in housing downtown make him feel optimistic.

“The more people we get living downtown, the more eyes you get on the streets, the more there is a sense of safety. And the more people that are right there, for ready-made consumers for the downtown businesses,” Sullivan said. 

The most important thing for downtown is the increase in residents, in treating downtown as an actual neighborhood and not as a drive-to destination and mall.

"Foot traffic" really means foot traffic. Walking, not driving, is the key!

The Cannery Project at the Hearings Officer Tonight

The Cannery redevelopment for the former Truitt Bros. site is at the Hearings Officer tonight, Wednesday the 25th. The project generally looks like a good addition to Salem, but it also still seems uncertain and complicated.

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"
• And on Front Street, "Questions on Front Street"

The project is for 382 homes in three new apartment buildings and for 422 off-street parking stalls, 291 of them in a basement garages under each building.  The City eliminated minimum parking requirements last year, but we still have maximum limits, 930 stalls in this case. So 422 is very much a middle quantity of parking.

Newer renderings: 1914 building, food hall,
mansard roofs, interior driveway, river path
(updated project website)

There's also some adaptive reuse for buildings along the river, conceptually assigned to food and wine businesses. Riverside dining, perhaps!

We've already discussed the Mansard roof on the main buildings along Front, and in the packet are revised drawings for a tasting room on the interior of the lots, and food hall and market along the river. 

The oldest building is retained with few modifications, and currently the concept is for a tasting room and perhaps even a small winery or brewery. (There may not be enough room to deliver grapes and such at the site, and also the wine industry is currently experiencing a contraction with an oversupply of grapes and wine inventory, so this is very much a detail not to attach to.)

Adaptive Reuse: Tasting room

For the food hall and market concepts, these would use structural elements from older existing buildings but not maintain much else of the buildings themselves.

A Safety Plan too Aspirational and Questions on Front Street: At the MPO

The Policy Committee for our Metropolitan Planning Commission meets on Tuesday the 24th to adopt the new Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan.

Ticketable: On Commercial between Hoyt and Rural

The MPO did not in the end incorporate more of an emphasis on system speed and legal, lawful posted speed, which are often too high and too lethal for an urban area. They focused more on speeding above the posted speed.

Previously:

• "Salem-Keizer Transportation Safety Plan needs more on Speed, not just Speeding"
• "Public Comment Calls for more Attention to Speed and Speeding in draft Safety Plan"

The edits from the August draft to the September final version are mostly small.

Perhaps the most consequential set of edits undercuts the document as any kind of "action plan."

Merely a "guiding framework"

The plan doesn't actually commit the MPO or its members to doing anything. It is mainly aspirational, merely a "guiding framework" and list of "recommended strategies." It's more hope than plan.