Environmental Justice at the MPO Tuesday

The Policy Committee for our local Metropolitan Planning Organization meets tomorrow, Tuesday the 28th, and they'll be getting a refresher on Environmental Justice and Title VI requirements, will consider setting Legislative priorities for the next session, and ratify adopting more Performance Measures that ODOT has set rather than setting them independently at the MPO.

These are mostly just some notes in passing. (See also notes last week on continued intransigence on greenhouse gas assessment.)

On Environmental Justice, even though there is a formal and legal framework, it is more about process and procedure than about outcome, and it is not clear that it's actually very effective. Environmental Justice is another framework we could use for evaluating greenhouse gas emissions - and, indeed, the Federal lawsuit in Eugene may well develop new approaches along this line. But the MPO on its own could still interpret the legal requirements in more charitable and more effective ways rather than in the minimalist, pro forma way we see now.

SKATS currently evades
addressing "adverse environmental effects"
of greenhouse gas emissions

The EJ analysis is not very robust

For next year's Legislative session, the Eugene area MPO submitted a draft of priorities (1-17) for statewide consensus at a state-level organization, and SKATS can get on board with that or can develop its own list. The top of the list is dominated by non-auto mobility. SKATS has been lukewarm, and sometimes even hostile, to this general sense of priority, so it will be interesting to see what they have to say. Probably they will not adopt a concurrence.

(Part of first page only)

On the newly mandated Performance Measures, it makes a lot of sense not to reinvent the wheel, and certainly from the start it is a reasonable decision to use ODOT's standards rather than to formulate SKATS' own measures.

But one of them might give us pause.

"Reliability" on non-Interstate NHS includes
a lot of "non-highway"

You may remember a while back some comment on this measure (and even earlier on the first pass at new streets to be included in the NHS):

[T]he majority of non-Interstate NHS facilities defined within the SKATS boundary, and likely in most MPOs in the country, provide for the movement of traffic within an urban area including the distribution to lower-order roads. Often these roads have sidewalks and bike lanes and serve adjacent land uses, both residential and commercial/industrial uses, via driveways and other curb cuts....

A performance measure that focuses solely on the reliability of vehicular travel time in such a setting is potentially directing investment that could damage the urban fabric of the area and diminish the livability along the corridor. A more nuanced measure is necessary in such situations.

The networks of streets, especially those designated as minor arterials (update - see map below and clarification in comments), in the NHS is overbroad and autoist performance measures may degrade them or keep us from making useful adjustments to them.

Finally, in administrative adjustments, a couple of project changes of interest here:

• The Mill Street RR crosswalk between the Depot and the Mill at the end of the Esplanade is slipping out and preliminary engineering won't start to next year - so construction will move out even farther.
• 12th Street signal project - which I think is at Marion and associated with the Union Street Bikeway project - is also moving the engineering phase out a year.

Look for the historic sign
next to the entry

You can download the agenda and meeting packet here.

SKATS Policy Committee meets Tuesday the 28th, at noon. SKATS is at 100 High St. SE, Suite 200, above Little Owl Kitchen and Table Five 08.

Addendum, August 29th

Safe Routes to Schools submitted comment on the Legislative Priorities.

From the August 28th letter to SKATS

And here's a clip from Map 3-10 in the 2015/2016 RTSP. The roads in black are "principal arterials" and therefore part of the National Highway System. Some of these are dangerous roads for walking and biking, and I stand by the criticism that measuring vehicular-miles (they are not truly "person-miles," not until persons traveling by bus, on foot, or on bike are included!) that are "reliable" is potentially harmful.

Principal Arterials and NHS from
2015/2016 RTSP, Map 3-10