Missed the Workshops? Our Salem Interactive Map now Online

The City and consultant team have just published an interactive map that roughly duplicates the mapping charette conducted in the recent workshops.

Placing the pins is a little awkward

It is in truth a little awkward and complicated, and you will have to futz with it some to get the hang of it. You might also tire and give up before you've completed making your notes and marking your ideas.

The good news is, it looks like you can chop your attention into multiple slices: Make a few notes, step away for a while, and return to make more notes. Rinse and repeat.

On the pins that have been placed, and on the discussion about the charettes we've seen, it has seemed like our notions about any kind of commercial zoning, including mixed-use concepts, are still limited by our previous deployments along major arterials.

Activity Nodes and Corridors from 2006

Here you can see Edgewater Street; Wallace, River, Portland, Silverton Roads; Lancaster Drive, Mission Street, Commercial Street, bit of Liberty Road out south. All the higher intensity marks are on the big stroads. Edgewater's really the only exception.

But if we want truly walkable neighborhoods, we will have to put more pockets of commercial and multi-family housing at the crossroads of mere collector streets, inside the residential districts themselves. Perhaps even some local streets will need a kind of upzoning. A small neighborhood pub or grocery will also need more housing to provide its customers, and more missing middle housing will be necessary also.

As you think about putting pins in, think about neighborhoods you know, and realistic distances for short trips of walking and biking.

The notion that we can retrofit South Commercial or Lancaster for walkable mixed-use development and that this might be sufficient is not very likely to be true.