The City's teased the first Open House on the Cordon-Kuebler Corridor Study, which will start on the 23rd.
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| The study area in teal |
The whole is classified a "parkway" and currently intended for four auto travel lanes and high speed as a near-highway. This study is very likely merely to refine that and also to green it with a multimodal wash. At the moment, it does not appear consistent with our climate goals.
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| Current City of Salem Parkway standard in TSP |
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| The "parkway" classification calls for four auto lanes and highway auto speeds (photo from project site, comments added) |
The City frames it up as "planning for future growth" and improving "current conditions, safety, and capacity concerns." The post is very popular with lots of sharing and comment. The algorithm selects "Cordon road need to be a 4 lane road with middle turn lanes and not reducing the speed limit" and puts this comment at the top. At a glance, all but one comment share this basic frame. A need to widen Cordon is an article of faith for many.
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| via FB |
However, now that we know the proportion of emissions from driving, and we know we need not just to electrify the fleet but also to reduce total auto miles driven, it makes no sense to plan for this large capacity increase with the old assumptions.
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| Widening doesn't help with reduced driving |
How is widening Cordon Road going to get us to Scenario 1, let alone Scenario 2?
The public intro to the study doesn't mention climate:
The Cordon Road/Kuebler Boulevard Corridor Study aims to develop a multimodal corridor plan and an access management strategy that outlines a cohesive and consistent vision that encourages desired land development, accommodates future growth, and creates a safe and enjoyable travel experience for users of all ages and abilities. The project will also include community involvement to assure the design plan is consistent with the needs of key stakeholders (including neighborhoods, schools, and businesses).
They have published a technical memo on operations analysis, and it doesn't mention climate either. Instead, it asserts we should plan for a 2% annual increase of traffic, and plots the congestion and "failing" levels of service we need to solve through widening.
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| Planning for 2% annual increase |
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| Plotting intersections at or near "failure" |
What we are setting up is a whole analysis and planning process that uses our 20th century assumptions for constantly increasing driving.
Then, very late in the process, we will decide we need to factor in climate and emissions reductions. Since these considerations were not integral from the start, they will be layered on awkwardly and superficially, a Potemkin performance for appearance.
A little over a decade ago, we saw the playbook on the SRC.
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| We won't let reducing driving get in the way (October, 2008) |
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| We'll just "assume" a reduction happens (February, 2009) |
The planning for this process will also seek to "demonstrate fairly and conservatively the independent need for highway improvements" and then much later to backfill some climate stuff, they'll wash it with some assumptions for reduction in travel, without actually planning for them in any central way.
The proper procedure, of course, is to ask "In order to hit our climate goals, what level of driving do we need to see on Cordon/Kuebler?" And then ask, "What changes do we need to make in order to attain this?" There needs to be a deductive, top-down element to the study, of planning and managing to the climate goal.
But what we will see instead is a retrospective, inductive method. "Based on 20th and early 21st century driving patterns, conservatively we see demand for more driving, and so we need capacity increase to satisfy this demand." And then sidewalks and bike lanes and transit and other climate elements will be secondary additions in the left-over space, very discretionary.
The process is principally a County one, not a City one, so they will be much less inclined to address climate than even the City. Still, at the very start, the assumptions and framework are inconsistent with our urgent needs on climate.
Once the survey is published there will be more to say. (See previous posts here.)
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| May 13th: A bad fire season already |
1 comment:
It all comes down to money — the constitutional dedication of gas tax revenue to “highway purposes” means that we essentially removed this huge river of money from all democratic control forever, so there’s no point in being surprised that the system that it funds further acts to keep itself expanding forever.
We have only two options:
1) Eliminate the constitutional dedication of gas taxes to fund only highway purposes and put all gas tax revenue in the same pot as all other revenues that can be spent for programs; or
2) We extend the dedication to insist that ONLY gas taxes can be spent on highway purposes, and nothing that can be funded with gas tax revenue can be funded with revenue from other places (like property tax).
The system we have is the worst of all worlds — it’s what powered the carburban experiment that has to end or that will end us.
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