1972 Plan for Downtown Featured Plazas, Still Misunderstood Traffic

One of the pernicious myths about traffic is that we can redirect or channelize traffic in order to save other places from traffic.

We see this in our street heirarchy, in which we channelize traffic to collectors and arterials in order to shelter local streets.

We see this in parkways, bypasses, and beltlines, all aimed at channelizing traffic for efficient flow and to remove it from other places.

Back in 1972 there was here an early version of this. The "Central Salem Development Program" envisioned multiple plazas downtown on Liberty Street at the intersections with cross streets. While Liberty was not envisioned as fully pedestrianized and closed to car traffic, it was understood as a slow street and appears to have chicanes on it even.

Detail, downtown - Feb. 29th, 1972

To provide the shelter for those plazas, it relied on a traffic plan focused on the Front Street bypass and Pringle Parkway. It also would have routed more traffic on the High/Church couplet, and blasted through a continuation of 12th Street north of Safeway.

The CSDP traffic plan would remove through traffic from Commercial and Liberty Streets and thus allow more convenient parking, more landscaping and better pedestrian environment in the retail core. A system of "bikeways" is proposed along the Willamette riverfront, the creeks and some streets.

Detail, traffic plan - Feb 29th, 1972

It also proposed even larger parking garages than we actually built. One of them would have taken out the Grand Theater, for example, and the Chemeketa parkade would go one block further north, taking out the Wilson garage (Santiam Bicycle) and also use the Rite-Aid parking lot. 

Though we did not expand the High/Church couplet or blast 12th street, the Front Street bypass and Pringle Parkway have not removed sufficient traffic from Liberty Street to make those plazas.

In fact, the diversion has likely induced more total traffic, which filled back up the Commercial/Liberty couplet. 

This is the myth of congestion relief. That we can widen and redirect traffic to channelize it to desired places and provide efficient flow.

We see that in contemporary claims for the SRC and for a beltline with Kuebler/Cordon. "If we just built these giant expressways, they would relieve the burden on our smaller streets and provide a safe haven for non-auto traffic." We also see it in neighborhood concerns about cut-through auto traffic.

But nothing here has ever worked this way. As soon as a street seems to enjoy slack traffic with free flow, new traffic and travel fill it up. This is the law of congestion and induced demand.

The solution is less auto traffic and slower traffic, not redirected and channelized traffic.

For a couple of Strong Towns notes on channelizing and our prevailing hydraulic approach see:

• "The Neighborhood Traffic Trade-Off"
• "Traffic Congestion Was Last Century’s Problem"
  

One major weakness in that 1972 plan, and certainly a weakness we have seen in Eugene's failure with their own now fully abandoned pedestrian mall, is even with better theoretical provision for walking and biking, it lacks enough emphasis on housing and neglects the significance of proximity. The emphasis instead is on the bigger parking garages and downtown as a drive-to destination, drawing from more distance residences.

• An overview of the mall
  
• And a brand-new PhD thesis, "A Historical Inquiry into the Failure of Downtown Eugene's Pedestrian Mall," which surfaces an earlier, rejected concept that included mixed auto traffic and was not a pure pedestrian mall. Otto Poticha, on the UO faculty, and one of the principals of the firm behind that rejected concept, still comments on Eugene's downtown and deserves more attention. (His Lane County Public Service Building is an interesting contrast with our own City Hall.)
  

It will be helpful of course to revise our Transportation System Plan, a project that will start in earnest next year.

By making that a fully separate project from Our Salem, however, and not deeply integrating changes to land use and transportation in one synthetic process, we will get transportation as a secondary layer, and may not fully realize the changes necessary to activate the associated and desired land use changes.

Related, see:

• "1979 Front Street Bypass FEIS Shows Errant Assumptions" (2016)
  
• "Why a Beltline Concept for the Bridges was Eliminated" (2018)
  
• "Our Salem Vision and Draft Plan Relies too Much on Arterial Conversion to Mixed-Use" (2020)
  
• "Policy Ideas on Transportation Likely too Weak still in Our Salem" (2021)
  
• "Cherriots and Our Salem should give more Thought to Future BRT" (2022)