Placing the SRC in the MTP and Review of Cherriots Plan: At the MPO

Finally some reckoning for the failed Salem River Crossing. The Policy Committee for our local Metropolitan Planning Organization will consider vestigial elements of the Salem River Crossing in revisions to Chapters five and nine of the forthcoming long-range 2023 Metropolitan Transportation Plan.

Incorporating the SRC "No Build" decision in MTP

The changes generally shift the discussion from the relative definiteness of the "needs and gaps" chapter to the more speculative and uncertain nature of the "outstanding issues" chapter. On balance this is good! 

NY Times today

But there's still no real acknowledgement of the Climate Action Plan and our need to reduce driving and VMT. The passive fatalism of "It is expected that...trips traveling across the bridges will increase...." is a denial of our need to manage actively and positively to actual reductions in car trips across the bridges and everywhere in the Salem area.

We aren't yet managing to plan for reduced trips

I hadn't seen an updated chart of bridge traffic counts recently, so that was helpful.

Latest on bridge traffic counts

But we still treat the counts as if we are helpless to alter them, and cannot manage actively to reduce them. Traffic as a rising tide against which we are helpless. Well, that's not true.

Cherriots Long Range Plan

Also on the agenda is the Cherriots draft Long Range Plan, though more informally than any action item:

The SKATS Policy Committee are not being asked to approve the document, but rather, review and provide feedback to Cherriots whose board of directors is scheduled to adopt the final document at their December 15, 2022, meeting.

Future service map

The Plan is being emailed separately, and is not in the agenda packet. Cherriots also has not published the plan independently on the project page. It's a little weird how buried the thing is right now. If you want to read it, you have to find it in the Board packet for November 17th. (Previous notes here, also.)

Since Thursday, a few more things have stood out.

The emerging neighborhood and area names are useful. I have lumped the Gaia and Mill Creek industrial areas together as new office park development on the city edges, but there might be contexts in which it is useful to distinguish them, and Gaia and Mill Creek are useful short names. With the housing and commercial development around the old Pringle School and the new Costco, Fabry-Battle Creek also seems useful, especially with the affordable housing projects (more to say on that later). I prefer the old Mushroom Plant over East Park Estates, but maybe that will get memory-holed - which is itself a reason to preserve the older name. The State Hospital area does not seem to have a label.

By the old Mushroom Plant, the core network highlighting seems to omit a segment of route 11 on Lancaster. If that's a gap in the future frequent service, that would be good to know about.

But the plan does not directly engage Our Salem and its changes to Salem planning. The words "Our Salem" don't appear at all in the Cherriots' Plan. This seems like a real omission. The blue line for "improved cross town connections" traces out a north-south alignment along north River Road and along south Commercial, but it does not directly engage the new zoning.

New zoning in Our Salem

Perhaps more alarming, since it could be said plausibly that there is a vague kind of indirect acknowledgement of Our Salem in the Plan, the explicit discussion of the Climate Action Plan, three instances of the phrase only, is about EV mania only. Nothing about increased ridership.

Nothing about increased ridership?

Scenario 1 (2035) call for 4x increase in ridership

I know that Cherriots covers more than just Salem, but it is principally located in Salem, and neither Our Salem nor the Climate Action Plan are very well integrated into the Cherriots Plan.

If Cherriots has identified tension with the two Salem plans, it would be more useful to have that tension highlighted so it can be subject to analysis and debate, and not discreetly passed over in silence. Cherriots is not solely responsible for any increase in ridership, but they should be discussing more explicitly how the long-range goal assists with that, and what more from other jurisdictions and entities may be necessary. The general tone of any discussion about ridership is responsive and reactive, passive again, and not much active on creating demand or ridership.

As a whole, for a big long-range plan, the draft Plan that is on the table for Cherriots seems rather thin.

Other items

ODOT is planning on sprinkling ADA curb ramps all over! But we've already seen that the ones on Wallace Road/OR-221 are deployed nonsensically without supporting crosswalk enhancements. This may be a spiteful kind of compliance with the ADA lawsuit.

For 738 new curb ramps in the SKATS area

And it should be noted that the McGilchrist project already has very significant cost overruns. This is just for the intersection with 22nd, and is not the full length of McGilchrist.

Cost overrun on McGilchrist already

The Policy Committee meets at noon on Tuesday the 22nd. The agenda and meeting packet can be downloaded here.