On December 19th at about 2:30 in the afternoon, a driver struck and killed Denise Marie Vandyke as she attempted to cross State Street at the intersection with High Street, just below the offices of her employer, our local Council of Governments, which also staffs and hosts our Metropolitan Planning Organization, SKATS.
The Policy Committee for SKATS meets on Tuesday the 24th, and so far the MPO is largely silent on any public acknowledgement of Vandyke's death, and on the ongoing road safety crisis that precipitated it and provides context for the cause of her death. There was a brief quote in the Salem Reporter piece, but no statements on the COG website, social media, or MPO meeting agenda. In a monthly email earlier this month they posted a job notice, which is, I believe, to replace Vandyke. Even in a pro-forma, ritual way, there was no acknowledgement of the loss and reason for the job posting. The announcement of the annual dinner for the COG has no note of a special tribute or anything.
The silence is odd. Maybe there are good reasons for it. Certainly they have personal mourning and trauma to process. I am sure there is plenty of private conversation. But as a public agency charged with framing policy and allocating funding on transportation and safety, they would find it reasonable to have more to say in a public-facing way.
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| There's a safety plan starting up |
They're even cranking up a Metropolitan Safety Action Plan study, and the crash and death would provide an introduction all too relevant, a way to stay focused on the real human costs of safety failures. It could be an opportunity for introspection and a total reassessment of our approach to speed, road safety, and car dependency. It could be galvanizing.
It's not the first time this corner and building has seen a crash.
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| The corner has been a problem: In October 2016, a person drove into Table508, now Epilogue Kitchen via Twitter |
As it is, from outside the silence looks like too-hasty reversion to business as usual, a little bit of the memory-hole for an unpleasant fact.
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| NY Times front page earlier this month |
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| Intro to Chapter 7 of the MTP |
On the agenda is a review of Chapter 7 of the long-range draft Metropolitan Transportation Plan.
After seeing several iterations of the document, first as RTSP and now as MTP, it is hard to see the constructive function of the document (distinct from its function as a regulatory requirement). The actual funding and policy decisions are executed under the four-year cycle of the short-term plan. This long-range plan compiles a long list of projects that might be funded with "reasonably anticipated" funding, but it says nothing about the order of projects funded and also has no guarantees that projects will be funded.
Some projects are excluded from "anticipated" funding, and these are categorized as "illustrative" projects rather than "included" projects, but that subgroup is on the margins and not central.
Any definiteness comes in the short-term plan rather than this longer-term plan.
In any event, the shape of the whole document is wrong. It purports to forecast travel demand and congestion from employment and population estimates.
But we have another thing to forecast now.
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| Comments in November from 350.org |
As our 350.org chapter points out, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce vehicle miles traveled. We need to take our emissions and mileage goals and back into the transportation system that will get us to meeting those goals.
Instead, we take our current norms for car travel and simply project those forward. If we actually build out this system for 2050 or whatever year, we will have failed very grandly to meet our climate moment. The document has essential failure baked into it.
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| Projections for congested streets |
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| Still stuck on the SRC in November |
Our travel demand instead needs to count people rather than cars. It remains dumb that our approach to "levels of service" and to "volume/capacity" measures counts one bus with 20 people the same as one car with one person.
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| Shifting from counting cars to "person-trips" |
We should count people, as in this suggestion for "person-trips" from Moving from Cars to People.
The document is necessary for regulatory requirements and formally constrained by them. But as a constructive policy document for local government, it does not match up very well with our local needs.
As a footnote, a table of categories looks useful.
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| Categories of projects |
It is helpful to have "urban standards" distinguished from "urban standards with center turn lanes," for example.
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| January meeting information |
The Policy Committee meets on Tuesday the 24th at noon. The agenda and meeting packet can be downloaded here.
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