Earlier this month at a Cherriots Board meeting, they saw some drawings for the future South Salem Transit Center. Early workshopping had settled on a concept they called the "diamond" plan.
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| Overall site plan concept (click to enlarge) |
The driveway entries are off of Wiltsey road, and the small office building is in the northwest corner of diamond.
It's supposed to be a "mobility hub." What about bikes?
The bike parking appears to be clustered at the office building, 8 racks under an awning and 12 racks exposed. There might be some bike lockers there also.
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| Detail on deployment of bike racks (red and yellow notes added) |
And how do you get to them?
If people on bike are not permitted to use the bus driveway and its direct connection to the street, then accessing the bike racks requires sidewalk biking or, more likely, a complete dismount to walk a bike.
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| On the sidewalk and isolated (2013) |
This was a real problem at the Keizer Transit Center, and showed ways that bicycling was too secondary, something fitted in last, and not any primary focus.
At first glance, this concept for the South Salem Transit Center appears again to treat biking as a kind of walking, and not anything vehicular.
As the site plan concept goes out to a wider public for comment, this is something to pay close attention to: Is Cherriots really committed to bicycling and other modal travel?
Additionally, there does not seem to be any evidence on the drawings (or in the laconic "minutes" to the Work Session in tonight's meeting packet) that Cherriots is coordinating with the City of Salem for a new Library or for housing. There are opportunities to leverage the site for multiple uses! This too is something to watch as the project develops and matures.
3 comments:
One reason the architect gave for "sidewalk biking" is that this will put the bikes next to the security office, so under supervision all day.
Which is important for a place where get each you to park your bike for extended amounts of time while you use the bus for longer trips.
It works for increasing last mile usage.
A bigger concern I have is that there are so few biking spots.
A transit center of that size could have thousands of trips, planning for only 1% of rides starting or ending by bike might be severely underestimating possible usage, as the Netherlands have shown. This might lead to bikes being put into the walk ways.
But I imagine that expanding bike parking would be a good problem for the transit center to have
Perhaps I did not underline it sufficiently, but I am less interested in the location of the bike racks, the end point, which as you point out is totally logical, than in the circulation system that connects between street and racking.
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