Notes on Walk to a Park Day

In the press and city PR for National Walk to a Park Day this week, the City underlined that only half of residents live within a 10 minute walk to a park. Here are some meandering notes on that - a walk, as it were.

Crossing Liberty near Skyline - via FB

Wednesday paper

Proximity alone is not always an inducement or barrier. The quality of a walk matters also! Does it feel comfortable and safe? Often enough a 20 minute walk on pleasant streets beats a 10 minute walk along a dusty, zoomy stroad.

The City said

Salem joins the Trust for Public Lands and its 10-Minute Walk initiative to build quality parks close to home and eliminate the park equity gap.

It would be helpful to learn more about the 51% statistic (and its reciprocal, 49% live within a 10 minute walk). 

The Trust for Public Land itself appears to make a different claim, and suggests 71% of Salem residents live within a 10 minute walk. That's a non-trivial gap of more than 20%!

Trust for Public Land assessment

In the 2013 Parks Master Plan, the deficiencies seemed to be clustered in unincorporated Marion County, east of I-5.

Proposed parks, 2013

Additionally, however, there might be data weirdness. The Trust for Public Land map for Liberty School and Wendy Kroger Park looks very odd. (This cropped up in the first instance of the map from 2020.)

Detail for Liberty School and Wendy Kroger Park

How can this area of high priority (purple) actually touch the corner of Wendy Kroger Park (dark green)? Is there no connection there? I could not tell from maps. It may be that the map is accurately measuring walking distance, and that a lot of roundabout, out-of-direction travel is necessary to reach a park entry.

If that is the case, this also underscores that raw proximity is not always the most important thing. We may not always need more park land; we may just need better connections to existing parks.

The nature and quality of the street system matters!

On the Modern Urban Standard

At top in the capture from the video looking south along Liberty, you can see the modern urban standard: Sidewalks, paint-only bike lanes, two auto travel lanes, and one continuous center turn lane.

New 4/3 Safety Conversion on Broadway NE
(September)

This is the same basic cross-section striped on the new 4/3 safety conversion for Broadway north of Pine Street. 

(These take so long! See in particular:

• After a lengthy application process, the project secured funding in 2016
• After a knowledgeable citizen critique of an extra turn lane the City was attempting to bolt onto the project, Councilor Andersen was able to maintain the three-lane section in 2020)
  

Just north of Liberty School, Skyline was a few years ago widened from two lanes to this three lane section.

That three lane cross-section is everywhere.

Certainly the 4/3 conversion is helpful, but it's less clear that 2/3 widenings are helpful.

A center turn lane is a capacity increase

Even the Feds agree they represent an increase in capacity, calling them "minor roadway expansions."

By widening the road, they induce higher speeds, psychologically through the wider vistas, and hydraulically through the center turn pocket so through-drivers don't have to wait for left-turning drivers.

But even the 4/3 conversions need more. When the City announced the "safer streets" interactive map this week, a person observed "the speed limit on 17th has been reduced to 25 mph and alot of people just ignore it." 17th was one of the very first 4/3 safety conversions here in Salem, and while it is an improvement over a four lane section, it still induces speeding. (See a summary of the change on 17th here, with links to previous discussion.)

We've also seen the problematic three lane cross-section on Mildred Lane right by Bryan Johnston Park.

Larger stroads are more obvious problems. Walking to River Road City Park from the east and southeast is a huge pain. Walking to Bush Park from the west is also a real pain across the Liberty/Commercial couplet. Walking to it from the east is even more difficult with the railroad added to 12th/13th. Some of our biggest stroads (and a parkway with River Road City Park) separate those neighborhoods from the parks.

Edge conditions, connectivity to existing parks, and modern standards that still overvalue car speed and capacity deserve more attention in any claims about walking to parks. It's more than just proximity.

Role of Police

Though it wasn't highlighted much in the walk from Liberty School to Wendy Kroger Park as featured in the City video clip and in the newspaper, Police joined the walk.

Police have also been joining Safe Routes to Schools walks in the past year or two. And in them they've been featured predominantly. Here's an instance from earlier this month.

Copaganda? Or a real contribution to safety?

Parents might like the presence of cops, even ask for them, and their preference deserves significant deference. (And maybe insurers or risk-managers also demand them.)

But the measure of safety isn't when cops are around. The real measure for a safe walk on a safe route is when there are no cops around. Moreover, if cops are necessary to guard against drivers and their cars on these special trips, then there's a problem with drivers and cars.

The drivers and cars need the cop presence and education, not the kids!

"How to speed" video, via Twitter

You may recall an ostensible public service video, with the same officer, that was actually a tutorial on how to speed up to 10mph over a posted limit without getting a ticket.

We would be better served by advocacy for less speeding and lower speed limits than by handing out stickers to kids.

The way Police are deployed for these walks looks more like copaganda than anything that creates durable safety on a route.

This was starkly visible in the promotion for the bike rodeo in August. What is being promoted by this image? (See notes on last year's here.)

Teaching safety? Or riot and crowd control?

Following the deletion of "E for Enforcement," the National Safe Routes Partnership continues not to recommend "automatically" including police.

Police not recommended

Our Safe Routes to School program, and the wider conversation about walking safety, is a little out of step, and this preference deserves more discussion.

Naming Parks and Remembering History

What about Wendy Kroger? Who is Wendy Kroger? Why do we have a park named after her? Shortly after it opened in 2003, Cannery Park was renamed after Kroger. This is recent history, and it is not as widely known as it should be!

August 14th, 2003 (l), July 16th, 1999 (r)

This is an instance of ways our approach to history often fails to activate any narrative or analysis of that history. What's the story? Why does it matter? Who would ever know! That's a topic for another post, but it seemed worth mentioning, since the name and its significance already seemed to be sliding from collective memory.