City Council, February 12th - Better Crosswalk Safety

For Monday's Council meeting, Councilor Stapleton has a motion for a downtown safety study:

I move to direct staff to conduct a study to gather recommendations to increase pedestrian and bicycle safety and access within Salem’s downtown core, specifically including an analysis of pedestrian lead times at intersections and the feasibility of reducing speed limits to 20 MPH. The study should build upon the recommendations from the Central Salem Mobility Study and be coordinated with work on designating downtown as a Walkable Mixed-Use Area, implementation of Vision Zero, and associated updates to the Salem Transportation System Plan (Salem in Motion). This study should also consider impacts and timing for the new paid parking implementation and any needed updates to SRC 95.710, 95.740, 100.230 and 101.100.

Featured image with the Feds!

Though Councilor Stapleton's motion does not use the specific language of "leading pedestrian interval," the motion's language certainly suggests it. 

The Federal Highway Administration's page on leading pedestrian intervals leads with an image at the Capitol. Salem must have some of them! But when I am crossing a street, I am monitoring for cars and drivers, and not paying attention to the light sequencing, so I have no idea how many intersections downtown and elsewhere might employ them. It's not clear whether we need more of them downtown, or whether we need to lengthen the walk-only phase on existing ones.

For more on them see:

• US Department of Transportation (more traditional)
  
• National Assocation of City Transportation Officials (more progressive)
  

The study envisioned by Councilor Stapleton might also consider places where all-way pedestrian scramble signals might be appropriate, where crosswalks should be raised within speed tables, where count-down timers might be prompting last-second speeding by drivers rather than helping people on foot, and other kinds of incremental improvements to crosswalk function. Make walking delightful!

Here are some people killed while on foot or at rest near sidewalk areas in the last few years. Several were within crosswalks. I do not know of any killed by drivers recently while bicycling downtown (one death involved a train), but this may be because very few bike downtown as it is so forbidding.

• Robert Duane Marshall (Center and High)
• Denise Marie Vandyke (State and High)
• Jowand Beck, Luke Kagey, Joe Posada III, and Rochelle Zamacona (camping on Front between Union and Division)  
• Marlene Moreno (Center and High)
  
• Rodric Kenyon Drolshagen (State and Front)
• Marshall Leslie (12th and Center)
  

Using a broader analysis, including car crashes without people on foot or on bike, the MPO lists seven of the top 20 high crash corridors downtown.

Seven of 20 worst corridors (SKATS)

They are:

• Commercial Street
• Wallace Road
• Marion Street
• Center Street
  
• Liberty Street
• Union Street
• High Street
  

They are the usual suspects, with Union and High also. (And you could include Market Street, even.)

The project would also be a chance to make a wider reassessment of the downtown mobility study. Some parts we should accelerate, and others perhaps revise.

10 year vision

It was adopted formally by Council in August of 2013, so it is totally appropriate to check the 10-year recommndations.

• Light at Commercial and Union? ✔ Sharrows on Union Street? ✔✔ We exceeded that!
• Sharrows on Winter Street downtown? ⛔ Not close.
• Bike lanes on High and Church? ✔
• Cottage two-way? ⛔ Not close.
• Dual turn lane removal? ✔ (most of them anyway)
  

Making State and Court Two-way is a goal

What about the 15 year horizon?

• Court Street two-way with bike lanes? Some kind of very partial credit. ¼ credit? No bike lanes, about half of it two-way.
• State Street two-way with bike lanes? Ditto with ¼ credit.
• (The Union Street is a carry-over from the 10 year list.)
  

Union St Bikeway out on 25 year horizon

And what about the quarter-century recommendations?

• Union Street will be done. ✔ Maybe not as thoroughly, as some hoped, but a real bikeway will be in place.
• There are no firm plans yet for any State Street bikeway, any Winter Street bikeway, or two-way conversion for High and Church Streets. ⛔

Salem Bike vision has a somewhat different idea for downtown. They place more stress on Marion/Center and Liberty/Commercial couplets, and much less stress on Winter and Chemeketa Streets.

More

And there is the current ODOT project for downtown, emphasizing buffered bike lanes, with one stretch of multi-use path, and also some new or enhanced crosswalks.

Downtown State Highways

There's a real chance to coordinate these better, really get behind a vision, and then to accelerate changes, some of them incremental and less costly, others more substantial and requiring more of a capital investment. It should be easy and comfortable to walk and bike downtown!

People routinely bike too fast in Minto Park

Also on the agenda, and at least conceptually related, is the annual report of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. One of the bullets is researching policy on e-bikes and other micro-mobility like bike rental and scooter rentals. This is great, but we need to talk about scorching in the parks. People bike too fast and hog space, even kind adults who think they are going "slowly." The path system isn't really wide enough for both user groups. And the reason that kitted up adults bike in Minto, even train in Minto, is because our street system, where they belong, can be terrifying and generally sucks.

"Pass with care" from 2018

We should not let the dominance of cars on the roads push people cycling onto the parks path system and in turn dominate people walking. Our climate goals call for less driving. Drivers are the user group who should be inconvenienced, and walking and biking made delightful. Currently we have it backwards.

Other agenda items will be in a separate post this weekend.