Salem-Keizer Transportation Safety Plan needs more on Speed, not just Speeding

Yesterday our Metropolitan Planning Organization announced the release of the draft Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan.

On Monday they will start taking comment on it.

We will have an online Open House outlining the major plan elements and asking for your feedback which will be listed here when open. The Open House runs August 5th through August 14th.

Draft Plan, August 2024

While one of its 16 recommendations is for more automated photo speed enforcement, it does not give enough attention to speed generally, including lawful, posted speed. The seed of the idea is there, but it is not developed and centered enough.

"Kinetic energy" sounds like military talk

The plan employs a "safe system" structure, which on the whole is a positive development. But it still bogs down sometimes in jargon, and this often corresponds to weakness in the analysis itself. One moment of jargon is the shift from talking about speed to "kinetic energy." From a pure scientific description of the energy in collisions this might be reasonable, but it also sounds like something borrowed from military jargon and a euphemism for warfare.

When we talk about speed and anything kinetic, we are talking about the speed of drivers and cars. We are not talking about the kinetic energy of a person on foot or even a person on bike. This jargon obfuscates, and diffuses responsibility from the drivers and the safe operation of motor vehicles onto "shared responsibility."

2 lanes or 4 lanes is not the best variable

So when the analysis dwells on lane count as a key road characteristic and variable in crashes, it evades the question of driver speed.

Killed at 40mph in 2020

A driver apparently operating lawfully at 40mph on Doaks Ferry Road, two lanes wide, struck Selma Pierce as she attempted to cross. Posted speed and design speed, not mainly the count of lanes itself, is an important variable here. At a more reasonable urban speed of 25mph, it is likely that stopping distance and time would have been sufficient to avert catastrophe. Any crash would likely not have been lethal.

At a crash site, via Twitter (2023)

A driver killed Denise Vandyke, an employee of the COG/MPO, in a crosswalk right below their offices! But you'd never know it from the draft safety plan. A little over a year ago, a Director of Cherriots and the COG briefly alluded to the crash and death, but that loss hasn't been revisited and doesn't seem to have given the plan any extra urgency. As with the word "kinetic," there is too much abstraction in the analysis, and we need to attend more closely to actual cases, crashes, and deaths.

There is real grief here, and the plan should take more care to honor that. It should be ok to acknowledge grief as an ingredient in the moral case for better safety. It is a matter of public health, and also a personal one of grief.

There is random variation and luck involved in crashes, and we cannot dwell exclusively on the particulars of any one crash, of course. Aggregate pattern is important. But the balance is off here.

Back to the particulars of the plan, paired with the recommendation for photo speed enforcement should be a much larger discussion and recommendations for general and systemic speed reduction throughout the urban area.

More automated photo enforcement

It's in there, but buried!

"Manage vehicle speeds"

"Reduce vehicle travel speeds"
and "encourage slower speeds"

In the "safety emphasis areas" reducing speed gets what amounts to footnotes, and it should instead be a central and pervasive theme in every section.

Crashes on our busy streets correlate with speed

Crashes and deaths cluster on our busy stroads. Many are posted for 35 and 40mph, sometimes even more. With the allowance of 11mph over for ticketing, as well as the general engineering conventions on design speed, the 85th and 50th percentile speeds are often meaningfully higher than the posted speeds. Degradation in safety doesn't just happen when there's a death or serious injury. It happens also when someone who might like to walk or bike or bus, chooses instead to drive because the non-auto choice seems perilous.

Speed on our high crash corridors

We need to be looking at not just "speeding" or even speed at impact in crashes, but also system speeds. A measure of speed should be included at every road segment as a key part of the safety analysis.

Until we do a better job at centering speed, making progress will remain difficult.

Crashes are increasing

Earlier this month a driver crashed into a storefront at the mall. Drivers routinely crash into large, highly visible objects off the roadway. It happens all the time. Drivers, driving, and speed are the primary elements in the "kinetic energy" of crashes. That should be more explicit in our analysis.

Storefronts aren't safe; it's not a pedestrian's fault

See previous notes on the MTSAP, especially, "Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan should focus more on Speed". Next week during the Open House there will likely be more to say.