Sustainable City Year Program Bike Presentations and Final Reception June 4th

Do you remember the SMILE lane concept from 2018/19?

The SMILE lane with stencil -
Michael Dooley and Daisy Jones, via UO

Probably not. It was generated by University of Oregon students when the rental scooters were popular and it was becoming clear that e-mobility needed greater consideration.

Five years later we might focus more on e-bikes.

But the problem remains the same. The mix of urban micromobility is changing and the electrified versions intensify conflicts with people walking on the sidewalks and paths. At the same time, more exposed users of the roadway deserve separation and protection from those in cars.

The bike lane needs to grow, both conceptually to accommodate users of electronic assist, and in width to accommodate a wider range of users at variable speeds.

The SMILE lane was a concept potentially useful in both.

The City's announced

the UO Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP) Bicycle Planning class final presentations next Tuesday, June 4, from 3:30-4:30 pm at Center 50+. Students will be presenting 18 projects displayed on posters showcasing ideas to improve bicycling in Salem. Members of the community will then be invited to interact with students, ask questions, and engage in their ideas. We’d love a big crowd of Salem bicycle advocates to connect with the students, so please help us spread the word to your networks.

Following the poster session, we will have a brief program (starting at 4:30) highlighting the over 20 classes that conducted applied projects over the academic year. Light refreshments will be available.

Here are three questions to consider.

Particular attention to Front and Edgewater

Sidewalkification: Shared paths vs. on-street protected lanes

Especially in light of recent conversation on Battle Creek Road and the sidewalkification of bicycling, it will be interesting to learn whether students leaned more towards path solutions or to in-street protected bike lane solutions.

Support for Splash Pads is a Kind of Climate Action: Notes on the Climate Action Plan Committee

Though it has not occasioned much comment at all, last month in the course of the Budget Committee meetings, it came out that the City apparently is shifting formal support for the Climate Action Plan from the General Fund to the Utility Fund.

September 2021

Shifting CAP funding from General Fund

Comments in supplemental reports were not clear that that ending support from the General Fund had a corresponding move to increase funding from the Utility Fund for the CAP. (See comment below for a little more. It would be nice to read more explicit discussion of this rather than having to comb through a line item buried in a set of spreadsheets! In fact, in the folder of agenda and reports for the Budget Committee, there's no obvious document that is the latest version of the budget. It's hard to follow the process. See the addendum below, also.)

Happily, a couple days ago the Committee restored funding for water service and splash pads during the summer in our parks. People flocked to support the splash pads, and several public comments in support of them cited heat events.

Front page today on heat and budget

There could be a stronger thread for climate through the budget conversations.

On Monday the 13th the Climate Action Plan meets.

City Council, January 22nd - Urban Renewal, Climate, Baseball

Urban Renewal is in the air. We've discussed it here a little in response to a note at our Strong Towns Group, and on Monday Council will receive a summary overview.

Two slides from the URA report

For each URA there's a list of recent "key accomplishments." The lists show some of the range of projects urban renewal funding supports. It's a good start to reporting and does show that the way Salem uses URA funding currently is far from old-school "slum clearance" style Urban Renewal.

But the lists also give selective detail. The amount of URA funding is not given, nor a proportion to total project cost. The downtown slide shows the New Holman Hotel, but that is also in an Opportunity Zone and there are multiple, stacked incentives and subsidies in play for it. Is it really a success for Urban Renewal? Some projects are developer incentives to make difficult projects simply happen, some are more likely developer slush, some are City capital projects. It would be helpful to know about the proportions of each, and some judgements about when incentives were actually essential. That Park Front Office building was definitely a non-essential instance, an instance of slush.

Critically, the summaries don't give any assessment for whether Urban Renewal works for each area (as distinct from funding a shopping list of projects). The City still refuses to report on the initial tax base inside the URA, the appreciation in value of nearby property over the relevant time interval, and the new tax base inside the URA. Does it in fact boost the total value of the URA? Does the tax increment represent anything more than citywide appreciation in value?

Who knows!

At least on the now closed Pringle Creek URA, it certainly looked like the URA's assessed value failed to surpass doing nothing. It underperformed inflation!

What the City does say, as I read it, is that in a hypothetical, if you closed all the URAs (which I don't think is possible since they have debt to service), the City would receive about $6.7 million annually in property tax revenue that currently gets redirected to the the URAs. So that's the gap they create for the City.

There are a few interesting bits, among them the start and end dates for each area.

The City established the downtown URA in 1975 and it's now scheduled to close in 2041.

By contrast, the City established the North Gateway URA in 1990 and it's scheduled to close in 2026.

The West Salem URA has dates of 2001 - 2027.

McGilchrist URA has dates of 2007 - 2024.

Just generally our Urban Renewal scheme needs more analysis and discussion. By itself the item at Council is insufficient, but maybe it will get things started.

• Recently, "City's Lack of Reporting Hides Range of Urban Renewal Projects"
  

Four Transportation items in Report

There's a Climate Action Plan annual report for 2023. We've already remarked on most of these of interest here.

Climate Action Plan Committee Starts off in Idle in 2024

The Climate Action Plan Committee also meets on Monday the 8th, and the minutes from the December meeting are deflating.

Remember the irony from September 2020?

The PR campaign from the Sustainable Cities Residency decided to focus on the old canard and distraction of idling.

The idling canard

VMT reduction is the goal!

Morningside, SCAN, Parks - Bits on Fairview, High Street, Sustainable Cities

Though meetings are slowing down and wrapping up for the year, three meetings this week had surprisingly interesting meeting agenda and packets.

Fairview Park, Fairview Hills, The Woods

Morningside Neighborhood Association meets on Wednesday the 13th, and they'll hear a "Fairview Hills Refinement Plan Presentation." 

A decade ago the "Fairview Hills" plan was called the "Simpson Hills" plan, and then it went on hiatus. 

Simpson Hills July 2012 Refinement Plan (detail)

With a lot more now built out at Fairview, including immediately adjacent areas, it's reasonable to suppose the owners, or new owners, want to revive the project. It will be great to learn more about this.

They'll also hear a brief update on Fairview Park planning.

At the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board (more below on it), it sounds like sentiment for the park might be shifting in favor of fewer hardscaped recreation features and for more trails, trees, and open space. 

But there's already the plan to keep "The Woods" as natural space. A more built-up park, with splash pad, ball field, volleyball/pickleball court, things like that, to complement it is reasonable, especially since it will be a "community park" for wider use, not just a neighborhood park intended for local use.

That will be something to follow more closely as it develops.

Climate Action Plan Committee to see Student Public Relations Project

Yesterday the paper featured on the front page (but not at all online) a new warning from "legendary climate scientist James Hansen": Things are heating up faster than the current standard forecasts say.

Front page yesterday

On Monday our own Climate Action Plan Committee meets, and they might consider more strongly the urgency expressed in this comment from Hansen.

LA Times, Thursday

On their agenda are several items that do not seem to communicate much urgency.

from the UO SCI Open House last month

One item on the agenda is part of the University of Oregon Sustainable Cities residency. It is focused on "public relations," and an ongoing concern here is that the City fundamentally sees response to our Climate Crisis as a problem of public relations rather than a problem of reducing emissions.

from draft 2023 Annual Report

It also appears to repeat the frame of individual responsibility, which you will recall is a discourse of delay.

Sustainable Cities Residency Kicks-off Wednesday with Open House

On Wednesday the 11th, the City and University of Oregon are kicking off the public phase of the Sustainable City residency program at Peace Plaza. (With the current weather, it seems very possible they will move indoors to the Anderson rooms.)

Kick-off and Open House flier

One of the classes of particular interest here is a GIS course in the Geography department. Geography 482/582 will conduct "walkability and corridor assessments."

Walk Score for Salem

There is already Walk Score, which could be refined. A full service grocery store nearby is more valuable than a convenience store, and the algorithm may not fully account for this. Equally, a big box store with ample sidewalk connectivity but bounded by zoomy stroads, is less walkable than a somewhat smaller store on less busy streets. There are qualitative nuances that probably could be added to the algorithm. Walkability isn't just about destinations and raw proximity, it is also about quality of connection.

EV Mania, RR Balkiness, Climate Disconnect, Sustainable Cities Residency: Bits

Things are a little slow at the moment, so here are bits, some of them perhaps to revisit in more detail later.

On Thursday, Eugene Weekly had a charming story about a man's conversion of a vintage car from gasoline to electric.

On Thursday

It didn't give enough attention to significant details about the batteries, though.

“The two Tesla batteries add 600 pounds of weight to the car,” Diethelm says, opening the front bonnet to display one of them. It looks like a rectangular high-tech suitcase with very sharp corners lying inside the otherwise empty compartment. The other battery is behind the rear seat, for weight distribution. That all makes the car heavier than it used to be. “So I had disc brakes put on.”

We don't talk enough about the materials and mining for the batteries, or about the increased safety hazard and lethality from the additional weight. What is the social utility of conversions like this? As a hobby and kind of nostalgia it's great, though also expensive, but as an emblem of any approach to climate, the benefits are more private than public.

City Council, June 26th - Sustainable Cities Initiative and Vision Zero

Holy smokes, Council has a ton of interesting items on the agenda for Monday. Some of them we've previewed a little this week already, and they'll be in a second post over the weekend.

Fascinating is the return of the Sustainable Cities Initiative this fall for the next school year. 

You may recall the project back in 2010-2011. We'll come back to think a little more about it later this summer.

• The City's archived the reports here. 

One thing that immediately comes to mind is that the analytical mapping projects yielded more directly useful information than the more free-wheeling vision projects for entire neighborhoods.

One of the smaller projects was "Accurately Modeling Salem’s Bike Network in ArcGIS" by Michael Duncan, Kory Northrop, and Ted Sweeney.

The project modeled

bicycle routes along the parts of roadways where bicycles actually travel, and measures the level of fear associated with each section of the bicycle network. The dataset can be used to compare cycling routes through the city based on how scary they are, which can help guide infrastructure investment to increase the comfort levels of all bicyclists.

Anticipated "Level of Stress" analysis

This general concept is used now by transportation planning consultants, and the students were out in front of that a little bit. Their use of GIS technology seemed to be advanced relative to many professional traffic planners and engineers, and this might be an area for the City to ask SCI to lean into.

O'Brien analysis

By contrast, the ideas for the O'Brien parcel were abandoned with the Police Station, and related projects for Second Street in West Salem and the Epping parcel off Portland Road have not much corresponded to actual redevelopment.