Legislative Update - Week 1 Proper

Bills needed to be assigned to a committee by yesterday in order to remain alive, and there was considerable fallout.

Additionally, being focused on the budget, the session doesn't look like it will propose anything of real significance for transportation and especially for bicycling. Other transportation advocates and lobbyists don't appear to have highlighted significant bills for support or opposition. (If you know of something, chime in!)

House Bill 4148 with a fee on studded tires has been referred to Ways and Means.

House Bill 4043 on reinstating suspended drivers licenses has also been referred to Ways and Means.

House Bill 4167 would have increased the fines from $25 to $100 for kids who bike without helmets, but that seems to have died without being assigned to a committee.

Bikes and Business: Former Mayor on Salem Business Journal

I'm not exactly sure what this means, but of all the images of former Mayor Janet Taylor the Salem Business Journal might have used, they selected one of her on a bicycle (probably the Eneloop). That's a nice editorial choice for her recognition as First Citizen!

Ron Keleman, who is also receiving a Distinguished Service award, bikes regularly, and has come to B on B occasionally.

You can read the issue here (10mb pdf).

The Long Beach Business Journal just published a story about bike-friendly business districts:

With the assistance from a grant from Los Angeles County, Long Beach has been on the cutting edge of exploring how bicycles can form “Bike-Friendly Business Districts.” These districts can form the core of a local business transportation infrastructure that can solve the problem of improving traffic flow as well as provide side benefits to businesses and residents alike.

Hopefully Salem's businesses will also embrace bicycling as part of a solution to congestion that also improves livability and health - and frequency of customer visits!

Serendipity as Innovation Engine: Mike Nord and Encounters with Strangers

In addition to being a musician and professor Mike Nord is also a regular bike commuter! He is the captain of the Bike Commute Challenge team for Willamette University.

One of the subtexts in Barbara Curtin's profile of him in today's paper is the role of a city in fostering random encounters between strangers that generate culturally and economically useful ideas:

In the mid-1980s, two chance encounters on public transit would change the course of his life.

The first involved the "F" subway train from Brooklyn to Manhattan. We'll let Nord's wife, Ann Kresge, tell this part of the tale:

"I was in grad school, going to the east side of New York City for a graphic design meeting," she said. "He was going to the west side to play in a big band."

Waiting at their Brooklyn subway stop, Nord noticed Kresge's artist's portfolio and started a conversation. They boarded the train together and talked until he got off to change trains in Manhattan.

"I decided to take a risk. I got off, and we started chatting again," said Kresge. "We exchanged phone numbers and got together the next day. We've been together 30 years."

The second encounter happened on on a Manhattan-bound bus where Nord struck up a conversation with fellow musician. The man invited Nord to his home studio, where he was manipulating jazz guitar with electronics.

In a long reflection on the relationship between cities and the social/economic engine of serendipity, Ethan Zuckerman writes

We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected....

If you wanted to encounter a set of ideas that were radically different than your own – say those of a confrontational homeless guy who sleeps in a tub [Diogenes here, but by extension any sort of innovator or gadfly] – your best bet in an era before telecommunications was to move to a city. Cities are technologies for trade, for learning, for worship, but they’re also a powerful communication technologies. Cities enables realtime communication between different individuals and groups and the rapid diffusion of new ideas and practices to multiple communities. Even in an age of instantaneous digital communications, cities retain their function as a communications technology that enables constant contact with the unfamiliar, strange and different....

There were more economic opportunities in cities, especially for the landless poor, and an array of jobs made possible from the international trade that flowed through the ports. For some, the increased intellectual opportunities provided by universities and coffee houses was an attraction, while for others, the opportunity to court and marry outside of closed rural communities was the reason to relocate. Amsterdam built itself to prominence in the 1600s in part by allowing French Huguenots, Spanish and Portuguese Jews and Dutch Catholics to worship relatively freely – such religious tolerance would have been much harder to find in rural areas....

One of the real costs to a transportation system focused on the drive-alone trip is the loss of a large class of random encounters.

Even in an age of twitter and facebook and foursquare, the face-to-face encounter remains important, and as cities strive for economic innovation - as Salem strives for a stronger and more fruitful economy - the "invisible hand" of the marketplace of ideas works best when the same people aren't having the same conversations, over and over. Novelty and the unexpected are critical for innovation, and a robust transportation system that offers mobility choice, and fosters novelty and the unexpected encounter, should be an important ingredient in economic development. Call it "the big sort," a cocoon, or echo chamber - however you say it, the expanse of the same provides comfort and the familiar, but innovation for the future arises most often from the unfamiliar and even the uncomfortable.

40 year or 100 year Flood? Either Way High Water Comes Often to Minto

First they called it a "40-year" event, then a "100-year." I'm pretty sure it was not a 100 year flood. Both the 1996 and 1964 floods, which have been characterised as 100 year events, were much higher.

Unfortunately, the City makes figuring flood elevations rather difficult! There are two gauge scales, and two vertical elevation scales (called a vertical datum). Without specifying a scale - perhaps experts are able to infer the proper one - a number is not very meaningful.

Figuring this out is a handful!

The details of my calculations are here.

The recent flooding raised the Willamette to about 138.5 feet, well below the 100-year mark of 143.7 feet you see here on this elevation detail of the Proposed Minto Bridge and Path.

But even the landing, at just under 132 feet, will often be under high water. The Willamette's flood stage is on this scale about 137 feet, so with water 5 feet under flood stage, the path landing on the Minto side will be submerged! The path and bridge will in many ways only be usable in fair weather.

Update, Feb 8th:

Well, the river it turns out is not in flood or very high water nearly as much as I feared. Using a table of daily mean river elevations from 1988 on, out of 8539 days of readings, only 142 days showed river elevations over 131 feet (about 21.5 on the graph), which would be the low point of the Minto path (I don't know what elevations there are already in the park, if that path system goes even lower, however). You can see maybe 15 peaks that go over this threshold in the 24 year period. So that's on average a week or maybe two, of high water each year. I was thinking it might be measured in weeks or months rather than days.

I wish the City would discuss this openly, though. I think it's reasonable for citizens to want to know how often they should expect not to be able to use a +/- $7M facility.

For more detail and discussion see this previous note.

Map from the SJ.

Update, December 16th, 2014

Here they are on one scale!

Date	Stage	Flow
1861-12-04	47.00	500000
1881-01-16	44.30	428000
1890-02-05	45.10	448000
1964-12-23	37.78	308000
1996-02-08	35.09	244000
2012-01-20	29.36	170000

Table from "Historic Peakflows"
NOAA Northwest River Forecast Center

By this measure, the 2012 flood was distant from the 100 year events of 1996 and 1964 - and vastly smaller than the epic floods of the 19th century.

However, Minto Park experiences "high water" closures even in non-flood events. Even when the river is lower than park elevations, the swampy land is slow to drain, and standing water closes paths.

The City has still not addressed in a meaningful way the question of how often the paths and bridge will be closed seasonally.

Vision 2020 Looks at Bike/Ped Funding Sources and Sighs

In the furor over the proposed House Transportation Reauthorization, and the possible loss of dedicated funding for biking and walking facilities, the City's choice to depend on these grant sources is a timely illustration of the ways the system isn't working.

At Wednesday's meeting of the Vision 2020 Bike/Ped Workgroup, the principal topic was a review of funding sources and grant opportunities for bicycle and pedestrian facilities.

On the City side, discussion was slack, lacking vision and verve.

We spent nearly the entire hour and a half just going over the basics of each funding source. I had hopes the City would have candidates for each one and would show a draft plan for the next couple of years!

Staff did not. And it seemed the City's passion and vision has dwindled, whether on the Vision 2020 side or the Bike and Walk Salem side. Advocating for non-motorized transportation is not something on which the City really seems to want to lead.

So the real question may be about leadership and an enthusiasm gap.

Hopewell Road Shows Apperson Crash Markings

Oregon Bicycle Racing Association Executive Director Kenji Sugahara today visited the Hopewell Road site where on Friday David Apperson was killed and took some pictures. You can see the complete set here.

The markings appear to establish that the road, and Apperson, was just about to veer left and head east-bound. The Sheriff's press release and the rewrites in the Oregonian and Statesman, saying that he was west-bound, were almost certainly in error.

The road cut also casts doubt on the claim the driver was looking into the sun. If the cut and Apperson was in the shade, as several accounts have suggested, the sun would have been on the right, obscured by the cut's walls. If the sun was overhead and in a driver's eyes, Apperson also would have been in the sun. It is difficult to maintain at the same time that Apperson was in shade and that the driver was looking into the sun.

However, there is still much uncertainty, unfortunately. There's a lot of speculation out there. But the images do suggest, as many advocates and people who ride have feared, that the crash investigation may have have shown a bias in favor of the truck-driver, who may have been distracted or driving in a less-than-safe manner after all. At the very least it makes you wonder about observing the basic rule.

As I get meaningful updates on the crash I will continue to post them.

(Image: Kenji Sugahara.)

Advocates go DEFCON 2 over Proposed Federal Transportation Reauthorization

The League of American Bicyclists as well as the Portland Bicycle Transportation Alliance has gone all hands on deck over the new proposed transportation bill.

The American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act would axe a bunch of dedicated pots of money for walking and biking.