Wisconsin Ruling: Salem River Crossing's Traffic Projections also in Jeopardy? - Updated

A very interesting Federal case in Wisconsin has been making the rounds. A reader commented on the FHWA note yesterday and others have sent the news by email.

1000 Friends of Wisconsin filed a suit over outlandish traffic projections, and a Federal Judge agreed!

1000 Friends of Wisconsin v. USDOT et. al.

Vacate that approval!

From the Judge:

As noted, the plaintiff is skeptical that traffic volumes on Highway 23 will increase by as much as WisDOT has projected during the next 20 years. The plaintiff points out that traffic volumes peaked in about 2005 and have been declining ever since. The plaintiff contends that there are reasons to believe that this trend in declining traffic volumes will continue well into the future....

The plaintiff [also] contends that the defendants did not account for or address the environmental impacts of “induced travel.”....

[In conclusion] I identified two deficiencies in the defendants’ consideration of reasonable alternatives: (1) the defendants have not sufficiently disclosed how they applied their traffic-forecasting methodology to arrive at the traffic projections that they used in the impact statement, and thus neither the court nor members of the public are able to intelligently assess whether those projections are flawed; and (2) the defendants have not shown that they made a reasoned decision as to whether the updated population data from the Department of Administration required reconsideration of the traffic projections. These are significant deficiencies....

If it is true that the defendants’ projection of traffic volumes is flawed, then one of the key rationales for expanding the highway to four lanes will be undermined. If accurate projections are used, it may turn out that an alternative to full-blown expansion, such as installing passing lanes in certain areas and making other targeted improvements, would satisfy enough of the project’s purpose and need to be feasible. And because such an alternative would have fewer adverse environmental impacts than full-blown expansion, NEPA requires that it be fully explored before the defendants irrevocably commit themselves to expanding Highway 23 to four lanes.

It is not difficult to see how this might be relevant here.

Update, May 2nd, 2016

From the decision, 1000 Friends of Wisconsin v. USDOT:

I cannot find that WisDOT, when deciding whether to update its traffic forecasts in light of the updated population data, “conducted a reasoned evaluation of the relevant information and reached a decision that, although perhaps disputable, was not ‘arbitrary or capricious.’” Marsh , 490 U.S. at 385.

III. CONCLUSION For the reasons stated, IT IS ORDERED that the defendants’ motion to reinstate the record of decision and enter judgment in their favor is DENIED . IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that the defendants’ motion to strike is DENIED .

More at 1000 Friends:

Federal District Court Judge Lynn Adelman has rejected the Wisconsin DOT arguments that its traffic projections for increased traffic on Highway 23 are accurate. This means the project is not eligible for federal funding – effectively killing the project.

Cherriots Board Meets Thursday

The Cherriots Board meets Thursday the 28th, and there are several things of interest on the agenda.

Chamber's opposition to payroll tax

Probably at the top of the list are the responses to outreach, surveys, and other questions about how best to fund weekend and evening service.

In the packet is the January recommendation from the Chamber:

[I]t is clear that the Salem Chamber is strongly opposed to any payroll tax presented to voters as a revenue option to accomplish Phase 2 planning. The Chamber would most likely lead formal opposition to any payroll tax campaign presented to voters as we feel the costs of expanded service should be shared more broadly across the community as a whole.

In regards to the other funding option for Phase 2 planning, the Salem Chamber would not oppose a 5 year operating levy placed on the ballot for voter consideration. An expansion of evening and weekend service would benefit many in the community and we feel a strong campaign led by the Transit Board of Directors could result in success for your organizational goals. [italics added]

It is interesting that the Chamber does not see transit as a worthy investment for business and employee recruiting and retention.

No position appears to be taken, and the report is for information only and staff look to come back with a recommendation later.

There is also a relatively large quarterly report from Rideshare.

Drunk Driver Kills Person Walking Across Salem Parkway

The weekend did not start off well at all. One more person on foot was killed by a driver.

Friday night (technically very early Saturday) Travis Lane was killed while walking and attempting to cross the Salem Parkway at Cherry.

The initial story about Travis Lane didn't have much detail.

Pedestrian killed in hit and run on Salem Parkway http://t.co/B2ayXSuwPC

— Statesman Journal (@Salem_Statesman) May 23, 2015

But the next day's story (clip above) has utterly desolating detail:

At 12:25 a.m., the Salem Police Department received a report that a pedestrian was hit on Salem Parkway at Cherry Avenue NE. Lane was found dead when officers arrived.

The initial investigation did not determine where Lane was when he was struck, but Tim Hammond said Lane wasn’t the kind of guy to jaywalk.

While Lane was hanging out at Stefanie Hammond’s, his two best friends — Chris Hammond and Travis Malm — were hanging out at his home.

At 3 a.m., police officers knocked on Chris Hammond’s home, saying Lane had been hit by a car.

Several hours after the crash, Malm’s sister, Kimberly Malm, was arrested in connection to the crash on charges of second-degree manslaughter, driving under the influence of intoxicants, reckless driving, reckless endangerment and failure to perform the duties of a driver. [italics added]

The hit-and-run compounds the error, but crossing the Parkway at night, even in a marked crosswalk, and even with sober drivers, is treacherous: There's no room for error.

For drivers at highway speeds, reaction time + stopping distance makes it nearly impossible to avoid other objects in the road. Add impairment to reaction time and there may have been no correction whatsoever.

When we choose urban street design speed, we choose how many peds it's OK to kill in a crash http://t.co/lletYPL1Oi pic.twitter.com/LDdcQUt8tO

— Jeffrey Tumlin (@jeffreytumlin) April 7, 2015

For people on foot, highway speeds are certain to crush and kill you. (Remember, even at 40mph, a car is nearly certain kill a person on foot.)

They knew better
 in 1937

If an urban highway like the Parkway is engineered with gentle curves and some forgiveness for drivers who make steering or speeding or stopping errors, they have no engineered forgiveness at all for other users of the road.

That the driver was almost certainly not a stranger, and would likely know of Lane's walking habits, is a cruel, cruel irony.

But it underscores the dangers of speed and autoism. Cars kill. Full Stop. Traffic speeds in urban areas should not be highway speeds.

I think this is the fourth walking death this year. Drivers killed The Crosslands and David McGregor while they were out walking in January.

(Jeffrey Tumlin gave a talk in Salem two years ago, you may recall.)

Bad Crash near McNary

Additionally, McNary students apparently leaving school for the weekend crashed on Lockhaven. From the magnitude of the crash and resulting injuries, it seems difficult to conclude the kids were observing safe neighborhood speeds.

Crash in Keizer injures 3 high school students http://t.co/Z01iLsKwyX

— Statesman Journal (@Salem_Statesman) May 23, 2015

Our local MPO to hold Public Hearing on 20 year Regional Transportation System Plan

Our local Metropolitan Planning Organization, SKATS, will hold a Public Hearing on the draft Regional Transportation Systems Plan for 2015-2035 on Tuesday the 26th at noon.

Carbon is a huge void at the center of the plan
Draft RTSP, with chart from CO2Now

There's a pleasant ferment and amount of discussion going on with related matters, and if you would like to attend and offer comment, here are some themes to consider in your comments!

In an earlier note, we highlighted three things:

• We need more attention to carbon and greenhouse gas emissions
• The Third Bridge remains an enormous folly - that's one project it's totally worth criticizing.
• More and more cities are embracing "vision zero." We tolerate a lot of death and serious injury as acceptable "costs" of using the roads and of road-widening to reduce congestion. If we actually wanted to, we could do a lot more with reducing speeds and better engineering roads for safety.

These remain true.

Here are some additional things to consider:

• The FHWA is now assuming 1.04% annual growth in yearly miles traveled. This still seems too large from here - but if you aren't necessarily persuaded by the larger criticism here, and instead wanted to make a very conservative criticism of our travel modeling, asking SKATS to align projections with this new FHWA figure seems like low-hanging fruit and a very sober request. (The latest that I see - it's hard to find the assumptions in modeling! - is from the Nov 12th memo on tolling: "Traffic is assumed to grow at a constant rate of 1.97% between 2015 and 2035." So what does demand look like when you assume 1.04% annual growth?)
• Salem Sunday Streets has observed that cities are asking the Portland MPO, Metro, to fund Safe Routes to School. A representative from Safe Routes talked to the Technical Advisory Committee earlier this year, and asking our MPO for more focus on sidewalks and safe crossing is a fine thing to echo (though Portland's funding mechanism is different in this case).
• N3B has collated some additional comment on the Salem River Crossing components in the RTSP and they cite great points, which are also appropriate to echo.

Look for the historic sign
next to the entry

The Public Hearing is Tuesday the 26th at noon. SKATS is at 100 High St. SE, Suite 200, above Bar Andaluz and Table Five 08.

And here's more history trivia for the weekend. What was on the corner before the current building, known as the new Bligh Building or Pacific Building, home of SKATS?

Cook's Hotel!

Cook's Hotel the Table Five08 Corner of State and High
Oregon State Library

And here's the corner and its immediate neighborhood from above, probably taken from the tower, now lost, of the Grand Theatre. Cook's was demolished in 1925 or perhaps 1926, prior to construction of the new Bligh Building.

Cook's Hotel on the corner of State and High
The big lawn belongs to the old County Courthouse
Oregon State Library

Harry Scott's First Bike Shop was on State Street

Some time in the last year or two it looks like the State Library switched over to a new online catalogue, which includes their photography this time, and there are now better scans of photos that had been available only as dinky little things.

The first site of Scott's Cycle on State Street, circa 1914
Image detail, via Oregon State Library

The whole image:  Oregon State Library

September 9, 1916

One image it is especially nice to be able to see in an enlargement is a partial image of the very first location for Harry Scott's bicycle business, an enterprise that's still around and we know today as Scott's Cycle.

The single-story storefront was between the alley and the Griswold-Murphy building at the corner of State and Commercial, and you can just see the edges of it in the photo in the State Library's collection.

Here's a view of the Griswold block and the intersection of State Street and Commercial looking northwest about from above the Ladd & Bush parking lot (where there was a building, of course!).

Commercial Street at State Street, circa 1900
Griswold block in upper left; Pioneer Trust (1909) not yet built
Lots of people biking along!
Oregon State Library

The parade could very well be related to the Spanish-American War and the Oregon Volunteers.

Back to Scott's, if you missed the celebration last year, the business has been around for a century now! (You can read more about the history of Harry Scott's business here and here. Also, when you walk into South High, on the right is a bronze plaque commemorating its construction, and Harry Scott is named as one of the School Board members, about 10 years before he sold the business to Larry Lewis's group.)

For comparison, here's the site today, a gravel parking lot. The corner is slated to be redeveloped, and hopefully we won't see the empty lot much longer!

The site today: Sunday Streets in 2013

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For other notes remembering Veterans, see the African-American 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps, bicycles at D-Day, our earliest Veterans from the War of 1812, and elsewhere some thoughts on Lt. Col. Leonidas Willis, CSA, who settled here in 1871 after the war and whose son built the downtown building that now houses the Book Bin.

City Council, May 26th - West Salem Goodwill

The final recommendations of the "Blue Ribbon" Task Force on the Police Station and Civic Center will lead at Council for most, but others will have much better things to say. (So do read and consider them!) As the City summarizes it in a separate press release:

While the entire civic center complex needs seismic improvements, the task force recommended that the police station should be the priority. Police occupy cramped quarters on the civic center's bottom floor.

The task force has recommended that the city only pursue a bond measure to construct a new public safety building, which would be between 75,000 and 106,000 square feet. It also recommended that the city consider locations outside of the civic center campus.

From our perspective here, the most interesting item on Council's Tuesday agenda - delayed a day because of the holiday - is the proposed street vacation for the Goodwill development at the corner of Edgewater and Wallace.

Proposed Goodwill with First Street alignment in red
First Street there would be vacated

The Staff Report urges approval, but with a few conditions. In the Report is also a bunch of emails with Councilors and the Mayor, disclosed in order to avoid any ex-parte contacts in this quasi-judicial hearing. It doesn't look like there's anything really interesting in them, nothing about why there was opposition in the first place. Mostly they are about the maneuvering between March 9th and March 23rd to get the matter reconsidered after the initial vote to deny. (Maybe you will spot a more relevant detail?)

Salem Rivercrossing Traffic Modeling Discussed at Portland Talk Tomorrow

Let's go with the alternate title, shall we?

"Post-Apocalyptic Zombies Ate Oregon’s Post-Recession, ATR Regression."

All about post-apocalyptic zombies
(Mad Max, friends!)

Yeah, so what about that plateau in traffic counts and distance traveled?

via Washington State Ferries
Transportation Revenue Forecast, October 2014
(Sightline link broken)

Tomorrow at noon, Friday the 22nd, Andrew Mortensen of David Evans and Associates will talk at PSU about new Federal vehicle miles traveled forecasting and how this might impact local traffic planning.

A summary of FHWA’s new national traffic trends assessment will be presented, including discussion of varied factors influencing forward-thinking forecasts. Examples of Oregon statewide vehicle miles travelled (VMT) and historic traffic trends from ATR [automatic traffic recorder] stations in the Portland urban region and greater Willamette Valley will be highlighted. VMT, population and income data will be noted with implications on local transportation planning. [italics added]

Readers have suggested that we might read "greater Willamette Valley" as including "Center and Marion Street Bridges." (After the jump for updates!)