Vote and Help Rank Applications for $5M for 2018-2023

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Our local Metropolitan Planning Organization has a social media style map and is taking comment on applications for about $5 million in additional Federal funding.

The three in Salem are on Orchard Heights, McGilchrist, and Brown Road. Others are for Cherriots, in Keizer, Turner, and unincorporated Marion County.

(For more and a brief discussion of them, see last month's notes. If you really want to drill into detail, SKATS has posted the applications themselves here.)

With Call to Revive Jaywalking Laws, City Study Whiffs on Speed

Pedestrian Safety Study

They knew better
 in 1937

The City has released a "Pedestrian Safety Study," but in important ways it reverts to early 20th-century patterns of blame for people on foot and even of criminalizing walking. While the recommendation to "reconsider the lack of jaywalking laws," is not itself the central and most important recommendation, it is symptomatic and a real reflection of the study's limitations.

More than anything else, the study avoids the asymmetry in speed, power, and lethality between people in cars and people on foot.

Recommendation: Reconsider jaywalking laws

The study ends up being more about channelizing people walking into "the right place," about getting pedestrians out of the way, and about protecting drivers from unwanted crashes and messy complications, than it is about making walking in Salem a delightful, inviting, and preferred choice for short trips. It assumes a baseline of driving as the preferred and prioritized choice. In this way its orientation remains fundamentally autoist and represents a reversion to 20th century norms rather than a development that supports modern, 21st century travel choice and the increasingly exigent demands for responding to climate disruption.

Our earlier campaign to criminalize walking:
"The forgotten history of how automakers
invented the crime of 'jaywalking'"

Hopefully we are not heading towards
requirements for Pedestrian Safety Equipment

The historical perspective is not a matter of trivia. Just as we navigated a tremendous shift in the 1910s - 1930s in vehicles, road design, and planning, the transition to autonomous vehicles looms similarly large. Manufacturers and the larger auto-industrial complex, including engineers and consultants, probably would like to engineer as much predictability for pedestrians as possible, even to the point of requiring reflective gear or transponders. What if you had to have a smart phone or RFID chip to walk anywhere? Software and liability law could totally impose that requirement on people. It is important to note we are at, or approaching close to, something of an inflection point, able to choose one way or another.

Back in January 2016, City Council received a report from Public Works and the Police on people killed while walking in Salem. (Notes on the first version here, and on a slightly revised version here.) This led the City to commission a more detailed report from an outside consultant. That report has been published and the City will hold a brown bag open house on it November 13th at noon in the Library as well as present more formally the findings to Council that evening in a work session before the Council meeting proper. (See the City facebook for the event announcement.)

Budget, Transit, Age-Friendly Committees to Meet this Week

It seems like there is an unusually high number of interesting meetings this week at the City!

Monday, Budget Committee

Now that we have a new "Strategic Plan," the annual budget process is undergoing some changes and the Budget Committee will kick off the new cycle on Monday at 6pm in City Hall. (Agenda and meeting packet here.)

Update on adopted 2018 budget

In the backwards-looking update on the adopted 2018 budget, there's a discussion of some $400,000 budgeted for an update to the Comprehensive Plan, which will include "a physical vision for where future growth will occur." There is an opportunity for better coordinating transportation planning with land use planning.

Yesterday there was news about six new spec buildings going up at the Mill Creek Corporate Center.

You already know about the Amazon warehouse there.

This part of town is utterly car-dependent.

With Kuebler/Cordon and other busy roads, as well as the straight-line distance from residential neighborhoods, walking and bike is not realistic. Bus service is infrequent.

Meanwhile, Panasonic/Sony nearby has closed.

We have plopped down this major cluster of big box development without any plan at all for connectivity other than drive-alone trips.

More generally, as we push new development to the outer edges of the city and Urban Growth Boundary, we have not seriously asked about the transportation burden on the City and on individuals. Especially when we are also handing out Enterprise Zone tax abatements.

Don't Forget about the Exclusion Laws in the Newly Restored Oregon Constitution

One of the Negro Exclusion clauses
in our original 1857 Oregon Constitution

State Archives and the Secretary of State have announced a "public unveiling of the newly restored Oregon Constitution" for Monday the 6th.

That's pretty neat and all, but at this particular moment in time, what with General Lee in the news again, it's worth remembering that Oregon, while excluding slavery positively, was also explicitly established under the desire for no people of color at all. Current residents might have been grandfathered in, but the message was clear.

No free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside or be within this state or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ or harbor them.

If that's not a Constitutional provision for a system of white supremacy, just what exactly is it?

A recent essay at the Mill, "Rachel Belden Brooks and Family," shows some of the difficulty in our interpretation.

In 1844, a strong desire to avoid racial tensions led the Oregon Provisional Government to outlaw slavery in the Oregon Country. However compassionate this may sound, it was closely followed by a ban on the settling of free blacks in the region. Both laws were designed to keep the black population at a minimum and avoid conflict. Despite these decrees, many families brought slaves on their journey west and few, if any, of the slaves were set free upon entering Oregon. Rachel Belden was one of these, and is the first known black woman of Marion County....

"Avoiding racial tensions" and "avoiding conflict" are inadequate descriptions for the malignant impetus behind the Exclusion laws.

As it happens, it seems the Exclusion laws weren't enforced much, and our informal and ordinary understanding of our history is that we neglected and ignored them. It was bad law. We try to read this neglect in the most virtuous way possible.

But even unenforced, it was still more powerful as general culture than we would like to think. As a general rule, we don't take seriously enough the intent of the Exclusion clauses and the pervasiveness of the racism behind them.

Of course any history on this is difficult. Most of the sources also come from white people, white men particularly, and even when they are well-intentioned, we lose the agency of non-white people, who are not able to be in charge of the stories they tell about themselves in their own words. The "real history," such as it is, is certainly both richer and more terrible than we know. Additionally, around Statehood, Salem was a tiny community, and the stories we might wish to tell are all entangled and so very ambiguous. A Pioneer or civic hero in one context turns out compromised or even vicious in another.

America Waldo and Rachel Belden come to Salem

From Breaking Chains

In his book, Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory, R. Gregory Nokes writes about several Salem families:

Old Leslie Junior High Possibly at Risk in Proposed Bond

Leslie Junior High School, 1927 - 1937 (2014)

The future of the old Leslie Junior High School building looks to be more than a little uncertain just now.

The charter school will be moving out, and South Salem High School will expand into it the following year, but more change might be on the horizon.

A reader who attended one of the meetings about the May 2018 proposed bond measure reports that its demolition and replacement with new construction might be on the menu.

Plan to demolish "oldest section" and swimming pool
Long Range Facilities Plan, bond support materials

The District's published materials are less specific and a little vague. In the section on South Salem High School, they discuss "demolition and replacement of the oldest section of the facility," which offers a little wiggle room, but seems to point to the old Leslie complex.

Eugene Releases Draft Vision Zero Action Plan, Salem a Walking Study

If you happen to be down in Eugene today, Thursday the 2nd, the City of Eugene will be having an Open House to present the draft of a Vision Zero Action Plan.

Salem has also released a summary on a new Pedestrian Safety Study.

The Eugene Open House is in the Atrium Building Lobby in downtown Eugene (99 W. 10th Ave.) between 3:30-6:30pm.

You can also download the plan from the Vision Zero project page.

Scattered throughout are memorials to people killed on Eugene roads. They aren't just abstract numbers.

One important set of recommendations is to lower speeds, both posted speeds and design speeds.

"Truck hits bicycle path" - Where's the Driver?

"Truck hits bicycle path" (Were people involved?)

You've seen the headlines and stories already. While the lede is ok, "A terrorist in a rented pickup truck plowed through a busy bicycle path," the subhed is silly: "Truck hits bicycle path."

You might recall the last time this happened.

How it appeared in the Statesman, via USA Today

Some of the circumstances are different, but in both cases drivers used cars as lethal weapons. People, not cars, were in control and held the moral and effective agency in the resulting acts. People used the armor and horsepower of cars to hurt vulnerable bystanders. It is about power, lethal power.