City Council, January 17th - Work Session on Housing Crisis and Policy Agenda

You may recall back in 2017 when a driver crashed into a house and killed Srabonti Haque.

And again a year ago when a driver crashed into a house and killed George Heitz and Moira Hughes.

The house was no protection, in 2017 via Twitter

A year ago

A stick-built house with a mortgage and landscaping was no guarantee of safety.

Not even fire stations are safe.

2014 crash into Fire Station 11 on Orchard Heights

On Tuesday the 17th, after the Holiday, Council will hold a formal Work Session on City policies on homelessness and on the 2023 Council Policy Agenda and Strategic Plan.

Marine Drive and the Sidewalkification of Bicycling

The city's published another video on the bond projects. The first video, on Fisher Road, did not seem to merit comment, but this one on Marine Drive does.

City video on Marine Drive

On Fisher Road Mayor Hoy had talked with former Director of Public Works, Peter Fernandez, and in this one he speaks with Brian Martin, whom Staff Reports at Monday's Council meeting had identified as Interim Director of Public Works. The video may have been shot and edited before the City Manager made that decision.

Also Interim Public Works Director

Sidewalkification

They make a big deal about a 12 foot shared use path running on the east side of the roadway.

Plans for a 12 foot wide shared use path

The sidewalkification of bicycling is a little unwelcome. The path may function acceptably when the properties are not built out, but when there are meaningful volumes of people walking, biking, and otherwise rolling on them, there will be conflicts.

Five-year Forecast, Community Portal and Scorecard, Vision Zero: Bits from Council and the Budget

The airport discussion and vote last night was very disappointing. Maybe there will be more to say about that later. Council seemed more interested in Carbon indulgences than in actually reducing Carbon emissions.

The Budget Committee meets tomorrow the 11th, and they'll see the annual version of the "structural imbalance" chart.

Why are we going to spend millions on the airport?

The chart is familiar. Here's the same forecast from May 2017, five years ago.

Back in 2017

The forecasting keeps saying there will be a big problem, but that big problem does not seem to arrive. Do we really have a problem, or does Staff use a rhetoric of alarmism to shape the budget agenda in certain ways?

I would like to see a more historically informed discussion of, say, the last two decades of forecasts and actuals.

The forecasting looks authoritative, but that may just be on the surface.

Learn More About Transportation Planning: Check out this Comic!

Portland State University has published a comic treatment of our autoism and primer on transportation planning!

Moving from Cars to People

They write:

It's in everyone's interest for non-transportation-professionals to have a working knowledge of the conversation that's happening around sustainable transportation options. When important policy questions show up on a ballot – for example, whether businesses should be required to provide a certain amount of parking spaces, or whether the state should subsidize public transit – people who aren't in the transportation industry might not be fully aware of the tradeoffs involved in these questions.

It's also a good thing for people who are in the know already, because why not make things fun and approachable?

For more see:

• At BikePortland, "PSU artists and transportation researchers team up on new comic book"
• At PSU, with download links and physical copy order options, "Moving From Cars To People: A Comic About Transportation and Land Use"
• And an interview with the authors, "Communicating Research through Comics: Transportation and Land Development"
  

Also, today's New York Times has on the front page a piece on induced demand. The failure of adding lanes and capacity is mainstream, common sense now!

NY Times front page today

City Council, January 9th - Wishcasting at the Airport

Council meets for the first time in 2023, and the City is hyping the return to meeting in-person.

On policy, the start to the year looks a little awkward.

December 2022 and November 1952

If it seemed like a new Mayor, new City Manager, and new Councilors might meet our 21st century challenges, instead they seem determined to act as if we are still in the 20th century.

Leading the charge back to the 20th century is that interest in commercial air service. Who is Lucy and who is Charlie Brown here?

January 2008

October 2008 - via FB

July 2011

City Publishes ADA Transition Plan and Solicits Comment

Here's a process that slipped under the radar.

The City has published a draft of a new ADA Transition Plan for public comment.

Pretty lousy percentages of good/compliant ramps

Wow. The picture is terrible! The City rarely inspects ramps, and when they do, they find around half of ramps are deficient.

One thing that is not in the plan is any discussion of car speed. The word "speed" appears once only in an appendix. As we saw with the new ramps ODOT installed on Wallace Road, ramps that drop a person into zooming cars have limited utility. The mere existence of a ramp is no guarantee of its usefulness or safety.

Ramp to nowhere at Bassett St

I don't know if a Car Master Plan would directly help on this narrow question, but this is an instance where people not in cars are non-normative, an exception, very marginal, and those in cars remain normative and primary.

It is possible that more explicit discussion of the way we prioritize car travel and car drivers would help with better ADA accommodation.

Indeed, just the phrase "ADA accommodation" reinforces the non-normative status of people who use facilities required by the ADA: We have to make special accommodation instead of just designing the roadway for all users with more egalitarian standards.

In any case, a City road and street system that is fully accessible will have slower speeds, and just focusing on ramps is too narrow. The plan looks to be too siloed and not embedded enough in the total system.

There might be more to say later.

New Year's Wish? A Car Master Plan as part of the TSP Update!

One of the potentially helpful events and processes in 2023 is a planned update to our Transportation System Plan.

But even when, as a decade ago in the "Bike and Walk Salem" process there was special focus on walking and biking in the TSP, these were still very secondary elements. The default standard is always autoist and always implied. The person driving a car and the car itself remains normative, often not necessary to specify, and non-auto traffic the exception and always necessary to specify.

This summer an advocate in Portland talked about making the autoism instead an explicit subject of analysis and policy. Flip the script!

In May at the Friday transportation seminar at PSU, Cathy Tuttle suggested "your city needs a car master plan."

Yeah, a Car Master Plan! - via PSU

From the talk summary:

In 2022, cars are ubiquitous and completely embedded into America’s economy and social fabric. American cities don’t make car plans, but all transportation plans – whether they are for people who walk, bike, take transit, run freight or delivery businesses – are all written in response to cars. Transportation planning is all about cars; supporting cars or constraining cars. How did our cities evolve into places where cars dominate, and where can we go from here? To move to a new paradigm, cities need to acknowledge car dominance and focus on cars with the same rigor they do other modal plans – the history of cars in the city, the streets cars dominate, the actual vehicles, the drivers, and our future with cars. In the process of writing a Car Master Plan for Downtown Portland, Cathy Tuttle uncovered remarkable new information about curb space use, asphalt, and the four types of drivers. [italics added]

Four types of bike riders
Bicycle modal chapter of TSP, Dec 2012

In symmetry with the four types of bike riders, she identified four types of drivers.