Disconnects between Present and Future Needs in Budget and VMT

The City budget crunch is on the front page today.

Front page today

In the packet for the meeting of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board for tomorrow, Thursday the 12th, members can read a timely and thoughtful letter Planning Commissioner Slater writes, in his personal capacity as Salemite, about the disconnect between capital investments and operations budgets.

excerpt from letter in Dec. SPRAB packet

Slater writes

When the City follows the 2013 parks master plan and adds developed park acreage to our system, we do not have a discussion with SPRAB, the City Council, or the general public about impact to the general fund.

Slater is particularly focused on parks acquisition, parks operations, and parks programming.

Jaydriving and Lunacy in our Language

In today's paper is another story of jaydriving, but the story erases the driver, ascribing agency to the truck: "the truck did not obey road signs and was too tall...."

Today's paper

The headline on photos and video online and not yet accompanied by a story also erases the driver in talk about a "truck that drove into south Salem house."

Online only today

And last week in Salem Reporter about the sign, "frequently wrecked by car crashes," recently removed at the border with Keizer, the language is about a problematic sign well off the roadway and not anything about jaydriving or drivers who keep hitting the sign:

Now, Salem officials plan to replace the sign with a new one that is more financially sustainable for the city and easier for its Public Works Department to replace, according to Kathleen Swarm, the city’s recreation program manager.

“This sign has been causing problems for years and years, and is a huge burden for this city to keep up,” Swarm said at a Salem Public Arts Commission meeting on Nov. 13.

The sign was most recently hit around April and then sat dented for seven months, with the brick wall behind it broken into pieces. This time, fixing it would have cost around $40,000....

The frequent damage to the sign began a year after it was built.

There are two big problems here in the way we talk about these crashes.

First, in every instance of a crash there is a person operating and in charge of a motor vehicle. There is a driver with primary agency. We are not yet talking about robot cars.

Second, whether it's a bridge with prominent warning signs, a house set back from the street, or a welcome sign also well recessed from the street, drivers zoom along too fast on our streets and cause great damage.

Not the solution! via the former Twitter

Did we fail to put high-viz safety gear on the bridge, house, and welcome sign? If bridges aren't safe, and houses aren't safe, and brick welcome signs aren't safe, why do we keep insisting that people on foot or on bike are primarily responsible for safety? And why do we keep talking around the agency of drivers?

It's the cars and their drivers. We have a car problem and driving problem. As we move to a "safe system" approach, we still need to center motor vehicles, their operators, and speed.

Previously:

• Notes on Erasing the Driver here
  
• Notes on Vision Zero here
  
• Notes on the recent Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan
  

Update on Center Street Bridge Seismic

On the front page today is an important update on the Center Street Bridge seismic project. It's behind and running over budget. Readers here will already know most of the information.

Front page today

There's been a steady drip of delay and overrun especially at MWACT.

SRC Geological Addendum, Sept. 2016
(inset detail added)

But two points deserve more emphasis.

• ODOT failed "to conduct a geotechnical analysis before the cost was estimated." But the unstable soils were known during the whole SRC process. The same failure on the Center Street Bridge would also have affected the SRC and raised its costs. ODOT's ploy, not some inadvertent failure, is to look away from complications early in projects so they can lowball the public with underestimates.
  
• ODOT has a very large funding gap and shifting funds to the contested I-5 Rose Quarter (over)widening means taking funds for "smaller" project like this. The Portland widening mania means less funding for life-critical seismic, preservation, and smaller road safety work. ODOT could right-size the Rose Quarter and Interstate Bridge replacement projects and have more money for seismic work and other safety projects. At last week's Oregon Transportation Commission meeting they discussed a suite of cancellations, which will have a cascading effect.
  

Finding funding for I-5 Rose Quarter overrun (Dec. OTC)

ODOT's own decision making and priorities led us to this, and it's not just some unfortunate accident of fate.

See previous notes on the Center Street Bridge retrofit here.

City Council, December 9th - CAP Annual Report

On Monday Council will receive an annual report on the Climate Action Plan. On the one hand, maybe we should take an extra moment to appreciate it, as this seems like the kind of thing, and the manager the kind of position, the Budget Committee will find reason to cut as we face our budget crisis.

On the other hand, overall there is too much managing to process and procedure, to box checking, and not enough managing to and reporting on actual emissions reduction or on metrics for things that directly contribute to emissions. (This problem precedes the CAP manager, and is not something she is primarily responsible for starting, it should be noted, but is hopefully something she pushes against.)

CAP Annual Report

It was good finally to see some numbers on the Get There Challenge, but the numbers are not properly contextualized. The participation rate, which is very small, should be mentioned. Every number should also be expressed as a proportion of a total, even an estimated one, not merely a count. (The City should also have promoted it externally, publicly to the whole city. They were silent on it.)

It should also report on participation rate

One thing that looks a little odd is "the average one-way commute distance," 6.5 miles. Isn't that pretty much outside of city limits since city facilities are in the center? That's a whole topic! What's going on there?

Scenario Planning Project Publishes Outline of 2050 Baseline Assumptions

The Scenario Planning project has published a summary of the baseline assumptions and projections for 2050, a "Reference Scenario Documentation."

Our default assumptions won't cut it (we already know this)

You will not be surprised to find that even with ODOT-friendly modeling and assumptions, our current plans are not enough. (See image header at top of blog from 2020's "preferred scenario" in Our Salem!) We are ostensibly on track for a 10% reduction in VMT and we need a 30% reduction.

The analysis is a little odd, though. The zones in the analysis are very coarse with Salem having five zones. Far out South Salem is included in the same zone as the close-in, streetcar-era grid of the area around Bush Park. It would be good to see more discussion of methods. Maybe this is wholly defensible. But it looks like it's not fine-grained enough for truly useful modeling.

Very coarse areas for analysis

But you may recall what an informed critic said nearly a year ago:

it is so high level ("strategic") that it largely tells us what we already know: our existing plans will fall far short of meeting GHG and VMT goals, and if we do lots of things differently (pricing, land use, investing in transportation options, driving cleaner cars, etc.) we can get at least close to those goals.   This is pretty much what we learned more than a decade ago from the STS, Metro's "Climate Smart" plan and efforts by a couple of other MPOs. What scenario planning leaves unanswered - and puts off to some future process - is proposing and evaluating ways that we might actually double or triple non-auto mode share or actually plan for 30% of all housing in climate friendly areas.

This current document is merely the baseline, and further scenarios will be published that suggest greater change, but the level of specificity here in this baseline document suggests the later refinements will be equally coarse and will not meet the critique that "this is pretty much what we [already] learned more than a decade ago."

St. Joseph's to Redevelop former May-McCully House Site

You might recall the shabby rental at 757 Center Street. It was demolished this summer and sold to St. Joseph's parish.

They've initiated a file with the City for a small apartment block, a seven-plex. They call it a "priest residence," but it must be more than merely a parsonage.

Proposed seven-plex

It looks like a terrific addition to Center Street and good infill replacement for an undervalued building that was more historic than we realized, though again it had declined and may not have been worth saving.

• "Fate of 757 Center Street Italianate a little Careless"
• "A Crooked Secretary of State, a Steamboat Magnate, and a House Move: 757 Center Street's Early Story"

The brick cladding immediately calls to mind the Robert Lindsey tower by SAIF as well as the arches on the bank building across from the old City Hall site.

• "Mid-Century Brick Arches Embody Spirit of Old City Hall"
  

Even with three garage bays on the alley, it fits on a residential lot. Seven homes! This is more like the streetcar era main street development in the Historic District downtown. It would not be possible with mandated parking minimums.

When the file is complete and there is more of a narrative for the approvals process there might be more to say. But at first glance, this looks neat. More of this, please!

Three Building Centenaries: Security Building, Ike Box, Crystal Gardens

Some of the lesser buildings downtown are celebrating 100th anniversaries this year, two of them even this week. I'm not sure there's any great significance to squeeze from them, they're just very ordinary buildings, so here are some scattered notes.

Hughes Building today aka "Security Building,"
(Legacy Real Estate)

The building today known as the "Security Building" was first known as the Hughes Building. On its second floor the New Salem Hotel opened the first week in December of 1924. It was on the site of a cluster of wood-framed buildings representing a later phase for our "Chinatown" and represents some level of displacement and gentrification. Additionally, in 1924 it was adjacent to the Oregon Electric Depot, whose tracks ran up High Street at this time. But it was a little late to take full advantage of the proximity to rail!

December 9th, 1924

Frank Bligh owned the hotel, and his father T. G. Bligh had died a month earlier in a crash near Grand Ronde on the way back from the coast, where Bligh was building a summer cottage. (Blighs highlighted in yellow on the clips.)