A Review of Bikes in 2009: A Top 10 List

2009 is almost over and it was a year of significant improvement for bicycling in Salem! Here's a top 10 list in chronological order. What's your top 10 list of bikey events for 2009?

Things were perhaps slow until April. Then - wham! The long awaited opening of the Union St. RR Bridge was the top bike story of the year and it was one of the Statesman's top stories of 2009 as well. Also in April 100 bike advocates came to the Conference Center for the Oregon Bike Summit. (Photo: Thomas Patterson, Statesman Journal)

In May Oregon Parks and Recreation relaunched the Willamette Valley Scenic Bikeway.

Launched in June and running all summer, Friends of Salem Saturday Market operated a Valet Bike Parking service so people didn't have to bring cars to the market and could shop truly sustainably.

In June the Legislature passed the huge "Jobs and Transportation Act," HB 2001. Like it or not, it will shape our transportation choices for the next few years.

In July the City received two Transportation and Growth Management Grants to update the city's Transportation System Plan, and to create a district-wide Safe Routes to School Program.

In October the Salem Bike Taxi launched and added an important new way to get around downtown.

In November City Council voted to use sharrows on Commercial and to reduce it by a lane downtown.Also in November OBRA held the state Cyclocross Championships at Fairgrounds. This was the biggest race in Salem!

Throughout the year incremental improvements on Chemeketa brought the dream of a bicycle boulevard closer to fruition: In December the City started placing signage on Union St RR Bridge and Chemeketa. Earlier in the year State Parks worked to grind some curb, remove some bushes, and created a new way around the bathrooms on the Capitol Mall.

Runners-up and other important bike events:

Mayor Taylor and the City won an Alice Award and received a gift from Sanyo Solar of an Eneloop battery-assist bicycle.

All year, the Rivercrossing Alternative Modes Study worked on developing plans to increase bike commute trips across the river.

All summer and winter the Bike Drill Team grew and joined in several parades.

Late summer the missing bike lanes on 17th were placed at 17th & Market

In November the City installed video camera traffic light controllers at Front & Union

Lots of things to build on! There are elections, the short legislative session, the draft Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed third bridge, project selection and implementation of the road bond projects...lots of things going on and hopefully good momentum from 2009 takes us into an even better, bikier 2010!

MWVBTA Recommends Projects for $1.6M in Bond Funds

December 31st is the deadline for submitting ideas for the $1.6M from the Keep Salem Moving Bond for bicycle and pedestrian improvements.

The Mid-Willamette Valley Chapter of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance has submitted its list of recommended projects for the Bike and Pedestrian Safety Funds. (Once you click through, select "full screen" for all 6pp of the recommendations.)

There are fewer bike lanes to propose than we might have expected. The most pressing problems, the group decided, are crossing highways and other busy streets. Getting across the barriers, and not getting to the barriers, is the big deal. Moreover, lots of people don't feel comfortable in a 5-foot bike lane, and we believe low-traffic bicycle boulevards remain a superior choice for infrastructure.

The top projects are these:

Fix crossing at Commercial & Union St
Fix crossing at Liberty St & Union St.
Improve sections of Union St, Chemeketa St, and Winter St.
Fix crossing at Winter & Mission
Fix crossing and weave at Liberty & Commercial
Fix crossing at Fairgrounds & Winter
Fix River Road South Bike path and entry at Miller
Restore crossing of Front St. at State Street

These are mostly related to the Union Street Railroad Bridge connections, Bicycle Boulevards in central downtown, and two especially substandard connections south. We believe these will impact the largest numbers of commuters and help to create strategic transportation choices for the largest employment centers and their employees. Unfortunately $1.6M doesn't go very far.

There are lots of other worthy projects out there, spot improvements to parks and schools and other important neighborhood places. Fortunately, the new Safe Routes to Schools project and the Bicycle and Pedestrian updates to the Transportation System Plan will be able to drill into these in more detail.

The Mixed Blessing of Salem's Unmixed Downtown Office Parks

The next two chapters in The Death and Life of Great American Cities are on Parks and Neighborhoods. On parks and open space, Jacobs has much to say that is relevant. About neighborhoods, she is working on a much different scale than Salem; moreover, the Salem neighborhood associations, formed in the 70s, like those across the country, were in many ways a direct response to Jacobs' arguments.

Government is a huge engine for Salem's economy. At the same time, a little like ivy or kudzu, the large single-use office parks that ring downtown Salem have crowded out a healthy ecosystem of mixed uses that would better nourish the historic downtown core.

Jacobs derides many over-planned parks and open spaces:

The aim of the City Beautiful was the City Monumental. Great schemes were drawn up for systems of baroque boulevards, which mainly came to nothing. What did come out of the movement was the Center Monumental, modeled on the [Columbian Exposition of 1893]. City after city build its civic center or its cultural center. These buildings were arranged along a boulevard as at Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, or along a mall like the Government Center in Cleveland, or were bordered by a park like the Civic Center at St. Louis, or were interspersed with park, like the Civic Center at San Francisco. However they were arranged, the important point was that the monuments had been sorted out from the rest of the city, and assembled into the grandest effect thought possible, the whole being treated as a complete unit, in a separate and well-defined way.

People were proud of them, but the centers were not a success....people stayed away from them to a remarkable degree.

The architecture of the City Beautiful centers went out of style. But the idea behind the centers was not questioned, and it has never had more force than it does today. The idea of sorting out certain cultural or public functions and decontaminating their relationship with the workaday city [prevailed].

More generally, Jacobs talks about parks.

[O]nly a genuine content of economic and social diversity, resulting in people with different schedules, has meaning to the park and the power to confer the boon of life upon it.

For every Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, or Rockefeller Plaza or Washington Square in New York, or Boston Common, or their loved equivalents in other cities, there are dozens of dispirited city vacuums called parks eaten around with decay, little used, unloved.

In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes.

One of the bitterest disappointments in housing project history is the failure of parks and open grounds in these establishments to increase adjacent values or to stabilize, let alone improve, their neighborhoods. Notice the rim of any city park, civic plaza or project parkland: how rare is the city open space with a rim that consistently reflects the magnetism or stabilizing influences residing in parks.

Rittenhouse Square, a Success

Rittenhouse Square, the success, possesses a diverse rim and diverse neighborhood hinterland. Immediately on its edges it has in sequence, as this is written, an art club with restaurant and galleries, a music school, an Army office building, an apartment house, a club, an old apothecary shop, a Navy office building which used to be a hotel, apartments, a church, a parochial school, apartments, a public-library branch, apartments...[etc]. Does anything about this physical arrangement of the neighborhood affect the park physically? Yes. This mixture of uses of buildings directly produces for the park a mixture of users who enter and leave the park at different times. They use the park at different times from one another because their daily schedules differ. The park thus possesses an intricate sequence of users. In short, Rittenhouse Square is busy fairly continuously for the very same basic reasons that a lively sidewalk is used continuously: because of functional physical diversity among adjacent uses, and hence diversity among users and their schedules.

Washington Square in Philadelphia, a Failure

Philadelphia's Washington Square - the one that became a pervert park - affords an extreme contrast in this respect. Its rim is dominated by huge office buildings, and both this rim and its immediate hinterland lack any equivalent to the diversity of Rittenhouse Square - services, restaurants, cultural facilities. The neighborhood hinterland possesses a low density of dwellings. Washington Square thus has had in recent decades only one significant reservoir of potential users: the office workers....This principal reservoir of users all operate on the same schedule. They all enter the district at once. They are again incarcerated again after lunch. They are absent after working hours. Therefore, Washington Square, of necessity, is a vacuum most of the day and evening. Into it came what usually fills city vacuums - a form of blight.

The Scourge of Monoculture

It need not have been office work that depopulated [Washington Square]. Any single, overwhelmingly dominant use imposing a single schedule of users would have had a similar effect. The same basic situation occurs in parks where residence is the overwhelmingly dominant neighborhood use. In this case, the single big daily potential reservoir of adult users is mothers. City parks or playgrounds cannot be continuously populated by mothers alone, any more than by office workers alone.

Blocks of Monoculture Enclose Salem's Downtown Core: State offices, Pringle Creek, Riverfront Park

It is not difficult to see the parallels. Salem's downtown core is bounded on the south and east and west by large blocks of these sorted and decontaminated units.

On the east and south, precisely at 5pm each workday the spaces empty. The Pringle Creek Renewal Area and the Capitol Mall and State offices have a single use. On weekends and at night they are dead zones. As desolate islands, they also act as pedestrian barriers to the Bush-Gaiety Hill and the Court-Chemeketa neighborhoods (map here). There is little to pull people through the areas and into downtown.

The Capitol Mall has a long history. Up until 1935 it was a thriving residential neighborhood for established names in Salem. In her excellent article, "The Children of Piety Hill" (Historic Marion, 42:1), Virginia Green writes about the houses of Salem pillars like the Kays, Cookes, Pattons, Parrishes, McNarys, Eyres, Barnes, Lachmunds, and Spauldings. First Presbyterian was on the east side of Winter, kitty-corner to its current site.

After the 1935 Capitol fire, the State Capitol Reconstruction Commission claimed the four blocks just north of it, those bounded by Winter, Court, Capitol, and Center streets. The WPA helped with the State Library building, and in time three more office buildings replaced the homes. (Here are two photos of the Cooke-Patton home, just prior to razing. You can imagine the home's footprint just to the east of the State Library, between it and the fountain.)

By 1949 state planners envisioned a larger mall. Though it was debated into the 70s, with Gov. Vic Atiyeh pushing for a suburban expansion of the state offices out east near I-5, the mall ultimately was built largely as envisioned. Salem planners thought the concentration would assist with parking and make transit easy and attractive to use.



Also in the 70s, the Pringle Creek Urban Renewal Area was built. It is classic urban renewal with open space and mid-rise building massing. In this photo the Library is off to the right, and visible from the bottom are the Civic Center, Firehouse, Pringle Parkade (neither the plaza nor post office is built yet), SAIF complex, and Robert Lindsey Tower.

(Photo reference and notes - Pringle Creek Urban Renewal Area.)

On the west is the more complicated situation of Riverfront Park. It is a great improvement over the mill contaminated waterfront, and it has the beginnings for complexity: The carousel and playground, an ampitheater stage, the public docks, covered picnic area, the A.C. Gilbert complex, and the Union Street Railroad bridge. Soon there will be the Boise Redevelopment project.

But Riverfront Park is badly disconnected from greater downtown by a great moat: the very busy Front Street by-pass and two additional moat rings in the Commercial/Liberty couplet. Business also face State, Court, and Chemeketa rather than Front. The lone exception, The Rivers condos, might as well be several blocks away, and until there are better connections across Front, its natural walking connections will always be to the east rather than west towards the river. The planned closure of State street at the Carousel will intensify the moat and make the park and the Boise project even more car-dependent (more here and here). No business or cafe activity creates psychological bridges across Front.

One of the reasons the downtown core sometimes struggles is because it is not ringed with residences and a mix of uses that would send people downtown in waves throughout the day and night. This is over-simple, of course, but is an important part of the problem. The parks and open space around office buildings aren't structured in ways that make the areas and adjoining ones really vital.

Sad Sidewalks in Salem

Salem's sidewalks average almost 10 defects requiring repair per 300 foot block. Many neighborhoods don't have any at all. Salem sidewalks are inadequate in many ways.

Jane Jacobs has lots to say about sidewalks, but it's not always clear how much of it might relate to Salem. On the one hand, she talks about the sidewalks in densely populated urban environments, full of mid-rises, brownstones, or other essentially yardless adjoined housing. Against this is the super-block, high-rise "project." Neither of these exist here. Moreover, she cautioned against applying her urban analysis to towns and suburbs.

Even so, surely parts of her analysis do apply to Salem. In many ways, it is difficult to walk in Salem. Though the differences between downtown core, commercial strip development, and residential neighborhoods may make applying Jacobs' insights sometimes difficult or indirect, still, the greatest fact about Salem sidewalks is that too many neighborhoods don't have any.

At a very basic level, Salem has a huge sidewalk deficit.

This map is from the Pedestrian Element (16pp pdf) of the Salem Transportation System Plan. In purple it shows the extensive mid-century neighborhoods that lack sidewalks in Salem.

Generally, the older, inner areas of Salem have good sidewalk availability. The newer, outermost areas of Salem also have good sidewalk availability. In between these areas there are neighborhoods that were built in the 1940s and 1950s before sidewalks were required by Marion County. These areas came into the City through annexation and have not been improved to full urban standards. For this reason, large areas of Southeast and Northeast Salem are lacking sidewalks.[emphasis added]

In some areas, neighbors oppose sidewalks because the increase in property values will increase property taxes. These residents do not always consider the increase in transportation costs and aggregate medical costs they incur when they substitute motor trips for short walking trips.

Many of the Keep Salem Moving road bond projects are widening of roads to include sidewalks where previously none were built, like this on Hawthorne & Hyacinth:

Construct Hawthorne Avenue NE and Hyacinth Avenue NE to Minor Arterial street standards with center turn lanes, proper travel lane widths, bicycle lanes, curbs, gutters, sidewalks, drainage, streetlights, and landscaping, as needed.

These projects involve arterials, however, and not the network of local streets that also lack sidewalks. They also typically involve enlarging a two-lane unimproved cross-section into a three-lane roadway conforming to "urban arterial standards." Because busy roads aren't fun to walk, even improving them with sidewalks doesn't encourage walking enough. Additionally, there's no network of residential streets would feed walkers to the arterial sidewalks - so since the new arterial sidewalks will remain hard to reach by walking, the sidewalks will remain underused.

Another kind of deficit is sidewalk size.

Salem City Code (chapter 78) requires 5 foot sidewalks most of the time, except near schools, which earn an extra 3 feet for an 8 feet total width. Compared to Jacob's ideal of 30 or more feet, this is paltry indeed. Downtown sidewalks are considerably wider, but still far short of Jacobs' ideal.

A third kind deficit is sidewalk condition and funding for repair.

The city's Sidewalk Repair Program pushes responsibility for public walks onto the property owner:

[O]wners of property within the city limits and adjacent to sidewalks built since September 1, 1992, will be responsible for repairing or replacing damaged sidewalks, unless the damage has been caused by a City street tree....Owners of property within the city limits and adjacent to sidewalks built prior to September 1, 1992, will be assigned responsibility for repairing or replacing damaged sidewalks after the City of Salem first repairs the existing sidewalks and brings them up to an acceptable standard.

According to the May 2009 annual Sidewalk Repair Report, "A total of 93,387 defects have been inventoried as of May 12, 2009." Further, "Of those, 81,597 of the defects, or 87 percent, are non-compliant defects and need to be repaired." In the most recent November 2009 update, the city has "somewhere between 800 to 900 miles of sidewalk" and "between 65 and 73 percent" of Salem sidewalks have been inspected." Many of the defects violate ADA compliance, and Council recently instructed the City to focus on remedying these violations.

All in all, that's a lot of bad sidewalk. And it matters.

This is a bike blog, of course, but at the start and end of every trip, no matter what transportation choices we make, we're all pedestrians. That is the foundational experience in mobility.

This green transportation pyramid puts the pedestrian experience at the base of the pyramid, but at the top of the hierarchy. That's a clever way to show the importance of walking and sidewalks.

Fortunately, Salem won a grant to update the Pedestrian Element of the Transportation System Plan. Part of the grant application specified that it would fund completion of Salem's sidewalk inventory and recommend changes to development and design standards for sidewalks.

Unfortunately, it won't change the funding mechanism. Today, sidewalk repair is funded essentially the same way road repair was funded in the 19th and very early 20th centuries. Back then, property owners were responsible for directly repairing or paying an assessment to fund repair of the roads that fronted their property. Needless to say, many property owners found ways to avoid repair. Finally, in order to "get Oregon out of the mud" state and local governments took over road repair and road building. They realized that roads were common goods and should be funded publicly.

Sidewalks are also public goods, but we fund them as private property. Since those who enjoy them are usually passers-by rather than the property owners themselves, property owners have little incentive to build or repair them to high standards.

So Salem has a large and systemic sidewalk deficit.

In another note, we'll return to the rich complexity of sidewalk life, the ways sidewalk life leads trust and public safety, the ways sidewalk life helps to socialize children, and the relation between cars and sidewalks.

Jane Jacobs - On the Uses of Sidewalks

The first three chapters of The Death and Life of Great American Cities are about sidewalks and the uses of sidewalks. In order, she discuss safety, contact, and assimilating children.

More interesting to me than her chapter ordering is her writing. Her analysis employs a mixture of functional, aesthetic, and organic metaphors. Here are some paragraph-sized chunks. They're a little baggy and oversized, but since her prose is pretty juicy, it seemed worthwhile.

Though her chapter framework is functional, dwelling on way sidewalks are useful, Jacobs really starts things with an embrace of complexity and the aesthetic. If you don't buy the value in higher-order complexity, then I'm not sure her functional arguments will hold for you. But if you think simple is too often boring or stultifying or even hegemonic, then her argument suggests much.

Good Sidewalk Life Offers a Rich Complexity

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, whereever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance - not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.

[Public sidewalks] bring together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion...if interesting, useful, and significant contacts among the people of cities are confined to aquaintenceships suitable for private life, the city becomes stultified. Cities are full of people with whom, from your viewpoint, or mine...a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either.

The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors - differences that often go far deeper than differences in color - which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudo-suburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities ahve built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms...Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's weath of public life may grow.

Rich Sidewalk Life Leads Trust and Public Safety

The first thing to understand is that the public peace - the sidewalk and street peace - of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.

A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted street is apt to be unsafe....there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space....Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street....And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.

Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety. First, they give people - both residents and strangers - concrete reasons for using the sidewalks on which these enterprises face. Second, they draw people along the sidewalks past places which have no attractions to public use themselves but which become traveled and peopled as routes to somewhere else...Third, storekeepers and other small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace and order themselves...Fourth, they activity generated by people on errands, or people aiming for food and drink, is itself an attraction to still other people.

In speaking about city sidewalk safety, I mentioned how necessary it is that there should be, in the brains behind the eyes on the street, an almost unconscious assumption of general street support when the chips are down - when a citizen has to choose, for instance, whether he will take responsibility, or abdicate it, in combating barbarism or protecting strangers. There is a short word for this assumption of support: trust. The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.

Good Sidewalk Life Socializes Children into Responsibility

Among the superstitions of planning and housing is a fantasy about the transformation of children. It goes like this: A population of children is condemned to play on the city streets. These pale and rickety children [exist] in their sinister moral environment, "the moral and physical toll taken on our youth by the streets," sometimes...called "the gutter." If only these deprived children can be gotten off the streets into parks and playgrounds with equipment on which to exercize, space in which to run, grass to lift their souls! Clean and happy places, filled with the laughter of children responding to a wholesome environment.

Garden City planners, with thier hatred of the street, thought the solution to keeping children off the streets and under wholesome surveillance was to build interior enclaves for them in the centers of superblocks....Today many large renewal areas are being replanned on the principle of enclosed park enclaves within blocks....The relatively dead backs of buildings or, worse still, blank end walls, thus face on the streets. The safety of the unspecialized sidewalks is thus exchanged for a specialized form of safety for a specialized part of the population for a few years of its life.

I have been dwelling on a negative aspect of child rearing in cities: the factor of protection - protection of children from their own idiocies, from adults bent on ill, and from each other. I have dwelt on it because it has always been my purpose to show, by means of the most easily understood problem, how nonsensical is the fantasy that playgrounds and parks are automatically OK places for children, and streets are automatically no OK places for children...lively sidewalks have positive aspects for city children's play, too, and these are at least as important as safety and protection.

In real life, only from ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn - if they learn at all - the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns from being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties or kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public rsponsiblity for you.

The lesson that city dwellers have to take responsibility for what goes on in city streets is taught again and again to children on sidewalks which enjoy a local public life. They can absorb it astonishingly early. They show they have absorbed it by taking it for granted that they, too, are part of the management. They volunteer (before they are asked) directions to people who are lost; they tell a man he will get a ticket if he parks where he thinks he is going to park...the presence or absence of this kind of street bossiness in city children is a fairly good tip-off to the presence or absence of responsible adult behavior toward the sidewalk and the children who use it.

Cars and the Allocation of Space

Suppose we continue with building, and with deliberate rebuilding, of unsafe cities. How do we live with this insecurity? [One mode] is to take refuge in vehicles.

Sidewalks thirty or thirty-five feet wide can accomodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them - along with trees to shade the activities, and sufficient space for pedestrian circulation and adult public sidewalk life and loitering. Few sidewalks of this luxurious width can be found. Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conveniently considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings, and go unrecognized as unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplacable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are.

In another post we'll look at how Jacobs' analysis of densely populated urban sidewalk life applies and does not apply to what I think of as Salem's three kinds of sidewalks, those in the downtown core, those along commercial strips and arterial streets, and those in residential neighborhoods.

Chemeketa St and Union RR Bridge Signage Going Up

On of the Vision 2020 projects is to update and improve the directional signing along Chemeketa Street and the Union St. RR Bridge. The signs are now going up, and it's great to see the project approach the finish line! The project was made possible by a combination of funding principally from the City of Salem, from ODOT, and from the Downtown-Riverfront Urban Renewal Area. Special thanks to Julie Warncke and Kevin Hottman with the city and Rodger Gutierrez with ODOT!

Here's an example of an old sign. There were a couple of these along Court Street, and the group wanted to eliminate these and, among other things, bring the signage into conformance with the Salem-Keizer Bike Map.

And here's an example of the new sign. This is going west-bound on Chemeketa just as you approach the Capitol Mall. Chemeketa goes under, and into the parking garage, and bicyclists should stay above ground. The signing shows the veer into the turn-around.

On the other side of the turn-around are the two bathrooms, and signs have been erected on the sides of the bathroom instructing bicyclists to avoid the center area into which the bathroom doors open. Alex Phillips and Jim Bader from State Parks were especially helpful in arranging to remove some shrubbery and to grind down the curb so there was a good bikeway around the bathrooms.

Here's the sign going east-bound at 14th and Chemeketa. Hopefully that jog can be widened and straightened out to make the crossing at 14th easier and more straight-forward.

And here's the sign directing bikes from 24th (via State Street) onto Chemeketa.

On a sunny day we'll get more photos of the signs and especially the set on and near the bridge!

Oak Trees and Alt Modes: Ambivalence and Ambiguous Progress at Council

Interesting City Council meeting this evening. An oak grove with trees nearly 200 years old threatened by the Salem Renewable Energy and Technology Center provided most of the debate this evening. (Happily the effort to replant oak savannah at Minto Brown did not occasion debate, though it added to the irony.) Councilor Tesler defended the trees passionately and observed the irony in an ostensibly sustainable energy park needing to cut them down. It seemed, sadly, to be a metaphor for the way sustainability is all too often approached here. Jobs as resource extraction, pink-slipped when the market collapses or the resources run out, not jobs as a truly sustainable enterprise.

(Photo: Ashael Bush II in the Bush Pasture Oak Grove)

Still, Council passed a substitute motion directing staff to prepare a report on the trees with a view towards developing a plan to save them, which seemed like it preserved the possibility of meaningful compromise.

Two transportation developments reflected this ambivalence.

Council approved staff recommendation to proceed with a stimulus-funded Energy Efficiency and Conservation Grant application. The city proposes to allocate funds in this way:

$150,000 to establish revolving loan fund for energy efficiency upgrades.
This will meet Community draft Goal #1 - Improve energy efficiency in buildings community-wide.

$5,000 to support electric vehicle charging stations.
$85,000 to implement Alt Modes recommendations
These will meet Community draft Goal #2 - Create and support a viable transportation network that focuses on moving people.

$65,000 for a marketing plan.
This will meet Community draft Goal #5 - Complete a public participation program which fosters a sense of commitment and awareness of the benefits of energy savings and greenhouse gas reduction community-wide.

$1,171,000 to meet City draft Goal #1 - Lead efforts to increase energy efficiency in City buildings.

Especially interesting is the $85,000 allocation to begin implementing recommendations from Rivercrossing Alternative Modes Study. The good news is that these will be the first funds applied to the recommendations, and hopefully they will leverage more. The recommendations are good ones and should be pursued with or without the bridge. The bad news is that the projects cost significantly more than tens of thousands of dollars, and that the amount pales next to the proposed $500M for the bridge. Hopefully this is a prelude, not merely a bone.

Public Works gave an update on Market & Lancaster.According to the staff report, one of the primary objects in the widening effort is safety:

The current project looked at the effectiveness of these changes based on 2005 through 2008 collision data. The rate was reduced from 3.39 collisions per million million vehicles entering (MEV) the intersection to 2.4 (over 1 is considered a higher than average collision rate).

Staff developed a preliminary plan that continues to implement access management techniques at the intersection to help further reduce the collision rate. The techniques being considered include raised traffic separators (medians)…to control vehicle turning movements at driveways; consolidating multiple driveways to one location; and driveway closures.

But the plan adds dual turn lanes and widens the road from 5 to 6 lanes! SKATS 2007 data suggests the Lancaster corridor is in absolute terms the most dangerous place for pedestrians and bicycles - and they're going to take away with one hand what they give with the other! "Access management" and safety concerns look Orwellian here: Really making the intersection safe and functional for all road users would require an approach radically different from widening the road and closing driveways.

A more general update to the road bond is here.

So it was a half-glass night - half-full or half-empty maybe depends on your mood or sensibility.