City Council, December 5th - Sidewalks and the Prospect of a new Police Station

On Monday City Council will discuss sidewalks in the road bond, but in many ways the most interesting part is the report on prospects for a new Police Station.

Missing Sidewalks and Bike Lanes

Back in October the City baked the list of projects for "missing sidewalks and bike lanes" part of the road bond.

For people who bike, chief on the list was the blind corner and narrow clearances of the cut-through from Miller St S to River Rd S.

As part of the $100M Keep Salem Moving road bond, the city is allocating $15,000 for repairs.

The matter will come before City Council for a Public Hearing on Monday night.

The rest of the $1.2M allocated for sidewalks and bike lanes will go to sidewalk repair and construction:

• Baxter Road SE @ Reed Lane SE (northwest corner of intersection)
• Boone Road SE (Chan Street to Liberty Road)
• Ellis Avenue NE (Reedy Drive to Savage Road)
• Felina Avenue NE West of Hawthorne (north side)
• Gerth Avenue NW and 9th Street NW (west side between 8th Street and 9th Street, and east side between 8th Street and Walker Middle School Driveway)
• Hayesville Dr NE (north side of street, east of 12th Street)
• Marshall Drive SE (north side or street east of 12th Street)
• Onyx Street NW @ Chapman Hill Drive NW (along both frontages of north east corner vacant lot)
• Pringle Road SE (Georgia Avenue to Morningside Court)
• Simpson Street SE @ 25th Street SE (east Minor and west side of 25th Street across old Arterial railroad property)
• Tanoak Avenue SE (across from Ginwood Local Court)
• Weathers Street NE (south side, west of Weathers Park)

Strictly speaking, it doesn't appear there will be any new bike lanes constructed.

As a sort of footnote, there is an interesting report on sidewalk construction, requested by the Morningside Neighborhood Association.

Also on the bond measure, there is a proposal to exempt from public bid process the contracts on the rail line for the "quiet zone" and crossing improvements. The proposal looks somewhat absurd on the surface: As apparently the projects are all in the railroad's right-of-way, the railroad is the only entity that can do construction work. So if folks insist on a public bid process, it's far from clear how that would work. This looks like a mere formality. Another footnote.

New Police Station

Maybe the most interesting item - at least the one with the biggest budgetary impact - is a status update on the site evaluation for a new Police Station. Cost estimates range from $53M to $60M for a retrofit to a new facility. As with so many things, parking is a differentiator:

The primary difference between the Civic Center site and the alternative sites is the underground parking included in the Civic Center concept, which costs about $9 million more than the at-grade parking made possible by more abundant land area at the alternative sites.

Here's the concept plan for the current preferred Civic Center site option, in a rendering by collaboration between CB|Two and ZGF architects.

The new building, identified by A2, would sit across from the Boise project. Here's a corresponding aerial view (awkwardly snipped and rotated from the google):

The Civic Center is currently a dead zone outside of business hours, a mono-use office park that empties out at 5pm and on weekends. It would be neat to have some ground floor retail or restaurant, something unrelated to police and other City or emergency services, that would relate to the Boise project (also currently being designed by CB|Two) and create a richer zone of activity here. It's also an opportunity for a lovely building as opposed to the brutalist fortress now there.

When the earthquake hits, City Hall will be toast, so it's not like this is a frill. This is an essential infrastructure project, and hopefully the City will do it well and do it right.

Other Matters

In appointments, Council will confirm Councilor Bennett's appointment to the Citizen Advisory Committee for the North Broadway/High Street Parking Management Plan, and a new citizen appointment to Downtown Advisory Board.

They'll also possibly approve more money for the downtown Economic Improvement District, administered by the Salem Downtown Partnership.

In an information report, the name change for a segment of Salem Industrial Way to Auto Group Avenue appears to have been approved without asking for any concessions.

Light up your Bike for the Holidays

Unfortunately the Holiday Lights parade won't be in Salem this year, and unconfirmed rumblings have suggested the Keizer version might not be as easy to work with for a bike float. And anyway, the bike drill team's on hiatus.

But you can still decorate your bike! Make your own nightly parade!

(Photo: Commute by Bike)

LED lights powered by 2 AA batteries offer a cheap way to decorate your bike for the holidays - and improve your visibility in the dark of winter!

They make 'em in stars, snowflakes, icicles, and "regular" holiday lights. The strands have a 3 position switch - off, on, and blinky.

$4 each at the big chain stores. Maybe the small stores, too. (If you find locally owned stores with them, please drop a comment.)

Secure the battery packs and the strands with black electricians tape or the ever-handy duct tape.

Or make a tree or stand to strap on to your handlebars or pannier rack.

There are also other lighting systems like hokey spokes and FlexPro, some of them much higher quality.

If you have other ideas or sources drop them in the comments!

(mostly a repost from last year)

Grant, Morningside Neighborhood News

If you live in the Grant or Morningside neighborhoods, check in on what the neighborhood associations are doing, and plug into neighborhood advocacy!

Tonight at 6:15pm in the library at Grant School (725 Market Street NE), the Grant Neighborhood Association meets. On the agenda for 7:15pm Julie Warncke will be giving an update on the Bike Plan and on the Rivercrossing.

The Morningside neighborhood is updating the neighborhood plan.

As part of the Morningside 360 project, they're circulating a survey about values and goals. If you live or work in the neighborhood, be sure to take the survey and let them know how important mobility choice and robust bike facilities are! Parts of the neighborhood that are not close to Commercial are pretty car-dependent, with low walkability scores. And it's not like Commercial is pleasant for walking or biking! Make sure the City knows what you value.

The Morningside Neighborhood Association meets Wednesday, December 9, 2011 at 6:30pm, in Painters Hall at Pringle Creek Community.

Donate Bikes for Young Adults Transitioning out of Foster Care

Help make Christmas a little bit better for young adults by donating a bike. The Bike Peddler is accepting donations on Saturday, December 3, from 11:00 to 1:00pm. In addition to bikes, locks, accessories, and money can also be donated.

The bike program is sponsored by the Assistance League of Salem, Auxiliary. The bikes are distributed to young adults who are transitioning out of foster care or young adults on the road to independence.

(And check out the whimsical tree garlanded with reflectors and a chainring topper!)

Statesman Looks at $2M+ Subsidy for Free Parking

The discussion about who bears the cost of downtown's "free" parking in yesterday's paper was great to see. Somebody pays, and the general lack of transparency is not fair to the businesses who are taxed, or to the downtown visitors who enjoy the "free" parking. Because the costs are hidden and externalized, people are not able to make appropriate decisions about time and money and the allocation of increasingly scarce resources.

Writing in Sunday's Statesman Journal, Timm Collins offers a summary of its history and present state:

About 35 years ago, business leaders got together with the city of Salem to remove the majority of metered parking downtown.

Retailers feared a new mall on Lancaster Drive with its multitude of free parking spaces would bring downtown shopping to a grinding halt.

Voters formed Salem's Downtown Parking District which this year will spend more than $2 million on maintenance, promotion, security and management of more than 3,600 city-owned parking spaces.

"Free" parking, it turns out, causes lots of problems! The free parking on Lancaster properties created a cascading effect that harmed downtown and locked it into a dysfunctional relationship with its own free parking, where it is now deemed essential to downtown vitality.

Donald Shoup has written The High Cost of Free Parking and many essays. About curb parking he writes in the NY Times,

a surprising amount of traffic isn’t caused by people who are on their way somewhere. Rather, it is caused by those who have already arrived. Streets are clogged, in part, by drivers searching for a place to park.

Several studies have found that cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts.

And writing about Shoup, Tom Vanderbilt says in Slate,

minimum parking requirements warp markets and create a de facto subsidy in favor of driving. Donald Shoup, a professor of planning and author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is withering in his critique of parking minimums: "They distort transportation choices toward cars, and thus increase traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption. They reduce land values and tax revenues. They damage the economy and degrade the environment. They debase architecture and urban design. They burden enterprise and prevent the reuse of older buildings. And they increase the prices for everything except parking.

Because there are alternatives to shopping downtown, alternatives that have large parking lots with free parking, downtown merchants fear eliminating free parking.

At the same time, the market failures caused by free parking exacerbate all the problems Shoup lists in the Vanderbilt piece.

In fact, we have a system premised on what is really an amazing set of subsidies and consequent market failures centered on cars. Look at again our gasoline pricing:

Free parking is a giant sugar-bomb soda: Tasty for lots of people, but not at all good for us. And like soda, while it may not have immediate effects, the cumulative effects of a generation-long habit are bad, bad, bad.

(Gasoline pricing chart from Taking the Wheel, Achieving a Competitive Transportation Sector through Mobility Choice, p.11 [24pp pdf])

Vancouver WA Suggests Salem Should Explore a TMA for Downtown

Although it was during the OSU-UO football game, and I expected downtown to be a little quieter, I was still surprised with just how sleepy it seemed mid-afternoon yesterday on "Small Business Saturday."

In the Friday paper there was also a note about the trees, wreaths, and other decorations the Salem Downtown Sponsorship and the City are putting up.

What is the Question?

The lack of people and the decorations suggested that maybe Salem is asking the wrong question. The administrators of the downtown Economic Improvement District, first Go Downtown Salem and now the Salem Downtown Partnership, have asked "What do you find downtown?" - that is, what do people find once they get downtown? Do they find clean and attractive sidewalks? Do they find parking? Do they find businesses, amenities, and events they desire?

But maybe the question should be, "How do you go downtown?" with a focus on making it easier for people to come downtown. Maybe the focus on "parking" is something of a red herring, since after all that's the end-state for a car trip downtown.

Vancouver Tackles How

This appears to be the approach The City of Vancouver (Washington) is taking.

The Downtown Vancouver Growth and Transportation Efficiency Center Plan offers a

vision for downtown Vancouver...where people from all walks of life come to gather, live, work, shop and enjoy. The City hopes to maintain Vancouver’s small-town feel while continuing development by adding future employment and housing. This GTEC will assist the city by removing cars from downtown streets, clearing unnecessary parking, and providing pedestrian, bicycle and transit friendly links to major destinations. It will help provide additional transportation capacity without the need to build more on-street parking and/or parking infrastructure.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?!

As a central part of the Plan, Vancouver will

develop a Transportation Management Association (TMA) in the downtown. TMA’s are non-profit, member-controlled organizations that help to manage transportation services in a particular area like the downtown and are generally public-private partnerships, consisting primarily of area businesses with local government support. City of Vancouver is in process of hiring a consultant to help with development of this process, and the City is working in partnership with the Vancouver Downtown Association with this effort as well.

Bikeportland just shared the news that the contract for the consultant had been finalized. Vancouver will form a Business Improvement District that sounds a lot like Salem's Economic Improvement District to fund the TMA on a pilot basis.

A TMA for Salem has been Recommended Already

A couple of years ago, as part of managing the difficulty with crossing the Willamette here in Salem, the Rivercrossing Alternate Modes Study recommended forming a TMA for Salem's downtown:

The Salem Transportation Management Association would be a new organization created to work with the major employers in downtown to implement the recommended TDM [transportation demand management] strategies. Representatives from the City of Salem, downtown business associations, and each of the major downtown employers (the State of Oregon, Willamette University, Salem Hospital, the City of Salem, etc) would likely sit on the board of directors....

The purpose of a TMA is to have a single organizational body dedicated to tackling difficult transportation problems, such as congestion and commuting by single occupancy vehicle. It can help agencies meet goals and enact plans related to multimodal transportation, and can maximize the resources of individual businesses. For example, a business with limited parking capacity for employees and customers can reduce SOV commute trips by employees and free up parking capacity for business patrons. A local TMA can facilitate the implementation of effective transportation programs and services and provide a forum for businesses, neighborhood associations, and local agencies to work together to address transportation issues. A TMA can also advocate for the interests of local businesses and employees at the local, regional, and state level.

Without knowing more, the comparison here may not be exact, still it is interesting that the Vancouver "go downtown" website has a clear focus on transportation rather than on promoting individual businesses and events like First Wednesday.

Currently, we are focused on car parking because people don't feel they have a choice: Our bus system is weak, most people think biking downtown is a deathwish, and so it's no wonder they have a monomodal fixation on the car trip and finding a car parking spot. By creating a robust menu of choices, we will be better able to allocate existing resources and not have to build new expensive infrastructure.

As the Salem Downtown Partnership gets its sea-legs and starts building out its programming, maybe it should give more attention to the way people go downtown and not merely what they find once they get downtown.

Black Friday and the Myth of Motorist Innocence

Cherry-picking anecdotal "data" isn't really all that useful. Chronically we overestimate in-group virtue and underestimate out-group virtue. Whether a person walks, bikes, or drives a car, jerks are jerks.

But the next time I run into the old "motorists are law abiding, but people on bikes are lawless," cliche, I'll trot out this handy datapoint: Last Thursday and very early Friday, State Police issued 82 citations to people in cars near the Woodburn Outlet stores.

From the Oregonian:

Offenses included one arrest for drunken driving, three citations for reckless endangerment [of another person], three citations for driving with a suspended license, one citation for driving without a license, and one citation for possession of less than an ounce of marijuana.

The Statesman added that

58 citations [were] for "Illegal Stopping or Standing" on Interstate 5.

You may also recall 51 citations and one arrest from a crosswalk enforcement action last summer.

That's a whole lotta "exceptions"!

(Photo from the SJ)

Update, June 10th, 2015

Here's a good set from both Marion County and the City: 

In May, the Marion County Traffic Safety Team stopped and contacted 1,090  people (not sure if these are drivers or total vehicular occupants):

• 22 were arrested for DUIIs
• 76 were issued seat belt citations
• 899 were given speed citations and warnings
• 89 were cited as suspended drivers
• four were arrested for felonies
• 10 people were cited for other violations

In the online version of the article, the paper adds info on another 1200+ citations!

The Salem Police Department also participated in a DUII campaign during the month of May to target people driving under the influence of intoxicants.
Lt. Dave Okada with the Salem Police Department said the campaign resulted in 50 DUII arrests, and more than 1,200 other citations.

And even traffic counts yield evidence of routine speeding.

From the Commercial Vista Corridor study