Downtown Streetscape Open House Summary: Tame the Cars!

This week the City posted the summary from the Downtown Streetscape Open House.

The link on the City site is busted, however, but it was not difficult to figure out the right directory structure from the other documents that had correct urls. (Update - the link is fixed on the project website now.)

A busted url: It's in the cityofsalem.net/citydocuments folder

So, for the record, here's the link to "Downtown Salem Streetscape Plan Kickoff Open House Summary."

Here are two top-level clips.

It's really interesting how broad is the consensus on Court & Liberty as the "heart" of downtown. The Reed Opera House has something to do with that, as the earliest "big" institution downtown around which other things clustered. 

The red: Broad consensus on Court & Liberty = Heart

Maybe there's a real way to leverage that. That will be an interesting invitation to creativity for the Landscape Architects.

Final Winter-Maple Bikeway Plan Envisions Sluggish Implementation

Last week the City released  a final draft of the Winter-Maple Bikeway Plan. Overall, it points to ways our current formal planning paradigm is sometimes too focused on technical solutions and fails to give sufficient attention to the politics of actually realizing a plan with funding and construction.

final draft of Winter Maple Bikeway Plan

Back in May when we all got our first look at the draft concepts, you might remember a set of key challenges:

1. Parking reduction (and potential loss of meter revenue) from angle to parallel. Will the City and State and other neighbors embrace this?
2. How will the two businesses on Norway at Fairgrounds receive the idea of closing that small section of Norway to cars? Are they on board yet?
3. And difficulty with the railroad in securing permission for the reconfigured crossings on Maple.

Most of the other details seemed like details too small to fuss over. The incremental difference between an 80% solution and a 90% solution is rarely all that important, and just doing something is almost always better than the status quo. In any case, there is not much change from the May draft concepts to these December final concepts.

So how the final recommendations managed these three moments will be central to an opinion of the overall plan.

Implementation does not seem very Urgent

But first, there is one overwhelming impression from the final published study.

It's not clear how serious we are. Towards the end of the plan, there is a table with a staging plan. A lot of the pieces are envisioned as "long-term" for completion five or more years out.

Article on Driving in Rain Slips on Speed

We're in the holiday doldrums, a between time when there isn't always something interesting to say.

A funny press release made for a front-page article today about the dangers of driving in the rain.

With 55 crashes directly caused by rain, Oregon ranked fifth among the most dangerous states for driving in the rain in 2016.

Sounds ominous, right?

The total number of reported crashes for 2016 wasn't immediately at hand, but the number for 2015 is 55,156. This will give us an order-of-magnitude comparison.

That's one-thousandth of the crashes directly caused by rain, a tenth of 1%!

It's hard to think of any analytical framework that would conclude rain itself is a pressing matter for systemic road safety efforts above and beyond our existing standards for stormwater drainage.

TransitCenter Publishes Field Guide for City Leaders

The cover is perhaps a little underwhelming, but a recent TransitCenter publication is very interesting. "All Transportation is Local: A Field Guide for City Leaders" looks like something that could be a basic text for the City Council Public Transit Committee as well as the new bridgehead congestion Committee:

This handbook outlines practical steps that local elected officials can take right away to improve their transportation systems and make their cities better places to live, work, and visit. This how-to guide has four sections. “How to Make the Most of Your Time in Office” and “Alliances That Get Results” deal with the human dimensions of leadership, and “Make the Most of Your Infrastructure” and “Rewrite the Rules to Boost Growth, Not Traffic” deal with the physical and policy dimensions. No single formula fits every single jurisdiction, so elements from each of these sections can be selected as appropriate to your own circumstances. The important part is to find the combination of recommendations that work best for you and your residents.

Cherriots' own consultant also recommends it:

via Twitter

Anyone, not just Electeds, interested in Salem transportation would probably find something of use in it. So if you're looking for some transportation policy reading over the break, you might consider this!

Salem Area Driving May Double GHG Pollution from Incinerator

via Twitter

This past week the Federal Highway Administration seemed to exult in setting a new record in gas consumption.

And Salem Weekly followed up on some social media posting to note that our Brooks garbage incinerator is a huge greenhouse gas polluter.

But there's an element of comparison that might be missing. (The goal here is to sketch out an order-of-magnitude estimate, a back-of-the-envelope calculation. If you know of a more precise reckoning, do share it!)

Here are the top five polluters from the article with the number of tons reported as emissions:

1. Covanta Marion, Inc. 160,517
2. Kettle Foods, Inc. 8,491
3. Bruce Packing Company 8,152
4. Oregon State Penitentiary 7,127
5. Norpac Foods, Inc. 6,659

The incinerator wipes out the pack by two orders of magnitude!

But even the incinerator emits less than our daily driving.

Plans for Housing and Shelters Need to Account for Walking and Biking

There's been lots of talk about the non-opening and then opening of warming shelters in Salem.

New UGM site:
The corner of Commercial and D Streets is hostile
to anyone not in a car

With the prospect of the UGM's move north (a preliminary matter was before the Hearings Officer a couple of days ago) across from the new site for the Police Station on a very zoomy stretch of Commercial Street, it should be an occasion to consider walking and bicycling there.

Uncle Sam Buys Bicycles: A Patriotic Christmas Ad from 1917

Without diving in too deep at the moment, here's an interesting pair of ads from the Capital Journal's Christmas supplement of 1917.

Arthur Moore's father was a Justice on the Oregon Supreme Court, and he took over his brother's business after an untimely death. (More on Moore here and here.)

Bikes and Patriotism during War - December 19th, 1917

(For more on the Pope Manufacturing Company's Columbia brand and military models, here's a couple of sites with lots more - one, two.)

"you are all entitled to the joys of life"

And here is a car ad that makes an explicit appeal to - or might even partially constitute - a kind of autoist entitlement! (The rhetoric of "entitlement" has generally not seemed useful here, as nowadays it's usually employed as a partisan way to insult a chosen out-group, but it's impossible not to notice it in this ad.)