Address Change of 1904 and the Spaghetti Warehouse Move

With the sale of Roger Yost's properties downtown, the Spaghetti Warehouse at 120 Commercial St NE will be moving again. That's a real bummer for them and for their customers.

Errantly identified with the Greenbaum building
(248 is a red herring!),
this is in fact 120 Commercial St NE,
not 248 or 298 Commercial St NE.
(Salem Library Historic Photos)

Same view today - via Streetview

But that's not our story here.

Our story is rather about the perpetuation of an error in the City's historic photos database. (This really is just a long and meandering footnote!)

The old photo of the Buren & Hamilton store (at top) shows an address of 248 on the awning, but in the Library's historic photos the image is captioned this way:

Buren & Hamilton furniture store was located at 298 Commercial Street NE in the building now occupied by Greenbaum's Quilted Forest.

Awning with "24" and part of "8"
(From a different image at the
Oregon State Library)

The Library's image isn't at a very high resolution, and the number has been misread as 298. It really is 248. (See detail from different image above.) Since in the old directories, Greenbaum's had an address of 298, as misreadings go it is a "natural" one and is easy to understand. (And the modern address is 240-248 Commercial St NE.)

State of City Speech, Survey on Regional Plan, Decongestion Pricing - Moments in Autoism

SRC: "stalled"

In his "State of the City" speech yesterday, the Mayor gave a public and fairly unambiguous assessment of the current state of the Salem River Crossing, saying it was "stalled."

This was nice to see, and it will be interesting if other agencies and entities attend to the cue, or if it remains part of the public process theater in which people say one thing and do quite another. I am not super optimistic. By our inability - or refusal - to articulate a general critique of autoism, and then to act on it, we are stuck with the idea that other autoist solutions are necessary or helpful. We need to change the paradigm, to get outside of our autoism, and at the moment that shift isn't there. I'm going to jam together three topics that might seem unrelated, but they really all participate in the same unwillingness to critique our autoist preferences.

USGS quads, 1975 and 1986

In the Mayor's speech, and perhaps offered as an element of complaint, he noted

Salem’s street system was designed for between 60,000 to 80,000 people, whereas the city’s population is now closer to 170,000.

That's basically two generations ago; the 1970 census says the city's population was 68,000 and the 1980 census, 89,000.

Person in Truck on I-5 Strikes and Kills Man Trying to Cross

Today's article

From today's paper:

A Nevada man has been identified as the pedestrian who died after getting hit by a vehicle south of the Kuebler Boulevard overpass on Interstate 5 Saturday night.

Kirk Daniel Wilcox, of Sparks, Nevada, was dressed in dark clothing when he was hit by a pickup when he tried crossing I-5 from the center median across three southbound lanes around 8:55 p.m., according to Oregon State Police.

The 2015 GMC pickup towing an enclosed cargo trailer tried to avoid hitting Wilcox, but struck him with the right nose of the pickup.

the first article

Just a few notes:

1. A robot car struck and killed a person in Tempe earlier this month. By contrast, on this occasion there was a human fully responsible for the operation of the vehicle, and a "truck" didn't suddenly veer off, act autonomously, and strike a person on foot. "the 2015 GMC pickup...tried to avoid...struck him." Stop erasing the driver! The subject of the sentence is Christopher Scott Linn of Albany. Fixed it: Christopher Linn tried to avoid hitting Wilcox but struck him with the nose of his pickup.
2. Is it necessary to say the person was wearing "dark clothes"? These things are always so quick with the victim blaming. Well before we learn anything about the person driving, the person ostensibly in charge of operating a motor vehicle, we get the "bad pedestrian" trope. Notice the yellow highlight in each of the stories.
3. At the same time, yeah, the Interstate is the one place inside the city where priority rightly goes to cars and their drivers, and no amount of engineering or culture change is going to make it a good place for crossing on foot. Whether a person was wearing dark or illuminated clothing, 55+mph is a long stopping distance.
4. Probably this is more a story about homelessness or mental illness than a story about traffic safety. But we don't know! Maybe Wilcox had a stalled car and was seeking help. Reporters and police statements should be more neutral in the early stages of a crash investigation, not so quick with the victim-blaming and driver-absolving.

Postscript, April 6th

Columbia Journalism Review - via twitter

We'll come back to this probably. The Columbia Journalism Review finally addresses the autoist bias in so many news stories about collisions with people on foot and on bike.

She ran into traffic. He was wearing dark clothing. They didn’t use the crosswalk. In the aftermath of crashes between drivers and vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, there’s a tendency to blame the victim. It’s just one way the media fails to properly cover traffic collisions, according to a new report from MacEwan University.

A Survey on Goals in the new RTSP, Mixed Signals on the SRC, Scorn for GHG Reduction - At the MPO

The Policy Committee for our local Metropolitan Planning Organization meets today the 27th, and while there's not a whole lot of decisions on the agenda, the general tenor of the last month is perhaps interesting to note. (We'll shift back-n-forth between last month's minutes and this month's agenda.)

Most significantly, Staff is proposing to send out a survey on goals in the new 2019 Regional Transportation System Plan that they are just starting to write. This will be an opportunity to include language about greenhouse gas reduction and to strengthen goals for mobility and safety on trips other than driving.

Salem River Crossing

MPO Policy Committee Chair Clark - via SCV

On the Salem River Crossing, it's full speed ahead, never mind the nay-sayers.

Remember the letter from the City? "City Council is not at a point to support completing the environmental impact statement for the Salem River Crossing."

City Council, March 26th - Fenced Superblock on the old Lindbeck Orchard

Council meets on Monday, and they'll be reconsidering the creation of a Lone Oak Reimbursement District.  That's already got attention and debate, and at Council it'll certainly get more. But an approval for a fenced compound with apartments above Orchard Heights Park is a little odd and worth some comment.

The north-south axis is longer than 600 feet
and the project needs more east-west connectivity
(comments in red added)

This is the old Lindbeck Orchard site, and there have already been a couple of rounds of development. This latest is for 31 buildings and 322 apartments arranged in a ring on a private drive and parking lot, all enclosed by a fence. It looks like a kind of gated community. Between the fencing and the lack of public streets, there are questions about connectivity.

Enclosed by a fence

On fencing, it remains a sad feature of the project that it will be closed off to the sidewalks and neighborhood by a fence. It may be that we should consider adjusting code on complexes whose entries face inner parking lots rather than the public sidewalks and streets.

702.025(a)(2) – Safety Features for Residents.
(A) Fences, walls, and plant materials shall not be installed between street-facing dwelling units and public or private streets in locations that obstruct the visibility of dwelling unit entrances from the street. For purposes of this standard, “obstructed visibility” means the entry is not in view from the street along one-half or more of the dwelling unit's frontage.

Finding:
Dwelling unit entryways face interior to the development site, not towards the abutting streets, therefore, this standard is not applicable.

But it's not just visibility that's an issue. The fence and its relation to streets leads to a question about superblocks and connectivity.

Landscape, Circulation Rank Low on Police Station Priorities

Last night the City and project team shared some results and preliminary design concepts from the survey this winter.

The current concept, via Twitter

They've published a full report on the survey, and I want to drill into one small portion of it.

None of the elements in the survey that directly involve transportation were ranked very important. Car parking and transit ranked right in the middle.

Survey rankings, comments in red added

The elements that specifically involved travel on foot, "landscape" and "campus circulation," whether at trip-end after a car or bus ride, or as a full walking trip, were ranked very low.*

Urban Renewal Considers Funds for 440 State Street and Food Hall

An earlier round of work at 440 State Street
(via On the Way, 2012)

Downtown's urban renewal board, the Downtown Advisory Board, meets tomorrow, Thursday the 22nd, and they look to support more work on the 440 State Street Building.

You might remember back in 2012 an earlier round of work on the building. Apparently the "face lift" by itself was not enough, and there's a new project there.