Jaydriver Leaves Road, Crashes and Kills 4 People near ARCHES

Last night there was a terrible crash near ARCHES. The initial story, and a lot of the response, blamed the victims, focusing on them as camping in the wrong place. But they were not camping in the roadway! They were not even on the sidewalk. They were well away from where a car is supposed to be. (See this long thread on instances of drivers crashing into buildings well off the roadway. Are the buildings in the wrong place?)

The error, a grievous and fatal one, is the driver's. The driver is the one at fault, and reporting and comment should underscore the jaydriving, not the camping. Driving is the act that employs lethal force.

The Mayor even misunderstands the problem, perhaps by design.

The Mayor focuses on camping, not jaydriving

The problem is "unmanaged driving" not "unmanaged camping." If the driver had crashed into a building would the Mayor talk about "unmanaged buildings"?

From the Police:

[T]he driver of a two-door sports coupe was traveling northbound on Front ST passing Union ST when the vehicle left the roadway and crashed into an unsheltered encampment pinning two individuals beneath the car. The camp was located at the corner where Front ST NE intersects with the Front ST business route known as OR99E.

Two individuals died at the scene. Four people from the encampment were transported to Salem Health with life-threatening injuries, two of whom later died at the hospital. The driver, and sole occupant of the vehicle, was also transported for medical treatment.

The exact number of individuals and tents at the encampment is not known.

Officers helped several uninjured campers collect some of their belongings and provided shelter assistance. Three individuals were taken to a local motel. The City of Salem’s homeless advocacy partners were also contacted in an effort to get the members of our unsheltered community connected to needed resources as a result this tragedy....

Enrique Rodriguez, Jr., age 24, was [later] arrested on the following charges:

• Manslaughter in the first degree, four counts
• Assault in the second degree
• Assault in the third degree
• Reckless endangerment, six counts

There will be more to say, as too many people will choose to talk about "inappropriate camping" and not about "inappropriate driving" and "broad streets that allow or induce high speeds." However distasteful is the camping and its disorder, the fundamental and lethal problem here is jaydriving.

City Council, March 28th - Getting to Yes

Earlier this month in an opinion piece published in the paper, Planning Commissioner Michael Slater encapsulated our approval process and underscored it was not adversarial:

Salem’s land-use process, which derives from Oregon law, is designed to “get to yes.” The legal and administrative structure is set up to help the landowner gain approval for their application....the city can’t say no. It is required to help the applicant succeed.

Commissioner Slater earlier this month

On Monday Council has three items in various states of process that illustrate this.

The new Staff Report and Recommendation on the revised proposal for the Meyer Farm development immediately expresses the impulse to "get to yes." The revised proposal reduces the total number of lots from 139 to 126 and "results in the preservation of 11 more significant trees." Consequently the Staff Recommendation is to

Affirm the Planning Administrator’s decision approving phased subdivision tentative plan case no. SUB21-09 with the applicant’s proposed modifications dated March 9, 2022 and the additional conditions of approval in this report.

This will not be popular.

No change in concept, just deletion of lots
(yellow added)

The revised plan looks like trying for the minimum. They didn't try to rethink the concept at all. The plan retains the street layout and devotion to lot sizes for single detached housing, and simply deletes a number of the lots that overlapped with significant trees. (But are 126 or 125 lots remaining? There's an oddity in the count, though that might just be the "remainder parcel.")

It will be interesting to see whether Council can find additional reason to press for further modification or whether the requirement, as Commissioner Slater says, to "get to yes" ends the thing now for Council. (Though an appeal to LUBA seems likely no matter what.)

Here are some other interesting notes, but of much lesser direct relevance of course.

City Councilor, Cherriots Board President, Parks vice-Chair Float Protected Bike Lane Proposal

If you don't like high gas prices, you should support bikes!

For kids and for ordinary people

In a press release accompanying a proposal for a network of protected bike lanes, Councilor Virginia Stapleton, Cherriots' Board President Ian Davidson, and Parks vice-Chair Dylan McDowell underscore a message the City should lean into:

A comprehensive bike system would offer a safe, affordable, and carbon-free mode of transportation that is unaffected by fluctuating gas prices.

Climate, equity, and safety have not always registered widely, but high gas prices do. And right now is a moment.

The most resilient, patriotic way to manage high gas prices, is to get off the fossil fuel. The City should make it easier to convert some or all of your trips away from the car.

A Non-County Road, Kenwood Ave costs Residents - But Bug or Feature?

The potholes on the front page yesterday prompted questions about what kind of piece we would be getting. Would it dive into road funding, development standards, and our property tax system? It was begging for a Strong Towns style analysis.

Yesterday's paper

It got part way there.

One of the most important details was buried pretty far into the piece, though: Did the road belong to the City of Salem, a County, or was it a private road? The initial framing of the piece, the photos, headlines, and introduction with epic potholes and fine citizens who struggled with them, suggested a failure in basic government services. Of course they should have a paved road. These were people being neglected, it seemed.

Appearances were deceiving. The photo caption said "Salem," but the street turned out not to be a City street, and not even to be a County road in unincorporated Marion County. It's a kind of near-private street, formally called a "non-county road."

When the homes on the street were built, Marion County allowed developers to opt to not pay to include their street in the county’s roads system. It allowed the developers to sell the houses for lower prices. But it also required homeowners to maintain the road....

The people who live there now aren’t happy that decision was made. They’re paying for it with headaches, car repairs and explanations about how bad their road is.

Marion County Public Works director Brian Nicholas said there are four types of roads in Marion County: private roads, non-county roads, county roads and state highways.

Kenwood Avenue is a non-county road. That means residents have the responsibility to maintain it. Many don’t find that out until after they move in.

So what looked at first like a story about equity and the City of Salem turned out to be something different and more complicated.

Maybe it is not very fair to expect people seeking new homes to have a detailed understanding of the road type, but they are in fact buying or renting homes in unincorporated County areas in part because of lower property taxes or other benefits the relaxed level of County oversight seems to offer. So it should not be completely surprising that some of the infrastructure is "economy class." There is an element of "you get what you pay for" here. This may be in part a failure of the realtor and landlord system with disclosures, not underscoring to new purchasers and renters that neither the City nor the County will maintain the road.

Stories like this sometimes need to be turned inside out. Instead of stories that focus on the plight of individuals, they should be analysis of the systems that enact the hardships, with individual stories as illustrations of the general problem. Sometimes the focus on individuals hides too much. Though individuals are victims of a kind, the problems are funding and policy choices. These are not one-off, isolated instances to be remedied by bureaucrats being more responsible and giving attention to a neglected problem, or to be remedied by charity, but are features of a system that often requires deeper reform. The system might be working as intended, after all, even if we find some of the consequences unpleasant or unfair.

So here are some ideas for follow-up.

Weighting Climate and Emissions in the New MTP: At the MPO

The Policy Committee for our Metropolitan Planning Organization meets on Tuesday the 22nd, and they'll be considering how strongly to consider greenhouse gas reduction in scoring projects for inclusion in the next long-rang plan.

Notwithstanding our rain today, the larger difficulties of climate-intensified drought remain threatening.

In today's paper

You may recall from the technical committee's agenda earlier this month that new guidance from the Feds might be a little helpful, but it seemed also likely to be swallowed up by other scoring criteria and therefore more symbolic than substantive. (See item 12 in table below from the TAC agenda.)

New GHG criteria and Goal 7 (yellow in original)

Staff underscored that any weighting of this new criterion had not been decided and it remained an open question for debate and deliberation.

Nevertheless, the weighting that is proposed in the Staff Report is not very strong, 8.33% of the whole if all 12 are assigned one point.

1 point possible among 12 criteria

So we'll see. 

Mark Hatfield, Alice Lane, and the Problem of Encomiastic History

Our eulogies for great public figures have struggled to leave the mode of encomium. We see this most starkly with Asahel Bush. A century after his death, we still don't have a critical history of him in Salem's development and politics after statehood. More recently, our retrieval of the legacy of Elizabeth Lord & Edith Schryver has focused on the art of gardens and left other social history to the side.

June 11th, 1940

This past week the obituaries for Gerry Frank have also been pretty deferential. He was in fact one of the dominant figures in the second half of the 20th century for Salem and for Oregon. But even allowing for the immediate requirements of eulogy, they still leave a sense of being a little uncritical and one-sided.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. Writing in late 2017 about the difficulties posed by the living for assessments of the dead, in the Daily Astorian columnist Steve Forrester noted

Brent Walth — who wrote “Fire at Eden’s Gate: Tom McCall and the Oregon Story,” the most important political biography of this state — will not take on [Mark] Hatfield. When asked by Hatfield alumni to write that biography, Walth insisted that the late senator’s dark side would have to be in the story. That ended the discussion.

Now another impediment to serious Hatfield research has arisen. In “Hatfield’s Senate papers tucked out of view until 2022,” published Dec. 27 in The Daily Astorian, Claire Withycombe of our Capital Bureau [now of the SJ] reported that the senator’s widow, Antoinette, has sealed the papers until she is “in the grave.”

Frank was his own person and had his own life, and yet the center of his history and significance is strongly related to his work and life in relation to Mark Hatfield. Though elevated by his department store fame and fortune, he achieved power not as a connoisseur of cake but as Chief of Staff. The cake and travel fame followed. A full assessment cannot leave the world of Hatfield and of politics to the side.

Daylight Savings Time and a Bibliography on Autoism

A piece at The New Republic, "The Big Winner in the Daylight Saving Time Debate: Cars," discusses the time change debate as a "proxy fight" over our autoism:

[W]hat really sticks out is that the daylight saving debate is, to some degree, a proxy fight over cars and the role they play in American life....

Car hegemony persists even now, in part because so many Americans associate them with independence and self-reliance. But nothing benefits the reign of the automobile over us all than simple inertia—we’ve accepted that our built environment is designed for the benefit of cars so decisively that we’ve forgotten that we built that environment, through policy choices that may no longer make the sense they once did. That it’s easier to debate how to bend time to our will than it is to take back even a small parcel of the territory that’s been given to cars says it all.

via Twitter

Several conversations over the last month or two have yielded a real bibliography on autoism. This is a convenient peg for it.

Books

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, by Mike Davis (1990)

Geography Of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler (1993)

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, by Kristin Ross (1994)

Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City, by Clay McShane (1995)

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back, by Jane Holtz Kay (1998)

This next is interesting as it and the 2004 Urry article below, as well as other texts, use "automobility." 

This word has seemed to be a neutral modal description, the mere fact of getting around by car, and not the larger cultural system we have been calling autoism here. But some seem to use it for that cultural system also. "Mobility" usually has a positive valence, also. We like mobility. By contrast, the cluster of words marked with -ism and -ist often indicate more negative connotations, and indicate a perspective, orientation, system, or philosophy. So I still prefer autoism as more descriptive. But there is a body of analysis that uses "automobility."