Although it's less likely to be funded or occur than its bigger Columbia River sibling, anyone who cares about Salem should know that there is still a lavishly funded effort afoot to destroy downtown Salem's livability to promote more auto commuting (to what?) by ripping a gargantuan third auto bridge right through the heart of Salem.You just need to go to the Gilbert House on Front St. to get a sense of what a charming addition this bridge would be -- a brutal, looming monstrosity that would not only cause the destruction of many homes but also of the waterfront.
The photo (from the linked story) is probably a good predictor for Salem --- because of our railroad tracks and the existing buildings near the Willamette, a third Salem auto bridge would essentially be a gigantic flyover bridge that would look like a piece of central LA from a gangster thug movie plopped down into Salem.
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I am down with a future with less dependency upon cars. But it won't happen overnight. Even if we could magically somehow move just a quarter of the suburbs into a more urban Salem... well, we couldn't, because there isn't the available housing, infrastructure, jobs, etc.
For goodness sake, our busses don't even run on the weekends!!!
So I see how you can view another bridge as simply encouraging auto use... but that doesn't seem to ring true because the craptastic efficiency of NOT having one is not deterring anyone from buying a house in the suburb and sitting in their car idle for 45 minutes as they try to get over the bridge to West Salem.
So is there a compromise in this somewhere?
Sure, there's a compromise -- demand management: i.e., solve the stated problem -- the roughly half hour of congestion twice a day.
1) Get the State of Oregon to stagger start and end times for all agencies, especially those with customer service functions so that people have a longer window of opportunity, say 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day.
2) Eliminate subsidized parking for state workers and allocate all state managed parking spots by auction rather than fixed price and longevity. Run an annual e-bay style auction for all parking spots. Use the money to restore the free transit pass option for all state workers.
3) Force the State to live up to its own rhetorical greenhouse gassing about greenhouse gases and get serious about telework. The State has pulled BACK from telework of late. The rule should be that, rather than having to convince managers that you can do telework, the managers should have to convince DAS that there's some mighty good reason NOT to authorize it.
Meanwhile, the fact that people have bought in the W. Salem sprawl means that they assessed life with two bridges and found it good, so there's certainly no need to build them another bridge, anymore than people who move in next to an airport get to complain about plane noises or people who move next to a distribution warehouse get to complain about trucks.
Also, the transition to a car-free future is both a lot closer than you might think, and it can happen much, much faster than you appear to realize. When gas hits $8/gallon, Salem's daily weekday "rush minute" will be history.
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