The Zombie Project: A third auto bridge over the Willamette in Salem

This guy is in Iraq because we use 25% of the world's daily oil consumption rather than building transit systems and providing options for people that don't involve driving. A third auto bridge in Salem would be a monument to our failure to recognize the end of the carburban way of life and our willingness to let others die overseas so that we can keep right on driving multi-thousand pound vehicles for our every trip here at home. Image via Wikipedia

Road miles traveled going down? Gas prices going up? Country bankrupting itself by printing money it doesn't have to fund projects it can't afford to maintain a car-centered way of life it can't sustain? Check, check, and check again!!

Here in Salem, the group organized to push through a $600+ million bridge project was finally shamed into remembering that they were not supposed to be locked into planning a bridge as order of business one and only.

Naturally, they have only grudgingly begin to begin thinking about pondering alternatives to more autosprawl (meanwhile, busily beavering away on their dream plan, involving hundreds of millions of dollars, massive construction, etc.), while totally ignoring the spate of recent reports that suggest that our precarious climate is destabilizing faster than even the most pessimistic scientists imagined it would five years ago.

Funny, the "alternate modes" study --- (you'd think that the cheapest ways of solving the problem would be the MAIN line of attack, rather than the grudging afterthought only tossed in because they feared a challenge to the validity of their environmental impact statement) --- has been going since April, but they're just now getting around to alerting the public.

As always, there will only be two modes responses for all public concerns about this boondoggle of a project:

"It's too soon to say" and
"It's too late to stop now."

DEIS Update and Alternate Modes Study

The Salem River Crossing project team is busy working on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). Soon we will begin sending email updates describing the document's progress and how you can get involved once the draft is complete.

In the mean time, we'd like to tell you about an important study being conducted in parallel with the DEIS, called the Salem Willamette River Crossing Alternate Modes study. This study, begun in April, will identify needs and opportunities for improving transit service across the river in Salem. It will also cover related needs and opportunities for carpool/vanpool users, bicyclists, and pedestrians. This study will help assure that any improvements identified will be coordinated with the Salem River Crossing project, as needed.

The first Stakeholder Advisory Committee (SAC) meeting for the study will be held on Monday, June 22nd from 4:00-6:00 pm at the Mid-Willamette Valley Council of Governments office (105 High St. SE, Salem). At this meeting, the Alternate Modes study team will provide an overview of the study, discuss the current system, and outline potential improvements that will be considered. This meeting is open to the public and will include a brief period for public comments.

Meanwhile, bad ideas continue to percolate in background

The sales job to justify the already made (but, thankfully, far from funded) decision to destroy great chunks of minority-dominated housing areas of Northeast Salem and a big piece of West Salem for the convenience of motorized, nearly all-white commuters in Polk County with a third bridge over the Willamette in Salem proceeds apace.

"EIS" -- for those of you who don't speak the weird dialect of proto-English called Transjargon -- means "environmental impact statement." Originally intended to force governments to consider the environmental costs of proposed actions, they have become a cottage industry for consultants and a way to obscure the actual effects in a blizzard of mind-numbing jargon and hopeful assumptions totally unjustified by experience in other settings. Rather than being open-minded assessments, they are typically run as psuedo-studies where the inputs are carefully controlled to obtain the desired output decision. Here's some very telling language from a memo from the team working on this one:

First, the Draft EIS will assume that the future demand (year 2031) for vehicle trips across the river is 8% less than otherwise forecast. Basing the project design on a reduced traffic volume anticipates a high degree of success in increasing non-auto travel across the river and also helps prevent the project from being overbuilt.

So, note -- the selection of an entirely arbitrary figure for reduced vehicle trips that fails to account for the universal worldwide experience that paving drives driving -- that when you build more capacity, driving increases.

In short, taking this approach will enable us to (1) demonstrate fairly and conservatively the independent need for highway improvements even assuming a significant increase in the use of non-auto modes in the peak hours of operation;

In other words, we know we need a third bridge because we decided that a long time ago --- all that remains is jiggering the assumptions as needed to show "the independent need for highway improvements."

Note the one thing that none of the models used in these studies include: The price of gasoline and the global carbon dioxide concentration (which will, as it increases, necessititate ever more difficult measures to ameliorate all the prior investments in "business as usual" by the Highway Department").

And that's the key here, and the reason that this project will likely be derailed by a lawsuit if it keeps going down the path it's on now: the project team has refused to consider the effect of this spectactular and wasteful greenhouse generating project on the state's climate emission reduction goals.

Since the federal government is tiptoeing up to the unpleasant realization that CO2 is actually a pollutant that puts the environment at risk, one of these auto-bridge projects (the Columbia River Crossing megabridge or this one in Salem) is likely to serve as a perfect test case to force the State Highway Department to stop ignoring the rapidly mounting evidence that emissions have to come down radically.

So, as you're enjoying your $5 million budget cuts in Salem in 2009/10, take a moment to appreciate the high-priced consulting you're helping buy, to design a project that can never be built.

Dear Task Force and Oversight Team:

As we continue to work on the Salem River Crossing Draft EIS, we want to keep you apprised of recent developments and schedule highlights.

1. The Draft EIS is currently in the impacts analysis phase, which will result in a series of detailed technical reports. Over the summer and into the fall, we will write the Draft EIS itself, with agency review taking place during the remainder of the year. We are hoping to publish the Draft EIS in January next year (2010).

2. We expect to have at least one meeting each with the Task Force and Oversight Team in late summer or early fall to give you a summary of the technical reports and a preview of the Draft EIS. In the mean time, please watch for periodic email updates on the progress of the Draft EIS. (These will go to the general public too.)

3. We have finalized the approach to transit/TSM/TDM in the Draft EIS and would like to share that with you. Please see the attached memo from Dan Fricke and Julie Warncke, as well as the two background memos with further details.

4. We have made some minor updates to the project web site (including updating the information on schedule and the transit/TSM/TDM approach). We are currently making some minor adjustments to the graphics of the alternatives and will post those within the next month.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. Thank you.

The people supposedly screaming for a new bridge don't even think it's worth a buck to have

"Project consultants also have found that tolls of more than 50 cents would result in a decline in revenues because people would likely use the existing bridges instead."

(Gee, I thought there was no additional capacity on the existing bridges or that the sky would fall if people had to wait one more minute to cross the river. If the people the bridge is supposed to serve don't think a faster crossing is worth more than fifty cents, why should anyone else?)

A very important article and sidebar summary in today's Statesman-Journal.

First, it's worth noting that Saturday is by far the day of the lowest newspaper readership (which is why government media folks universally use Friday as "Take out the trash day" -- the day you release the news for the Saturday news cycle, so that the fewest people will see it).

Certainly one thing they want hidden is the time and place of the Wednesday funding workshop for "officials and community leaders" -- key facts from Journalism 101 curiously omitted from the story. Clearly, the last thing ODOT and Salem want is a lot of residents thinking about the staggering cost of this bridge before it's too late to head it off. This story may also appear today to set up an editorial on funding in the paper on Sunday or early next week.

But, either way, this piece merits attention now because it reveals that -- even aside from the consequences of promoting more greenhouse gas emissions and sprawl -- there is no case for the bridge, because even the prospective users don't think a faster river crossing is worth more than four bits.

Bridge funding in question
Local, regional sources include gas tax, bond, toll
Eunice Kim, Statesman Journal
March 1, 2008

They have determined where it could go, what it could look like and how it could affect neighborhoods.

Now, planners need to figure out how to pay for Salem's third bridge across the Willamette River.

"There's no money now," said Dan Fricke, a senior transportation planner with Oregon Department of Transportation.

Unable to rely on state or federal money, officials say local or regional funding sources must largely pay for the construction of a new bridge or expansion of the existing ones.

State and local officials are considering several options: a fuel tax, vehicle registration surcharge, property taxes and tolls.

"The days of getting large projects funded by the federal government are over," Fricke said. "There has to be a significant local contribution to make things happen."

Officials working on the Salem River Crossing Project have estimated that a new bridge will cost $667 million to $680 million. The other "low-build" option, which only would expand the existing Marion and Center street bridges, is expected to cost about $270 million.

Officials said they must determine how the project is going to be funded to get federal approval to build it. The funding strategy can include a mix of options.

Julie Warncke, Salem's transportation planning manager, said officials don't know how much money they can expect the federal government to pitch in. The largest federal earmarks for Oregon transportation projects have been in the $20 million to $30 million range.

"When you compare that to the total cost, it's not very much," Warncke said.

To help narrow possible funding options, officials and community leaders from across the region plan to participate in a finance workshop Wednesday. They will run through an exercise that will allow them to see how much money each option or any combination could raise.

"The goal is to get feedback on different funding sources to see which ones people in the local and regional area want to pursue," Warncke said. "It's not to choose the funding sources."

To build a $500 million bridge, those sources would have to raise about $30.7 million per year to repay 30-year bonds, said Samuel Seskin, a transportation planning director with the engineering and consulting company CH2M Hill.

A toll of 50 cents per crossing on the new bridge would generate about $5 million per year in revenue, officials said. The problem, though, is that it would cost about that much to collect the tolls. Project consultants also have found that tolls of more than 50 cents would result in a decline in revenues because people would likely use the existing bridges instead.

Tolling the new and existing bridges 50 cents per crossing could bring in $15 million per year in net revenue, officials said.

"It seems to me we have to toll both bridges to (pay for a new bridge)," said Lloyd Chapman, a member of the oversight team of officials working on the project. "The question is how much do we want to put the burden on users versus others?"

If officials went with a local fuel tax, it would be assessed at the pump. Such taxes in Oregon range from 1 cent to 5 cents per gallon.

A 1-cent tax would raise an estimated $515,400 per year in Salem and $59,000 in Keizer, officials said. That same tax would raise an estimated $1.06 million in Marion County, and $111,600 in Polk County.

The other options -- a vehicle registration surcharge paid every two years or a property tax levy -- also would bring in varying amounts of money depending on who was charged. For example, officials estimate that a $20 vehicle surcharge would raise $3.3 million per year in Marion County where there are about 309,642 registered vehicles, but only $800,000 in Polk County where there are about 71,377 vehicles.

There also could be variations to some of the funding options, like charging higher tolls during peak hours.

"The basic question is what funding package are (people) willing to vote for," said Dan Clem, an oversight team member and Salem city councilor.

The funding discussion is part of a step-by-step study that the city of Salem and ODOT are conducting as required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It will result in an environmental impact statement that identifies the preferred alternative, which officials expect to select by the end of the year. If funding can be secured, a new bridge could be built in seven to 10 years.

Bridge corridors under consideration include a crossing from Salem Parkway and Pine Street NE to Wallace Road and Hope Avenue NW, or from Hood and Shipping Streets NE to Wallace and Orchard Heights Road NW. The other option would not include a new bridge but instead would expand the existing bridges by two to three lanes each.

Interesting (intentional?) error--one of the "other options" is to do nothing at all with the existing bridges, recognizing that the thousands of people who drive across them alone Monday through Friday are saying that they don't think the delays are a problem--at least not enough of a problem to cause them to do something that would save them both time and money (riding the bus, carpooling, telecommuting, adjusting their work hours).