Deadline for TSP comments

The City Traffic Engineer, Amanda Owings said she will take public comments about the Transportation System Plan up to the end of April.  The collected comments will be considered when the staff does a re-write of the TSP as requested by the Planning Commission.

A few topics from the April 19 Mayor's Neighborhood Association Chairs Meeting:

• One of the topics brought up at the meeting a week ago was what criteria was used for ranking the TSP projects.  The engineers present, Erica Rooney and Amanda Owings, said the rankings may not represent community values and would be removed.
• A request was made to include the origin of each project - Metro plan, Parks and RC Trails Master Plan, CIP list, developer needs or neighborhood request.  There was much concern that regional goals dominated local, citizen desired projects.
• Regional (Metro) plans and goals are not mandatory.  
• In the discussion on how to relieve State St. congestion, the question was asked if there was scientific data that showed that adding a bike land (as suggested by the engineering staff) would reduce auto traffic.  The engineers did not know.  Further research has been reported here in a previous post on bike lanes and traffic congestion.  
• There were questions about why the project list had certain projects on it that no one in the neighborhood or city wanted.  It was pointed out that once projects were put on the list they never came off and the list kept growing.
• On the topic of trails and pathways crossing private land, sometimes through backyards, it was felt that property owners should be notified of the plans, though timing of notification was not agreed upon.  Some cited the Bullard case where a family had to take the city to court to prevent a path from taking their land and devaluing their property.  The gain would be nil for the one or two bicyclists who would use it.
• There was extreme frustration about not seeing many maintenance projects listed on the TSP lists.  Many roads are in poor shape and some are near failure (actively slipping down hills) but have not caught the attention of the Public Works / Engineering Dept.  It was explained that the TSP is a planning document for the future, not the present.  However, many noted that some maintenance projects were on the project lists, carried over from the CIP, so that wasn't entirely true.
• The funding portion of the TSP was felt to be weak as it did not address maintenance costs as a part of the estimates for listed projects.  As a planning document, the funding portion was not felt o be the job of the engineering dept. or part of the TSP.  
• Transit is always a hot topic, but most conversation was about increasing bus service so it is a legitimate travel option once again.  
• Up-classifying roadways and what that means for the neighborhoods and city was discussed and rejected by many NA Chairs present.  In light of little growth and no large developable pieces of land, the need for higher volume traffic roadways was nonexistent for the foreseeable future.  
• The Planning Dept. (in past meetings) and Engineering staff seem to express a preference for sidewalks to give people "a place to walk" as if people haven't been walking the streets of LO for decades.  The overwhelming feeling from the citizens present was that we like our more relaxed, country-style streets and neighborhood character without sidewalks - meandering paths were OK, but no path was fine too.  One suggestion was to include an approved street cross section that showed existing roadways with shoulders only.  

Read the document, walk and drive and bike around your neighborhood and city, and tell the engineers what YOU want for Lake Oswego.  You have only 2 more days to do it!