[street_blades] A Typical Hard-Working Salem Street Sign

1334. Today, we visited Salem to see an exhibit at Mission Mill Museum and to get some ... what else ... snaps of street signs and the like.

At the corner of Church and Mission Streets, SE, stands a signpost that illustrates just how overworked some Salem street sign assemblies can get:

From the top:

1. Historic District (Gaiety Hill/Bush's Pasture Park) Sign topper;


2. Blade for 500 block of Mission St SE;


3. Blade for 700 block of Church St SE;


4. Finger blade directing you up Church St to Pringle Park;


5. Finger blade directing you across Mission St and into Bush's Pasture Park to the nearby Bush House Art Gallery and Museum;


6. Your average everyday standard STOP octagon.

They do make their signposts do amazing amounts of dutiful work. Some blades require the application of supports, making it all like kind of like a majuscule Y, to give the sign the strength it needs to not bend over

The finger blad reading "HISTORIC MUSEUM/ART GALLERIES" deserves special note as to style. The color scheme – black type on an off-white background – is typical of the standard Salem street blade style through about 1980. After that, it was white on green. Moreover, the type face is plainly different; particularly compare the C in "Church" to the C at the end of "HISTORIC". The round letters are oval rather than elliptical, with straight sides and more perfectly circular tops and bottoms. This was also the standard Salem style, until the signs became white-on-green.

More commentary about Mission Mill and a fun but ultimately unhappy stop at the Salem Cherriots Downtown Transit Center to come.

Tags: Salem, street blades, street blade gallery, Salem photos

[maps, info_design] Marion County Maps: Insanely Detailed and FREE!

1231. While it should be no surprise that online sources for official county-level mapping of very detailed subjects online of public concern (such as tax lots, property lines, rights-of-way, and service district lines, as examples) what is equally curious to the uninitiated is the way you find them. Sometimes, the information can be rather buried.

And that's not the fault of the governments who maintain the information really. The main problem comes when one meets the verity that J. Random Citizen doesn't speak jargon – that particular cant which is lingua franca amongst those who work in our names in the halls of the county courthouses and city h alls of the land.

But the lingo is simple to learn. In particular, what one really needs to understand is the functions of various public officials, and what they do. The thing to really look for is offiices that have anything to do with recording, measuring, taxation, and the like. If a county or a city has online mapping, they will usually have that as an adjunct to offices such as City Recorder, Assessor, City or County Surveyor. From my reading of the Silverton City Code, for instance, I found that the City Recorder is responsible for generating the records of annexations, providing the ongoing definition of just what the city is and just what it isn't.

In the case of Marion County, the mapping function is provided by the Assessor's office. It should be a fairly simple reader exercise to deduce why that might be. In the case of Marion County, though, the maps available provide a sheer eye-glazing surfeit of detail about what's on the ground there.

The link to online map books at Marion County is here. Amongst them, and the one which excited me the most, is the Marion County Operations map book, which provides complete coverage of the county down to the property line – and not just that, but every property that has an address has that address placed on the map (check the illustration of a section of downtown Silverton). This is an invaluable resource to those wishing to reasearch and compile regular street maps that go to the next level by providing address information. Other maps include parks, urban and rural zoning, and others.

I am a big fan of maps that provide address grid info. They are interesting in and of themselves, to show the structure of the address system (which fascinates me as the shiny bit fascinates the crow), and dead useful to the sojourner trying to navigate themselves through an unfamiliar town.

Like most such records, however, it doesn't detail why the decisions were made; it must be inferred. In the case of Marion at large, the grid centers on downtown Salem, where State Street meets the Willamette; in Silverton, where Main and Silver Creek/Water Street come together.

Another thing that's not online yet, and germane to something I want to do, is plat maps. These are the original maps of the city as envisioned, and detail the streets that are there (or the ones they wanted to put there) and the city's history of territorial expansion. This is something I'm still running down.

Tags: maps, address grids, map design, information design

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[street_blades, info_design] New Portland Overhead Signs, and a New Street

1164. If you've been looking up and forward whilst waiting at any light in the Portland corporate area latterly, you'll have seen a sign bound to the overhead like this:

The City is, at last, addressing a real need in road signage. Most other larger towns up and down the valley (and across the Columbia too) have large signs denoting the street name on the traffic signal arm. Any driver who's been saved from having to frantically scan about on the corners to see what street they're crossing don't need to be told how good this is.

The standard has seemed to have been set; the iconic representation of the "Portland Rose", the red rose with three green leaves, and a simple representation of the street name at cross.

The notation on this particular sign deserves some explanation. For the past several months, a major realignment of the connection between Killingsworth Street and Columbia Boulevard has been becoming reality. The old Columbia Boulevard opening, a two-lane underpass under the railroad tracks, is a bottleneck. This old T intersection is being deprecated (and looks like it's being closed completely) in favor of a new higher-capacity, split access to a short road which is apparently being called Columbia Parkway, which goes frm NE 89th Avenue and Killingsworth Street over to Columbia Boulevard at the Holiday Inn Airport.

The (SB) denotes the split access–Columbia Pkwy splits into separated Northbound lanes and Southbound lanes.

The old part of Columbia Blvd east of that new intersection (which is also fully signalled) appears headed to a destiny as a dead-end stub.

Technorati Tags: pdx pdx geography,sign design,information design,Street Blades

[sign_design, info_design] County Highways in Oregon

1162. One thing not seen often in Oregon are signed county routes. I think this is unfortunate, because having county route numbers are a really nifty way of instilling terrior, a sense of place, and saying "follow Country Route 3" dispenses with all sorts of "go left here ... or was that right ...no, wait, start over" monologue that even I (and you can't get me lost very easily anyhwere in the Valley north of Corvallis) tend to get into (the brain is a funny thing).

There is one county in Oregon that implements a badged county road network, and that county is Douglas. It's a little hard to find maps with the route numbers on online–I do have a map of them, but that's off the official Douglas County map of 1990, an illustration of which is at left (click the map to embiggen).

The county road shield is a standard one: gold FHWA-style type on blue field, an irregular pentagon taller than wide, with mitred corners on the bottom two points and rounded corners on the top three. I've created what Douglas County Route 1's shield probably looks like.

I think one Good Thing to Do™ would be to institute a county route badging system in Oregon's counties, at least the Willamette Valley's. People who still complain about finding their way around Portland (even though it's largely simply laid out) would do with a City Route system (such badging regimes already exist in Winnipeg and Charlotte NC (though Charlotte only has the one badged route, Charlotte Route 4, but they personalize it with a city logo, which makes it kind of cool). This may become important in the near term as we seem to have this mania for renaming roads ...

We'll come up with our own design for those presently. Marion County, with trunk roads converging on the capital city, has particularly interesting numbering possiblities.

Tags: Oregon Geography, Oregon Counties, County Roads, Douglas County, Marion County, Multnomah County, sign design, information design