Say no to Smart Corridors

Agenda item 7B on the Belmont council agenda tonight is an MOU on behalf of moving traffic from 101 in the event of major crash. Smart Corridors is a symptom of a social problem- how we spend massive public resources- $10M in this case- making the roads appear safe so that traffic can move. In the process we permanently impair city government and forever postpone the promise to deliver on walkable neighborhoods and livable streets.

On Friday night a drunk driver ran into a stopped vehicle at the red light on El Camino at Harbor. The stopped vehicle was knocked 100' down the road. One fire truck from the Belmont/San Carlos fire department showed up along with four police cruisers- you know the costs involved. Two lanes were blocked by the cruisers and traffic was diverted through the left turn lane. The crash was cleared up, street swept, cars towed in two hours and you would never have known that a serious incident had occurred. AAA says crashes cost us $169B per year. 17% of crashes are due to drunk drivers, about the same percentage is caused by teenagers, and 19% result from speeding and aggressive driving.

Clearing the street helps move traffic, which means more opportunity to speed and increased volumes which results in the type of raised speed limits and conflicts with neighbors; and huge public expenditure to add more lanes and traffic lights to move more traffic, again over the objections of residents. More importantly clearing the street quickly means people are unaware of the dangers inherent in our corridors. I asked two residents of Redwood Shores their opinion of El Camino and if they would walk there. No they said the street was safe and clean, but they don't like it, and only go if they have to. I got the same reaction from two friends up at Hallmark.

Now as you know I live here and this Friday a crash happened in front of Rockets the new ice cream store on El Camino. I asked the owner- you've been here one month what is your crash scorecard. He said three crashes and one fatality. Just 100' to the north is our neighborhood bike shop, California Sports. A car has driven into the store three times in the last ten years, the most recent incident damaging the structural support of the building. California Sports has a large sign in the door that reads drive through closed. Two months ago a large tree with a five foot rootball was knocked over in the median in front of California Sports. The water pipes nearby had a large steel cage around it. Is was demolished and flattened. The pipes were fixed in a couple of hours. The landscaping was cleaned up in two weeks. Across from Rockets the new shopping center that was built after our house, where Sylvan and Dominos are housed, has had three trees knocked down and broken in the last three years. When I tell my friends in Redwood Shores and Hallmark these stories they say good god I never had an inclination that the street was so dangerous.

We should leave the crash there for a week with a large photo of the driver and say this public mess was caused by this drunk, this teen, this irresponsible person. Please drive carefully because our neighborhoods are fragile and we love our friends and family. We want sustainable schools and don't want to send our kids to Iraq because of failed public policies. Today the landscaper was replacing the tree that was demolished in front of the drive through bike shop. What's the point I wonder of this redone immaculately groomed median? To send a message that we are in control of the mess we have allowed the public space to evolve into?

In Belmont El Camino is two lanes with parking allowed in each direction. The shoulder lane has room for a moving car or bus, a bicycle, and parked cars. But in San Mateo these provisions go away. The street is three lanes with noticeably higher speeds, 30% higher, and the shoulder lane is not wide enough for a bus let alone shareable with a bicycle. Drivers will blow their horns and buzz cyclists sending a message that a fraction of a second on their commute is not worth the life of person not polluting the street or killing kids. This dangerous and rude behavior is a result of the expectation that arise from the infrastructure we have provided at the local level over the last 50 years. Its why a trucking company in Hayward does not need to upgrade its fleet with an safer diesel traps and brakes. This breakdown in civil society occurs because they don't see the child in the parking lot at Molly Stones who ends up as a disconnected statistic to their irresponsible actions.

Lets look at some other problems with the MOU submitted on behalf of moving cars from 101 after a crash to our neighborhood streets. One of the major problems with this MOU is the vision statement which reads from our General Plan/Vision Statement:
This Smart Corridor project will encompass the idea of Belmont’s “Ease of Mobility” vision
statement; “we put a priority on getting out of, into, and through town efficiently”

Notice where they have taken what we want to do in town and how we want to move around town and used it for a conflicting vision on how to get through or bypass the town.

And notice that the statement only applies to cars, not buses which are stuck in the resultant traffic, or bikes which lack room or connected bike lanes on the associated roadways. But consider the case of pedestrians-

Sunday traffic was backed up on the El Camino by a crash on 101 it backed up traffic on all the side streets. These drivers were now having to make right turns while watching traffic from the left and so not paying attention to crossing pedestrians since cars gridlock the crosswalks to get in under the light. Given the short phase of the walk signal I ended missing the walk cycle at Harbor when returning from the Farmer's Market and had to stay for another cycle because I was worried about the traffic turning from Harbor westbound to El Camino north bound. It makes getting to the train station, restaurants, and the farmers market unpleasant, noisy, smelly and dusty (resuspended dust is actually the cancer agents that no one- Air Quality District, Metropolitan Transportation Agency, ABAG know how to deal with) and dangerous.

The added mobility for cars means that drivers don't have to deal with the consequences of their bad decisions which are toasting the planet and making life difficult for residents of neighborhoods near the El Camino. Instead of helping us have a great neighborhood where we can access services while walking and our kids can play in our yards and cross the street we end up as a sewer for passing traffic where we have to worry about strangers with mobility and our kids. Drivers in turn learn bad habits, like how to use our streets, to bypass minor annoyances on the freeway.

There is related issue of pollution within the 500' school envelope for schools like Nesbit and Central. You cannot build a -NEW- school in CA within 500' of a highway because the pollution has been shown to permanently impair the lungs of children.

Finally the vision statement only sees Belmont as an impediment. The goal is to put a priority on getting through, not stay and visit or call it home. You'd think they were designing around South Central LA. Belmont becomes an accident of the road, a city displaced to make room for moving cars on the associated roadways, a roadside eye sore to dump pollution and display anti social behavior. Yesterday following a crash on 101 northbound cut through traffic from El Camino was running stop signs throughout the downtown. I called Belmont PD but an officer showed up for only 5 minutes and then left, not excusable, but understandable given the cost for us to provide PD with the needed resources.

What I told you so far only covers the public cost for incidents between Friday night and Sunday morning. Our public resource should instead be spent on a sustainable city government which can provide for safe walkable neighborhoods and and a healthy environment for our children to grow and play. Alternatives like the Alameda north of Ralston show that traffic does not have to destroy a neighborhood.

Grand Boulevard Initiative another vision

Yesterday at the GBI meeting, Rich Napier, ED for CCAG, championed the Smart Corridors program. Until fairly recently the Incident Management portion of SMART was only to divert traffic from 101 onto El Camino when there is a really big crash as opposed to the almost daily crashes. But at the GBI meeting it was rolled out as a way to manage traffic on the El Camino too, i.e. a combined traffic management of all the freeways and highways.

A developer from Palo Alto presented and said much where I didn't agree with him. His presentation had nothing on transit, great neighborhoods, or the air resource problem even though these end up being the basis of legal challenges. He took aim at Measure W and environmental groups for not walking the talk on density and instead using referendums to bypass the zoning process- the GBI process should instead formulate the mechanism and then build it into the landuse structure of the general plans so that they can't be overturned. The development at any cost presentation was peppered with parking parking parking (actual bullet in one of his slides) and imploring the cities to create an umbrella CEQA landuse plan which would exempt the developers from going through the process. He went on to condemn the GBI as trying to design Santana Row for upscale customers instead of building for the larger affordable mandate and other demographics- in other words lots more housing and lots more parking and lots more traffic management for Napier. He even promoted Laurel Street as a good model- a cities business district off the main thoroughfare; said thoroughfare to be used only for density without amenities like plazas and wide sidewalks (actually singled out as unfunded and unbuildable) which is quite in keeping with Napier's CCAG/GBI agreement to maintain ECR auto capacity at present levels.

There was no representation from Belmont and the task force has vacancies. Serious landuse decisions must start with transit; rather than retail which assumes that the mobility mode will be pollution and driving; and within the GBI corridor offer an excellent opportunity for the task force to engage the issue and the goals and then provide guidelines for implementation at the city level. I'm sure Mike Scanlon, ED for Caltrans and Samtrans, knows this. Instead Baer etc were an indication that the task force was going to the take the easy way out and sell density with parking as green, implicitly acknowledge that transit was a failure, and that the green movement was a means of attracting more dollars to their pocketbooks with business as usual. PA CC member Yoriko Kishimoto asked if unbundled parking and other known parking based solutions would work. Without acknowledging the attraction of lower cost housing from unbundled parking on the corridor the developer's response was that the market may not bear it; and then blew the economics and implicated the landuse choices he was advocating by saying that other jurisdictions offering free parking would take customers away. Correctly everyone on the taskforce and the developers condemned everybody else for not working toward the vision specified.

Landuse and transit

Why not make the tough landuse decisions and fund the infrastructure so that it will be successful? Large transit projects need to be able to control density and retail on the corridor and prevent autos from gumming up the works with free parking, and clogged traffic lanes that delay buses and make grade separation costly. Europe and Japan are able to do this successfully. But we don't emulate them because our best government that money can buy was owned by Detroit.

Times have changed. Writing in the LA Times on the financial meltdown Rosa Brooks observes: As you know, some outside intervention in your economy is overdue. Last week -- even before Wall Street's latest collapse -- 13 former finance ministers convened at the University of Virginia and agreed that you must fix your "broken financial system." Australia's Peter Costello noted that lately you've been "exporting instability" in world markets, and Yashwant Sinha, former finance minister of India, concluded, "The time has come. The U.S. should accept some monitoring by the IMF."

The Clinton Climate Initiative/C40 “Best Practice” transport profiles San Francisco as A world-leading low emissions transport system with zero-emission vehicles because more than half of the city’s Municipal Railway (MUNI) fleet, consisting of buses and light rail, is comprised of zero-emission vehicles. Other profiles include ciclovias in Bogota and BRT systems around the world. Implementing an electric bus/bike shoulder lane on El Camino would give us the best of these profiles at a fraction of the cost going into hydrogen buses, smart corridors, Ralston/101 style freeway expansion, freeway slip lanes and expensive rail enhancements.

HSR up the Caltrain tracks- No on 1A

There is more (bad) auto intensive planning, only more clearly apparent, in the HSR case, since its supposed to an alternative.

Sacramento and San Diego are supposed to added on after HSR from LA to SF is profitable. There isn't a public agency with a profitable revenue stream- so go figure.

Unless the agency can control the landuse decisions around the station, a 1/4 mile for Caltrain and five miles for HSR, these agencies will lose money and the books will have to be gerrymandered to achieve profitability. The result will be significant time delay as the legislature goes through the process of sanctioning the gerrymandering and developers grease the process. For developers greasing the process see the conclusion of this long article on the housing bust in Merced.

Instead of cementing the needed landuse changes for the transit agency, we leave the transit environment in the favor of the automobile, and end up doing what the North County Times reported in early September, with road expansion precluding present alignment- meaning transit is what you get after you've toasted the planet to the mostest by driving. The rules are fast and loose if we are spending other people's money (fed gas tax, etc.) that we decide to fund and build a system ourselves. A bridge to nowhere (actually an airstrip for private- planes- the basis of most transport planning) is possible with OPM.

With driving and developer greased sprawl we need airport expansion in of all places San Jose! The HSR tracks were realigned from the logical population intensive Altamont Pass to come through Northern California's largest city- for what purpose?

Bicyclists note the airport expansion destroyed the only bike connector, Airport Boulevard, between District 5 (used to Ken Yeager) and District 3 (Chuck Reed, now mayor) that I had commuted on for 20 years from south San Jose to work across the airport from Guadalupe Creek (its now a narrow fast four lane high highway slip lane going to six lanes across Terminal C,) and will preclude an alternate bike-ped boulevard on Airport Parkway that was a settlement with SJDOT, from the Downtown Access Committee, that I was on, because SJ Airport now needs two ten story garages and they will be located on Airport Parkway.