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.