CCAG Oversight Group San Mateo County

Walkalbe communities can reduce ghg by 60%

2009-12-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

There is clearly a benefit to high gas prices beyond reduced deaths, pollution, and improved national security from less drivng. Communities like Martinez and Benicia benefit when refiners go out of business. The economic rationalism that reigned over our political, economic and business worlds has ignored the public health while subsidizing a toxic world. The risks were always clear, as defined by rational science, while a logical analysis of the economics showed acting early was cheaper than acting late. For example a UC Davis study showed that living within 500 feet of a major roadway resulted in permanent lung damage for children. Yet a strange kind of religious and ideological zealotry holds federal policy in its grasp ignoring public health at the expense of declined national security.

Ethanol's problem stems from starving people to feed our cars. Instead the Federal government should push for walkable communities on the transit corridors. Growing Cooler from the Urban Land Institute shows that walkable communities on the transit corridor can lower green house gases by 40% and Robert Cervelo at UC Berkeley says that if Transit can capture the landuse value created by its presence and that if done right, like in Hong Kong, transit can be operated on a profit with conventional economic models. The green house gas reduction could reach as high as 60 percent, Cervero added, compared to the level of per-capita emissions that would result from continuing business-as-usual sprawl-inducing policies.

Ralston 101 next step

2009-01-19T16:00:00.000-08:00

History
Design started in 1998. Scott Mace of Mid Pen Bicycle Coalition warns about danger to cyclists and pedestrians. There are three authorities. Redwood City is the lead authority. Belmont and Caltrans are the other two.

Issues from the past
1- Belmont and Redwood City decide that bike accommodations are not necessary because a parallel bike bridge will be constructed shortly. Government penalizes walkers and cyclists today, for some Clean Air Act fix in the future, like the TDA-3 over-crossing of Ralston 101 which is now ten years late.
2- Caltrans accommodates compromised access provisions despite its district protests over such design elements on Page Mill Road at 280 and the resulting bicycle fatality that required an interchange restripping plan.
3- Redwood City is able to add two north bound ramp lanes in front of Oracle to 101 from Marina Parkway (which is what Ralston is called on the Redwood City side) to meet their Congestion Management Level of Service (CM-LOS) provisions because of acceptance of compromised access for bicycles and pedestrians today. (See Plan Expectations item 7 below.)

Status-
1- Interchange is still not signed off by Belmont because the landscape provisions have not been completed.
2- The onramp to 101 southbound from Ralston has the most pedestrian bicycle crashes in Belmont.
3- The bicycle bridge ten years later is less than 25% funded, mostly from TDA-3 funds (See Plan Expectations item 7 below.)
4- Numerous complaints about the interchange safety for bikes and peds followed from 2002 onward on the lines of the Scott Mace's notice of dangerous conditions. Peter Voramasenti, Peter Ingram, Dwight Caldwell, Ray Davis, and Julian Caroll were involved. The bridge was opened in 2004.
5- A subsequent meeting in May 2008 with Rich Napier, Dwight Caldwell, Paul Pang, Tom Madalena, and Peter Voramasenti resulted in a decision to review the striping of the interchange.
6- Redwood City painted a dashed pocket lane left of the two onramp lanes from Oracle as part of a larger (well done) restriping program in Redwood Shore in September 2008.

Paint Expectations
1- Caltrans will complete their restriping plan from the May 2008 meeting to allow a bike lane to the gore when westbound on Marina Parkway past the two onramps.
NOTE: subsequent update- Peter Dalgado in RWC said that RWC, as the lead authority on the unsigned off plan (see item 1 under status) would paint in the lanes on their dime if Caltrans can finish the drawings.
2- Belmont will draw and paint bike lanes from Ralston and Hiller to Ralston and Old County.
NOTE: subsequent update- Council member Bill Dickenson, lead to the Belmont Green Advisory Committee, said he would take this provision up with the Belmont City Council.
3- Peter Delgado in RWC said he might paint the pocket lane on Marina Parkway in solid lines after a bike lane to the gore is painted in. This would made the automotive design elements in the present striping plan safer since it causes motorists to rethink cutting in at the last minute.

Plan Expectations
1- CCAG will write a policy for interchanges that requires routine accommodations- bike and ped access will be designed into all projects and fully funded at the design stage. Sandy Wong, assistant director at CCAG acknowledged before the CCAG board, July 10th 2008, in response to question from Kelly Furgusson on item 4.10 pulled from the consent calendar, that this would be necessary.
2- CCAG needs to address how its CM-LOS goals result in designs like this 2004 interchange which compromise bicycle and pedestrian safety, comfort, efficiency, health and access elements.
3- Todd McIntyre of the Transit Authority was asked by Committee For Green Foothills, the Sierra Club, and Gladwyn d'Souza in the reauthorization of Measure A to only include funding for road projects that fully include bicycle and pedestrian access in August 2008.
4- Rich Napier said in May 2008 that he would look into getting full funding of bike and ped access in road projects from other road funding sources like the project budget itself. CCAG needs to write this into their project design requirements.
5- Belmont's unfunded bike bridge takes riders almost a mile off course with severe egress and exits time compromises. Egress issues are prevalent for all POCs including the Belmont Bike Ped bridge which seeks to provide access to the Bay Trail and links an east 101 Belmont neighborhood with Nesbit Elementary School. Caltrans is looking into egress and comfort issues on the upcoming Woodside interchange which could be a model of how future projects are designed. General plan circulation elements should state that POCs should be part of an Urban Trail System that provides complete regional access for children's land uses.
6. Caltrans District 4 needs to fully implement DD-64
7. MTC and the TA needs to review how CM-LOS provisions results in denied access and the resulting role of TDA-3 funds in compromised safety and access for non motorized modes.

STRS funding needs effectiveness appraisal.

2009-01-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

As the state gears up to release $48.5M in Safe Route To School funding they need to look how jurisdictions are spending the money and what the planning agencies are doing to the reduce the occurrence of problems from Level of Service "enhancements."

Measure A money is used by the Transportation Authority in San Mateo County to "relive congestion" from low LOS grades at interchanges with planning through CCAG. The larger permitted traffic take away pedestrian and bicycle facilities. For example the Ralston 101 interchange in Belmont CA took the sidewalk away on the north side and has street furniture in the narrow five foot sidewalk on the south side. The doubled up right turning freeway access lanes to 101 northbound took away a shareable bike lane westbound. Some cyclists began riding wrong way on the south side sidewalk interfering with peds on the narrow sidewalk. And cyclist-vehicle collisions have increased where the sidewalk crosses the access lane to 101 northbound.

Belmont told Caltrans at the interchange design phase in 1998 that they would be building a Pedestrian Over Crossing which is why the ped and bike facilities were compromised. The POC has only secured twenty five percent of its funding ten years later. The city has applied for a stimulus grant because they say it is a shovel ready project. Because of the topography it will add, if and when completed, 7/8s of a mile to a ped trip!

In the neighborhood on the northwest side of the interchange complaints of cut through traffic resulted in a 450k SRTS grant for bulbouts. This was installed without any neighborhood meetings. When other neighbors complained that the bulbouts only made it difficult to get in and out of their side streets and did nothing for cut through traffic on the collector, the city took them out for $500k.

The larger interchange has resulted in higher traffic volumes and off peak speed increases. Complaints from parents of school aged children resulted in a couple of SRTS grants to install lighted crosswalks and a couple for Automatic Speed Radar Display signs. One of the intersections where the SRTS lighted crosswalk was installed is more than 70 feet wide and complaints have persisted from parents about near misses with children. The city is considering removing the lighted crosswalk and going with a zebra crossing instead.

Meanwhile the off peak speed increases have raised complaints that the ASRD signs are routinely ignored. The response from public works is to point to enforcement and the response from police is that the Prima Facie Speed law conflicts with the Speed trap law and they can't do anything about it. However when San Mateo City police chief Mannheimer tried to get the state to allow ASRD signs to also write speeding tickets none of the surrounding jurisdictions supported the effort. In the neighboring city of San Carlos a the police say the same thing after an SRTS funded ASRD sign was installed on San Carlos Ave. When a senior was killed crossing SCA a couple years ago the city's first response was to try and take away the crosswalk. However after protests, I saw this last weekend, that they have paid to signalize the intersection.

Measure A strategic plan

2009-01-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

Meeting with Todd McIntyre of the Transportation Authority and Lenny Roberts of Committee for Green Foothills.

Anticipated revenue over 25 years is $1.5B
Estimated funding match $2.2B

There was almost nothing for bikes and peds in the last cycle except for the bike map. This was because the funding pot was .5% Marginally better for transit because Caltrain got the bullet and shuttle service and Burlingame got a station upgrade from a 30% funding pot.

Still a problem- Highways, local roads make up 50%. Only an additional 1% goes to management.

Comments due- by the end of September. Series of meetings are going to be scheduled around the county. We need to get more pedestrian and bicycle comments in. Todd McIntyre of the TA who gave the presentation was in Public Relations, been on the job only two months, and really knew his material well.

Purpose- the usual: What's worked well, how do we get a better Return on Investment, leverage more value with the matching funds. (We can point out here that building access into projects returns value.)
Goals- Safety, Capacity. (We point out that wider roads are more dangerous that bikes and peds make up 20% of fatalities and historically less than .5% of funding, and that capacity is greatly improved if more butts are on bike seats or walking.)

New Allocation- 3% bikes and peds, 15% grade separation, 30% transit, 27.5% highways, 22.5 % local streets and transportation, 1% management.
Electrification is in the transit dollars. I asked for solararizing ten platforms at 40MW per day or 40,000 panels to meet the 400 MW demand of the system at full electrification. http://cogsmac.blogspot.com/2008/08/electrifiy-caltrain-on-solar-pv.html
The 27.5% highway fund should be 50% discretionary for management programs by cities and county to reduce the need for expansion. This would be in addition to the available flexibility. Prevent Ralston/101 bicycle access deterioration by requiring that all projects need to incorporated and fund multimodality out of the roads budget and not the bike ped account.
The local shuttle program should include a bike sharing program and bike stations. Add downtown area shuttles like SCOOT.
Under accessible services include car sharing and ride matching.
Provide money for an electric bus line on El Camino that would continue the SF line from Daly City.

Highway and Roads program: Sierra Club is opposed to two of the four programs- widening and adding auxiliary lanes which is seen as widening. The Highway parallel Arterial Streets needs to removed or changed to 20 mph streets for alternate vehicles like golf carts. Need to add in hearings for the Environmental Impact statements and include wetlands and water mitigation. The interchange reconstruction component needs to take into account that interchanges have become barriers to accessibility for bikes and peds. (need a Ralston 101 study versus the bike bridge on how the matching funds line up.)

Bike ped program: saw very little of the Comprehensive Bicycle Plan built in the last iteration of Measure A and not building in bike access on the Ralston/101 interchange has ended up requiring funding for a ten million dollar plus bike bridge which is already four years late since the interchange opened. Add multimodaltiy criteria to come out of the interchange and highway budget. Midcoast Coastal Conservancy (?) MCC needs sketches for possible alignment, more bite sized trail chunks funded and built, and an assessment. Need an Urban comprehensive trail and highway plan. Bike lane improvements along highways like skyline. A connected off road trails where the gaps are identified and connected. An Urban Trail System where bike boulevards combine traffic calming to deliver a connected alternate mobility system utilizing trails, POCs, and traffic calmed streets. Trails consume $2M per mile. The pedestrian requirement are immense. So the $60M budget over the next 25 years will only meet about 2% of the bikes, ped, and trails needs. This means serious gaps in the system and a continued emphasis on driving resulting in more safety and capacity problems.

Alternate Congestion Relief program needs Next Bus Locator and a Fast Pass style ticketing system. Add Grand Boulevard, electric buses on El Camino and a bus/bike only lane for improved service under AB32.

Program categories: need parallel tracking for freight to rail. HSR will pay for its own ROW. Don't know what the FEDs will require in GreenTEA (begins negotiations in Congress next year and has serious budget shortfalls from the gas tax because of reduced driving.)

Evaluation Criteria- add access to effectiveness distinct from mobility. In other criteria add design review for multimodality.

What are the alternatives to smart corridors?

2008-12-31T16:32:00.000-08:00

Smart corridors seeks to move traffic on surrounding arterials when a crash backs up traffic on 101. Other arterials are presently encroached on but not systematically because people are afraid of getting lost. By providing directional signage CCAG hopes to use the entire network to move traffic. Similarly surrounding neighborhood streets are encroached on from these arterials by drivers looking for alternatives (more below). Adding more traffic to the arterials exponentially increases the traffic on surrounding streets spreading toxicity and danger.

One alternative to smart corridors would be regulate the causes of crashes in the first place. Speed, aggressive driving, male drivers under 25, distraction, inattention, and alcohol make up 90% of causes on all roads.

The most effective way to manage speed and aggression is with monitors. However because we have bankrupted the state with Prop 13 and elimination of the vehicle license fee the CHP are unable to staff monitors. The state is working on distraction- for example texting becomes illegal tomorrow; and alcohol needs additional tools like breath activated ignition locks. Keeping bad drivers of the road would help! However speed, young drivers, and inattention have been addressed a long time ago in regions as remote as Singapore and as recent as London and Stockholm.

Enter the same technology that CCAG wants to use for smart information. The freeways around London are congestion priced so that all the lanes remain operable at a certain speed which looked like 50 mph. The congestion pricing varies dynamically and is displayed so drivers know the cost of using lanes. The monitor program controls both volume and speed and its all done with video cameras. Caltrans should invite TfL (Transport for London) to learn how to implement these systems. TfL is instructing systems from Seoul to Copenhagen.

Traffic Management through Pricing is on everyone's vocabulary today including Poizner. VTA is in the process of implementing High Occupancy Toll Lanes and CCAG is studying them. For the cost of paint CCAG could generate a revenue stream to make Caltrain and buses viable so that commuters have a viable choice to 101. At a minimum CCAG could manage, with an increased maintenance budget, the existing roadway under its jurisdiction so that surrounding neighborhoods are not turned into traffic sewers for the rat race. Pricing, as the recent run up in gas prices shows, clearly works.

50 mph not only saves gas (i.e the balance of trade and national security), it saves lives from the energy impact in crashes and the reduced pollution because of the efficiencies realized by today's car engine designs. Today's freeways operate at an average speed of 14mph during the peak period. Getting them 20 mph or 35 mph would be huge public benefit and improve safety.

Moving traffic is a problem. Congestion management saw an environmental benefit from moving traffic at a congested node. However the entire network then becomes a pollution matrix. By Braes Paradox the nodes spread to other locations quickly bankrupting the ability of jurisdictions to fund "improvements." Braes Paradox says that additional roads, or network redundancy, add anarchy into a network. The result is increased congestion. Physicists Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, along with computer scientist Micheal Gastner, looked at the price of anarchy caused by self-interested drivers and showed that closing off roads (options?) improves throughput.

Taking lanes away from Single Occupant Drivers for HOT applications with speed monitoring will improve the overall network under CCAG jurisdiction. For the cost of paint we can replace the $10M neighborhood congestion program known as smart corridors.

Finally provide real alternatives for commuters to choose from. The trains and buses are running empty with low gas prices. And bike lanes don't connect frequently ending at the worst location in major traffic points. If Seattle and San Francisco and Davis can figure this out why can't we?

Drug warnings instead of clean energy- the policy problem

2008-12-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

This is like the foreclosure problem. Instead of working on home owners the government tries to bail out banks and sinks the economy.

Washington's new tact: Helping home owners
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: December 4, 2008
WASHINGTON — After pouring vast amounts of money into financial institutions of almost every type, and having little to show for it, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve are suddenly taking a new look at ordinary homeowners..
The Treasury Department is working on a plan to boost the housing market by subsidizing 30-year home mortgages with rates as low as 4.5

The government should be working on cars and their pollution to prevent the causes of asthma. Instead the government is allowing a failed business model to continue

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and BILL VLASIC
Published: December 4, 2008
WASHINGTON —
In a sign of the growing pessimism among the Democratic leadership, Mr. Dodd; Ms. Pelosi; Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee; and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, wrote to President Bush after Thursday’s hearing urging him to rescue the auto industry.

by only placing warnings for the drugs used.
Warning Given on Use of 4 Popular Asthma Drugs, but Debate Remains
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: December 5, 2008

WASHINGTON — Two federal drug officials have concluded that asthma sufferers risk death if they continue to use four hugely popular asthma drugs — Advair, Symbicort, Serevent and Foradil. But the officials’ views are not universally shared within the government.

As long as experts consultants and policy makers feed from same trough they will be blind to solutions. Messing up renewable energy to benefit a failed business models in autos and fossil fuels is now used as an excuse to not build a successful model.

By KATE GALBRAITH and MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: December 4, 2008
The Energy Challenge
Energy Goals a Moving Target for States
An oil well in the shadow of wind turbines in Abilene, Tex. The state gets 4.5 percent of its electricity from the turbines.
The structure and aggressiveness of the targets varies widely among states...While the country has no shortage of entrepreneurs hoping to build wind turbines and solar arrays, they have been slowed by problems like finding suitable sites, overcoming local political opposition and securing financing. In a few cases, including some in upstate New York, allegations have been made that the developers bribed officials to win approval of their projects.
Fines for missing the targets can run to $25 million a year, but because of fine print in the regulations, the San Diego utility and Pacific Gas & Electric said they did not expect to incur fines; a representative for Southern California Edison said he was not sure.

The government needs to take its own advise on American optimism and just do it. Not closet up back room deals with thugs and failed business executives bent on harming the health of Americans.

Digging a deeper hole

2008-11-26T05:39:00.000-08:00

Policy makers seem caught in the headlights like deer. Paulson's plan to drive people more into debt is obviously wrong at a time when debt is causing the global economy to tank. "In part, that's because as federal officials reach further out for ways to ease the credit freeze-up that's hogtying the overall economic recovery, they have little choice but to adopt strategies carrying greater risks."

Well not quite. Not at all. You solve debt with jobs. Green jobs that refuel, repower and rebuild will allow people to make their own decisions on how to get out of debt. A revenue carbon tax can encourage better consumption, Removing the deduction for debt will change behavior.

However the infrastructure for energy consumption is the economy and experts do not know any other way around it. That's why they are stumbling today and digging the hole deeper. Strangely environmentalists can align with Republicans to limit the state's ability to build infrastructure for consumption.

Need indicators to measure energy consumption caused by infraastructure

2008-11-26T05:23:00.000-08:00

Can we measure how cities have managed to increase energy consumption? And what rules are used to shape energy consumption? For transportation its easy. The increase in road, public works budgets, increasing speed limits, road designs are readily available as physical measures of how fuel consumption has increased with infrastructure. The rule used in Level Of Service. But what about other areas like water and garbage?

Climate change is resonant with the public today which is why we have an interest in less driving and green buildings etc. About 40% of the community Green House Gas footprint comes from building energy use. 55% of GHGs in this area come from the buildings location. Our inability in the past to address the toxic results of city actions, by just addressing pollution through the EPA and CEQA, has resulted in species declines and rising resource prices destabilizing the globe through resource wars, droughts, hurricanes, and fires. We have brought on our own four horsemen of the appocalypse.

On the Belmont Green Committee to address climate change, we just added a debate item, to do a postmortem analysis of city council actions to highlight how the working of city hall and the general plan shape energy consumption.

It was good to see the reporter take back this message:

The article goes on to write: Cities and counties make the rules that shape energy consumption. Why fight at City Hall against carbon dioxide emissions? Because about 45 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions come from transportation, and 28 percent from electricity generation and natural gas burning to heat and power buildings, according to Bay Area air quality officials.

Strangely the inability of city hall to address climate change is itself leading to a global decline from the effects of peak resources. The depression is causing all kinds of good things like a move to more home gardens, and declining energy use.

Congestion is a poor measure of mobility.

2008-11-10T13:15:00.000-08:00

Congestion management, or building us out of congestion, is a poor way of measuring mobility, which is why access issues for bicycle and pedestrian mobility get locked out of the funding and design streams. CCAG has not been able to implement many of its bicycle master plan provisions over the last two iterations since 1995, and is looking for a new plan, because congestion management has wiped out the routes and created the need for expensive replacement which lack any funding capability in TDA-3. One example is Ralston over 101 where the two right turning lanes on 101 northbound wiped out access and a replacement with the Ralton bike bridge is now more than eight years late and seriously funding challenged. Greg Marsden has proposed alternate measures.

Looking in the TEP for alternate funding is also wrong. SMCTD Transportation Expenditure Plan Program Categories Pedestrian and Bicycle 3 0% $45.0 million $25 million (page 7) to implement either Millbrae Avenue/US 101 pedestrian/bike overcrossing (Millbrae)
or US 101 near Hillsdale Boulevard pedestrian/bike overcrossing (San Mateo) are replacement funding for not providing routine accomodation. Both Pedestrian overcrossings should have been included as Routine Accomodation fundings when Caltrans and Bart completed the projects that left these projects up to the local municipalities. When all is said and done, there would be all too little money left in the pot to fund any other project that the 19 other Cities might propose.

In the Economist building out, or Braes Paradox, was recently described and the following letter received:

SIR – It may be of interest to your readers to know that it was actually economists who first figured out that an individual's selfish behaviour when selecting an optimal travel route would yield different traffic flows and times than if one were to assign flows in a centralized manner to try and minimize the cost to society ("Queuing conundrums ", September 13th). Arthur Pigou wrote "The Economics of Welfare" in 1920, by which time he was well aware of the distinction between different traffic behaviours.

Curiously, traffic and queuing problems keep on getting (re)discovered by different disciplines; now it seems to be the turn of the physicists.

Anna Nagurney
Director
Virtual Centre for Supernetworks
Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts

Note the solution- permanent Sunday Streets!

Universal health care should be the first priority.

2008-11-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

THE NY TIMES reported today that AIG will need another $40B on top of the 121B already spent. Without addressing the underlying landuse issues, of failure on the outskirts of the driving economy, we are leaving this problem to fester and worsen.

Hurricane Katrina and the fires in California have created other problems with insurance companies. Florida, Louisiana were looking to join CA in providing state insurance for disasters because insurers were bailing out. The load on employers have also taxed the ability of insurance companies to provide health insurance and states are trying to grapple with this problem too.

HR 676 cost of a $60bn-$110bn plan to provide universal health insurance for Americans is insignificant relative to the broken system we have today. We should replace it and reduce out costs quickly and help employers reduce their burden. This will allow employers to use critical funds elsewhere in rescuing their business. Then the government can tackle the investment in the urban environment to reduce the need to drive with the balance of the bailout bill.

Bailing out GM and other losers of the past system without using a gas tax is just bad policy.

Green TEA goals

2008-10-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Cities should receive credits for reducing speeds limits to 20 mph to enable neighborhood electric vehicles. Cities and counties should receive clean air credits for coordinating landuse decisions within a 1/4 mile of a transit center to better the bottom line of the agency and remove the structural deficit.

Transportation corridors should use electric buses. This is because the global warming problem has been left to fester too long and the alternate fuel issues are not viable any more. San Francisco has proved that electric buses are cheap reliable and Zero Emission Buses. Programs like the Grand Boulevard are ideal places for ZEB. The Grand Boulevard is also an opportunity to make the land use partnership that will ensure a sustainable revenue stream to the transit agency.

We need a floor tax on gasoline to ensure that alternatives continue to be developed. If oil drops below $75 a barrel the tax should kick in. The last year shows the clear benefits of high gas prices to reduce global warming with choice.

More duh from McCain

2008-10-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the bond collapse which means cities and CCAGs and Caltrain has problems raising money and may even have lost some in the collapsed financial institutions McCain proposing to have the government replace/reset bad mortgages with new ones at lower value with lower payments to keep people in their homes.

McCain's always been the more pragmatic politician on the latest issue, a sort of Johnny-come- lately. There is campaign finance reform, global warming, oversight of Pentagon spending, we don't torture, etc.. The problem has been the results. Take the last one for example. If someone had proposed torture ten years ago they would have been yelled out of the room, considered a crazy person, out of touch, a Klan nut. Then Charles Manson takes over the White House and everyone is marching under the holy cross of Abu Grahib. So McCain after saying he had the experience and was a supporter of Geneva Conventions then proceeds to embrace reform (torture reform sounds nuts) in name only, i.e. excepting the special circumstances of the presidency (which was claimed) and putting a few ridiculous restrictions in elsewhere ( which wasn't claimed and was now watered down.) Instead of saying, it's unacceptable to live in a world in which torture can be discussed rationally, we got the present dispicable situation.

You can see the same thing with Campaign Finance. After reform, media, friends, and issue groups were legal to bring in much more money than was previously possible, completely tilting the elections in favor of sound bites and entertainment and the stupendously crazy claims from the competing like Obama raised $60M in September. Can you imagine how much that would feed instead of feeding Fox and ABC?

So I'm wary of johnny come lately touching another important issue and adding his special blend of incompetence; which comes from a past understanding of a problem, instead of the social morality of the global community. For one thing what is he trying to solve? Is it the decline in home prices which is dragging down everything or an attempt to arrest the bleeding from bad mortgages? The latter may already be solved by the bank defaults and the federal buyout. Its a small function of the problem: which is that entities like Fannie Mac and Mae who did not have toxic loans also collapsed when valuations dropped for their legal loans. These issues in taxes, revenue, and spending also need to arrested by negatively capitalizing the loses in the entire market with similar formulations used in the real estate market segments of the Federal Reserve.

Get off the fossil fuel drug

2008-10-06T17:57:00.000-07:00

The journal featured a discussion of carbon footprints which most green groups also tend to get wrong. In WSJ.com - Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints Ball starts with the wrong assumptions and then backs into the foretold conclusion.
1- That the fossil fuel economy can be adapted to a low carbon future.
2- that a style of green consumption can reduce carbon sufficient for 350ppm future.

Lead to the foretold conclusion that small incremental steps to correct global warming are unclear, insufficient,and risk carrying the stigma of greenwashing.

The library is filled with millions of dust collecting solutions to each aspect of the fossil fuel economy because the constitution sees nature as property and gives rights over it to the corporations that deliver consumable desires. Cap and trade is an example of the constitution selling rights to the biosphere which rent our lungs out for asthma and cancer.

Seeking to spread confusion from his wrong assumptions and conclusion Ball writes: So far, these efforts raise as many questions as they answer. Different companies are counting their products' carbon footprints differently, making it all but impossible for shoppers to compare goods. And even if consumers come to understand the numbers, they might not like what they find out.

Rather we need to be slower and smarter, meaning disengaged from consumerism as the primary avenue of experience. Get more from less- reuse existing streets to increase zero CO2 mobility. Ball instead is mired in the other paradigm.

Why slower? I can deliver a truck load, 1400 cubic feet, of fava beans from Half Moon Bay to Belmont every half hour. On a bicycle I can maybe deliver 20 cubic foot in eight hours- 30 if I pushed myself. But fossil fuels also mean I can build houses in Belmont and leave the agriculture to HMB and Chile. HMB meanwhile chafes under the property prices for agriculture versus growing homes and can't wait for the road to come through. The established solution to green house gases is to go slower allowing an economy to develop around the bicycle and horse and burro and walking and the golf cart.

The silver bullet of SB375 and electric trucks and hydrogen cars can still come on line later. We don't have the time to wait for the silver bullet to work and to get enacted and to deliver results. Species are going extinct now, oceans are collapsing, food riots are spreading. Hyping the silver bullet is just another way of saying lets do nothing. We need to get of the toxin of going faster with fossil fuels now.

Why we need car free TOD now

2008-10-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

We need to bailed out of the fossil fuel economy.

Yesterday the government had to bail out AIG because it was "too big to fail." Today three banks, JP Morgan, Citicorp, and Bank of America have reached the size of being too big to fail because of mergers engineered by the Federal Government. What moral bind are we in down the road for irresponsible actions from these Goliaths?

Rising gas prices forced consumers to confront the hole they had dug for themselves by greedily consuming the toxic products put out by rising bank stars on Wall Street on the fringes of the commute beltway in Tracy and Merced and Modesto and Stockton. The average commuters costs have gone up 25% because of rising gas and related food prices (from $2500 to $3000,) and upto 50% of homes are in or will be in foreclosure. Meanwhile the government was quietly funding its illegal war, in Iraq for Halliburton and Exxon's benefit, on the basis of consumer borrowing from the home equity.

Despite owning Iraq, gas prices have and will continue to rise because of peaking supply and increasing demand. Another 25% increase seems reasonable in the next eight years making the housing problem worse. Simultaneously, foreclosures will continue to put downward pressure on homes values by increasing the supply of depressed inventory. The next government will need to provide another bailout. The pattern of home value collapse on the fringe of the commuting suburbs outside the urban job centers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley needs to be addressed. A bailout needs to remove incentives for Americans to live far from where they work. Policies to reduce Vehicle Miles Traveled will solve the problem of rising gas and falling home prices with locational choice. Carfree Transit Oriented Development is a logical bailout policy initiative if we want to escape the fate of the post soviet empire.

Say no to Smart Corridors

2008-09-23T09:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-18T08:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-09T11:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Drilling is bad public policy

2008-08-18T15:22:00.000-07:00

The social benefits of high gas prices clearly outweigh the downside. Reducing sprawl puts more money in peoples pockets since they have less need to carry the fixed cost of an automobile. Immigrant families know this. They flock to cities not suburbs. They ride the bus until they can afford a car. We should be ensuring that services are available in walkable radius so people don't need to drive. Instead of discussing the benefits of high gas prices policy makers want to drill off the coast.

Drilling off the coast is bad policy. Numerous editorials have said that we will not make a difference in the price because we consume more than we produce plus what reserves are estimated off the coast. Based on available supplies and consumption trends (imports) drilling will bring 4 cents of relief ten years from now. So why aren't we developing walkable cities and implementing existing technologies now? and making this policy?

More importantly lower gas prices don't make sense. Because of the import dependency we create national security problems like Georgia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. We put forward a sham of health care as a consequence of losing our money to war to protect oil sources. We end up with the worst of friends from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and the most abject losers from Tibet to Aung San Suu Kyi. Our newspapers become government mouthpieces bemoaning the loss of
the dictator Musharraf while championing democratically elected governments in Georgia where we clearly don't intend to act.

Politics is about oil and the transfer of $2T in the last eight years to oil companies is the culmination of that policy. Bush is not just sleep walking through history- he is filling his and his cronies pockets along the way. Politicians blab on about religion and non issues like gods in marriage, talking about stuff that even the average American has a hard time believing in or holding up, and worse, firmly believe politicians hypocrits in this regard. They talk to preachers that the average American has a hard time trusting.

Then to make matters worse they can't even define who's rich. The average American earns 40k- $5M leaves out everybody. If you spent $1000 a day for the rest of your life it would not equal $5M. A frugal person with $250,000 could grow their own 100 sq foot vegetable plot and purchase health insurance and not work for the rest of their lives. Can you imagine an annual salary of 250k?

Without a quality discussion like politicians were capable of in the mid seventies on petroleum we get stuck on affordable (fossil fuel versus renewables and the poisoned be damned) practical (sprawl instead of walkable cities, Saudi Arabia Prince Bush versus Tibet's Dalia Lama) and available (now versus hydrogen's promise in the future- but not the siren call of technology: instead our continued dependence on hummers and priuses to consume greenbelt and Mexican peppers.)

Nancy Pelosi needs to do more than just accommodate the latest bad policy. She and others needs to articulate the modern security concerns and its implications toour pocket book and health care.

Electrifiy Caltrain on Solar PV

2008-08-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

I live a block from the Caltrain line in overcast Belmont. From solar PV I average 3.2 MW per year from 20 panels which equal 250 sq feet and generate 15% surplus power per year. However I face southeast. Similar sized south facing and southwest facing installations generate 4-5MW per year. 4MW is what one electric Caltrain needs per day. That would translate to square footage of panels equal to 250x365 sq ft= 92,250 or round it up to 100,000 sq feet which an area 100'by 1,000' ft. Most station areas are a mile in length which would be five this amount or 20MW per day. If the station area solarized was 200 feet wide then only ten stations would need to be solarized for the entire train at 40MW per day from 40,000 panels.

From the EIR/EIS the accurate power requirements to operate a 100 train per day Caltrain system is approx. 300 MWh PER DAY. A full build out scenario of more trains per day would require 400 MWh per day. That would imply 20 stations areas covered in solar panels. Or some equivalent length of track could be solarized. Given the sunny location of most trains this facilities are more likely to produce about 40% more power. This can be used to provide hybrid and golf cart charging stations at the park and ride and to power homes such as the San Carlos Transit Village with 370 rental units.

Sierra Nevada Beer put in a nice shaded solar parking lot.
http://www.gizmag.com/solar-powered-beer-sierra-nevada/8671/

Why not raise gas prices?

2008-08-05T16:19:00.001-07:00

There are clear benefits to high gas prices including local jobs and industry. All of the governments stated goals are met. So why not tax gas to raise prices?

Because the stated goals are a sham front designed to cover the naked adherence to financial bases of resource consuming corporate agendas. Like Bush/Cheney's Iraq war and coastal drilling there is little incentive to try and meet stated goals of transit usage and PM10 reduction. Instead the government will come up with ploys to keep the nonsense in place. An example is natural gas in the late '80s, electric cars in the 90s, and now hydrogen cars. Each has been deffered after years of government handouts and the existing model of Exxon Chevron Bush Cheney continues to sail along without alternatives.

The most recent such sham is tolls instead of a gas tax. Bush knows that tolls will be opposed and offers them out there so that an uneven policy can develop which may dumped somewhere down the line if gas prices decline enough for people to drive again. The opposition to raising gas prices is forwarded as a populist agenda as if people actually prefer income taxes or sales taxes or whatever other tax is not being discussed.

So why do they do it even when as Toyota and GM show bad earnings and inventory on the shelf its clearly not in their best interest to oppose a gas tax? Because it isn't Toyota and GM but the board and CEO of these groups that are the bad guys who labor in a "free market" but where the rules are stacked in favor of the business they think they know how to do. They feel they are too old to compete, in a new market of Nissan electrics and Picken's natural gas, and they are right. These companies need to restructure and get new management and that's not what they are about. What they are about is running the company into the ground on the model where they pay themselves millions in bonuses while the companies and pension plans sink.

This is where the rules of resources usage and sustainability clash in the 21st century. The old model of gas consumption and Iraq wars are going up against a supply shortage as consumption increases. These CEOs can no more avoid it then avoid the drift of consumers toward more fuel efficient cars. Ideally, for humans on this planet, fossil fuels would stay in the ground for a time in the future when we go through global cooling when they can be used to increase the green house effect.

Sustainability curriculums need to look at models of resource usage that are able to cap depletion at rates beneficial to future generations. That price cap is the challenge of our time. Until then the only model is one where people like the CEO of Toyota can grandstand on the Prius while rolling out Tacoma gas hogs for profitability. And politicians will similarly grandstand on gas prices rolling out hydrogen cars and tolls instead.

Ruling for clean air and renewable energy offer hope

2008-07-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

In an excellent ruling in LA the judge took the health interest in the community, not to have asthma and cancer from high flow users, to say that new gas fired powered plants need to show their clean their clean air merits before the permit is issued.

Naturally high flow users, in Orange County which would benefit, rather than paying their way, are warning of blackouts. But the low flow users are hip to the tradeoffs: "Many of the plants, such as a 914-megawatt generator sponsored by the small industrial city of Vernon, would be in low-income, crowded areas that have high rates of asthma and other pollution-related diseases. Though they would be outfitted with the latest in pollution-control technology, the gas-fired generators would emit thousands of tons of fine soot particles, which are linked to cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.

Years ago, the air district set aside what it called Priority Reserve credits so that projects such as hospitals and police stations could be built even if they added to the region's pollution. Last year, the district, lobbied by a host of former politicians, decided to sell the credits to energy companies for $420 million: about half the market value, according to environmentalists' calculations.

Environmental and community groups said Wednesday that they would sue in federal court to nullify such credits.

The decision, meanwhile, left air regulators perplexed at their next move."

Why now? The CAA has been around since the seventies. The Times writes "Under the federal Clean Air Act, no polluting facilities can be built unless soot and chemicals are reduced elsewhere in the region through a complex system of pollution credits, also known as offsets."

Renewable energy benefits. " Under California law, private utilities, which produce 11% of their power from renewable sources, must boost their so-called "green" portfolio to 20% by 2010. But a recent plan released by the state Air Resources Board said the amount must increase to a third by 2020 for all utilities, if the state is to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gases that are causing global warming.

Aides to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are negotiating with legislators to put the 33% requirement into law this year, a measure that could alter plans for many of the new gas-fired plants."

The Times writes: The 32-page decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Communities for a Better Environment and other groups. In it, Judge Ann I. Jones told the air district it could not sell offsets to the plants without a fuller analysis under California's Environmental Quality Act. In particular, the judge said, the district needed to analyze exactly how many tons of pollutants, including health-damaging soot and planet-heating greenhouse gases, that each proposed plant would emit.

Use a gas price ladder.

2008-07-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

Like a pair of murderous thieves the Governornator seems stuck in the same financial meltdown of the Bush Administration. His proposal slash and burn everything could use a little forethought; the thinking he left out when he created this morass with the vehicle registration fee cut on becoming governor. Imagine responding to an emergency with laid off and minimum waged workers?

Rather than cut all all transport spending look at the benefits derived from high gas prices. Less driving means less needs for roads. Take that portion of the transport budget out completely. Add clean air and traffic calming fees to gasoline large enough to continue raising the price to offset the budget deficit. Take the resulting revenue and use it to meet the demand for transit and a walkable infrastructure.

Higher gas prices have reduced congestion, decreasing the needs for new roads, and meeting many government goals on higher transit usage, more carpooling, reduced air pollution, lower highway fatalities, ag land conservaton, wildfire awareness, and reduced gas usage. All these goals cost a lot in lives and money to implement and the later goal has major national security implications. The reduced need for roads means less spending on one of the larger program in the federal budget that has major negative ramifications for the environment with expensive mitigation in wetland, ag land protection, wildfires, water conservation, and wildlife protection.

Instead of expanding all the benefits of reduced driving from higher gas prices government is bemoaning the loss of revenue for their pork projects. This is because road building has become ingrained as the economic spur for local development based on timber, water, and land exploitation. The resulting rise in land prices drives out farmers and local business who can't compete without labor that can afford to live locally. Our lifestyle is exported to China for cheap trinkets at the local Walmart dragged in by GATT, an undemocratic organization.

The government should see that higher gas prices takes away the need for congestion management agencies and metropolitan transportation authorities. We should be talking like this so that policy makers can make the right choices. We should be doing more than just filling up the coffers in Riyadh and Tehran. We should use a ladder that increments the price of gas every year to a set goal of $16/- by 2012 to meet all our GHG requirements. If gas simultaneously rises in price on the world market the gas ladder should step down to keep the average increase per month as the same price. Not keeping gas at high levels will let motorists savings go up in fumes.

This way the government will get the money to realize its goals and meet national security goals.

Good transit helps the biggest nest egg

2008-07-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

Good transit plus good jobs really does equal a strong housing market says the SF Chronicle in a piece on corporate shuttle services and property prices. They go on to say that "with Apple, Yahoo, eBay and VMware also starting employee shuttle services in the Bay Area (and Microsoft recently launching one in Seattle), there may soon be more transit-specific real estate formulations to measure."

Density with corridor transit is a solution to many problems including gasoline useage and global warming. The Urban Land Institute lists it as one of the regional solution in Growing Cooler- what they call compact, transit served areas.

The state instead is moving ahead with a small partial solution with future demand management. AB3021 would allow the MPOs and local jurisdictions to build a toll road to bypass a problem.

As stated in the MN this "little-known piece of legislation working its way through Sacramento would create a new transportation board to oversee the financing of toll roads and give local and regional agencies the authority to impose tolls on projects in their jurisdictions."

This is the wrong solution since all it will do is induce more driving (also in Growing Cooler) which today we know leads to more pollution, deaths, congestion, property price declines in far away suburbs, environmental damage from restricted wildlife corridors and stormwater flows, and fires. Instead the toll authority should be allowed local jurisdiction to charge tolls to manage existing lanes and roadways.

Why $16/g would be a solution

2008-07-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

At every income level the economy redefines its stragglers and the price points are where people drop off with alternatives like car sharing, biking, etc. Turkey for example where the price of burros is up 7X in rural area is one such price point.

The resource depleting economy and its peak everything consequence provides high return on investment for increasing fossil fuel consumption, low ROI for reducing fossil fuel consumption.

Consumption patterns for some are changing under duress which leaves the underlying problem intact. In other words those who can afford will still toast the biosphere and we are not going to get to 350 ppm of CO2. Oil is off ~$5/bbl today and if the risk premium is further reduced it could fall back to ~$100 and oil consumption with Sacramento SUVs would resume its growth path.

We need to be at $16, relative to how prices changed in the mid seventies, so the Sacramento ped friendly vision can be realized. Economic changes that, more than incentives, will institutionalized low resource consumption, are no where in sight. The weak blueprint submitted by the California Air Resource Board for implementing AB32 is an example. The carbon trading CARB wants to implement is just a new market in polluting our lungs.

All we have today at $4/- a gallon is some good discussion at the policy level as mayors etc look for alternatives to city budget shortfalls. Much better would be policy that took into account resource conservation based on built in incentives.

> [planning]
>
>
> Sacramento Area Council of Governments, Urban Advantage
>
>
> Sacramento officials used photo imagery to show how different parts of the
> city could be brought in line with their pedestrian-friendly vision.

The Truth About ANWR

2008-07-07T10:45:00.000-07:00

There is an email going around called "the truth with ANWR" which expresses three fallacies-

-- that the only problem is energy dependence and consequently independence is a public good.
- that the planet is huge relative to where we live and we can exploit remote areas without consequence.
- that barren areas are not worth protection.

The problem of today is peak everything, a resource limited world. Hello that's why remote areas like ANWR are relevant. More than: after this what? questions should be asked like: why are we in this pickle and what can we do differently today to not need ANWR? Is drilling pollution neutral? Why did we get rid of coastal drilling in California? Is oil transportation pollution neutral? Would we want to live in Benitia or Martinez? Do we like living downwind from B&M?

Energy independence is not a pubic good for the same reason we are not clamoring for banana independence or coffee independence. Its only a public concept to get public resources expended to destroy wilderness (places where we can't live) for corporations who cannot see the big picture because of their structure and time lines.

We may not live in ANWR and thus its remote but others do- the Gwitchen Indians and the Inupiat Eskimos. For the same reasons that we don't want a prison or a water tank in our back yard they shouldn't have oil drilling in their front yard. The ANWR is the calving ground of their porcupine Caribou herds.

The Mojave, Death Valley, Trinity Wilderness, and coastal areas are not really barren. They have local life forms that have adapted to niches in the food chain. ANWR's coastal plain sustains not only the Gwitchen and the Inupiat but also the Caribou and the polar bear. Its a large food trough where the Aboriginal peoples have learned to live sustainably. Our inability to do so where we live despite huge resource exploitation everywhere is what threatens their world just like it destroyed the aboriginal peoples in our world. It shouldn't be sacrificed because the governor needs another hummer or to express our sexuality in our automobiles. Why destroy another wilderness to pollute the air and water in the Bay Area?

More fundamentally there is not enough oil there to meet even five years of consumption at present rates assuming we really go independent.

Policy makers at CCAG seem stuck in providing the wrong infrastructure. That's why in "emergencies," like the present search for energy independence, people are in this pickle of not having enough train cars at CALTRAIN and buses at SAMTRANS, and missing connections and no bikeways, when they have happily given the thumbs up to SUVs for the past forty years after the "era of limits" proclaimed by Jerry Brown.

Fortunately people have always felt unempowered and distrusting of government...

because they have no say over fundamental decision making around them, like the quality of water they are forced to drink or air they have to breathe or the toxins in the food they have to eat or the quality of paint allowed in the school the kids have to go to or the lunch they have to eat. So people take the political compromise from non participation and turn it into a general conspiracy of a criminal government against the individual. Second timeliness is a problem that extends this conspiracy when getting something done, like a traffic signal or a stop sign, takes forever.

People are stressed by the golden handcuffs and distances over which they transact their lives (i.e the importance of energy cost) and there is a xenophobia here, which is also taken out against the government, which is that living in isolation wouldn't be so bad if the government stopped allowing more people to come live near me.

Finally how difficult can life be? Breathing dirty air, eating tainted food, and living in traffic toxic neighborhoods can't be that difficult. So politicians at CCAG must be stupid is the assumption.

So companies can exploit this distrust by taking a common bad like the problem with energy usage and its cost, and instead of arriving at a common good like transit or compact neighborhoods that don't need huge energy inputs, the very decisions that average Americans make when gas prices are high, politicians and publicist for corporations assume that the common bad must be a good, since we are doing it, and want to deplete the resources without verifying the actual amount or understanding the cost of making it happen, and of course given the unempowerment, timeliness, stress, and xenophobia peoples distrust of government is verified.

Failed Politics and Congestion Pricing

2008-07-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

From Today's New York Times the numbers presented by the Deputy Transportation Commissioner show that $15/gal will get a 10% reduction in Manhattan traffic which Mayor Bloomberg intended with congestion pricing. The Port Authority estimates that there is a crossover point when the cost to transit will not be offset by the rising price.

The disadvantage of not raising gas prices with taxes is that the Saubies (Saudis and Bushes) make the money instead of society and transit. The impact is spread out instead of localized to the congestion zone according to the DTC. The advantage is the meshing with "goals of cutting traffic and as a consequence lowering pollution."

The decrease in demand for parking was double that of the decrease in bridge traffic, probably because people were trying to scrounge more, and similarly an increase in neighborhood traffic around entry points with no toll. So parking cost rises can offset a need to raise gas to $15/-

A federal policy that gives cities a roads and transit funding bonus for parking management through pricing would be immensely useful here, and CCAG should ask our representatives for this in the Green TEA. James Kunstler says that all the talk of technology and alternate fuels are delusional, and will make it that much more difficult to achieve our goal of 350 ppm of CO2, from the present of level of 384 increasing at slightly more than 1 ppm per year. The good news is that demand, 1/3rd from China, will continue to increase which means rising prices. The bad news for policy makers is that they are unprepared with the infrastructure for a transit ready society and the public distrust in them is justified.

Just going along with the ride and monkeying with the goals via hydrogen shuttles and smart corridors to barely achieve congestion management goals is not just bad policy- data shows that it will be catastrophic.

Comments on the CCAG agenda 7/12/08

2008-06-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Comments by Agenda item for CCAG 7/12/08

4.0 Pull from CONSENT AGENDA items 4.2, 4.5, 4.10

4.2 El Camino Real Incentive Program Planning Grant process.
Comments- Extend the electric buses down the El Camino from Mission St in San Francisco at Top of the Hill, Daly City. Electric buses are cheap, quiet, and zero pollution- the only zero pollution large vehicle in the mass transit choices. They are an established technology used in Seattle, San Francisco and recently designed in by numerous Latin American cities like Bogota, Mexico City and Curitiba that have attained fame for their low CO2 mass appeal in transportation. Electric ZAP buses would complement the walkable goals of El Camino by lowering noise and air pollution for the admirable housing goals in the Grand Boulevard Initiative.

4.5 An agreement with Bottomley Associates for the Context Sensitive Design Practice & Guidelines and the MultiModal Access Strategy in an amount not to exceed $140,692/-
Comments- Please consider true multimodality. Take one example at Ralston and El Camino. Fast turn lanes create unique opportunities for automobiles to collide with pedestrians. Wide streets force seniors to try and jog unsuccessfully, frequently arriving stranded in the middle of the intersection, on a tiny median, as their train or bus pulls out. Bicycles are challenged to take lanes to the left of stopped buses or vehicles parked for free in front of the multimodal station, impacting fare box recovery and ZAP accessibility. Cities in turn respond with expensive enforcement fixes like video cameras to nab offensive drivers enabled by poor multimodal designs.

4.10 List of projects for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) for consideration in the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP).
Comments -A big thank you to MTC for adopting ambitious greenhouse gas, VMT, congestion, safety, and affordability goals for the RTP-2035. Please ensure that CCAG now prioritize investments that support these goals. With transportation contributing fully half of all of the Bay Area's greenhouse gas emissions, I'm urge you to help us reduce our automobile dependence by investing in great transit, safe biking and walking, and the land uses that support these transportation choices.

Specifically, I'm asking you to:
• Increase funding to complete the Regional Bicycle Network and Comprehensive Bicycle Plan in San Mateo to $200 over the next 25 years. Make sure that CO2 intensive projects when funded, like the Ralston 101 Interchange, do not penalize bicyclist and pedestrian, by removing access today for a future project like the Ralston 101 bicycle bridge. This bike bridge has found less than 20% of its funding in the last eight years and is not even prioritized in the Comprehensive Bicycle Plan list of projects.
• Increase funding for Safe Routes to Transit by investing an additional $2 million/year for the next 25 years.
• Create a new Safe Routes to Schools grant program and fund it at $2 million/year for the next 25 years.
• Increase funding for the TLC land use program to $300M over 25 years.
• And finally develop working strategies to meet air quality goals for PM10 and PM 2.5 because NONE of your options are remotely expected to succeed by 2035.

5.0 REGULAR AGENDA
5.2 Cooperative Agreement for the County Smart Corridors project.
5.2.1 Status report on funding for the Smart Corridors project.
Comments- The smart corridor program has a negative impact on zero CO2 modes creating accessibility problems for pedestrian, transit users, the disabled, and bicycles. Please ensure that the subsequent EIR, which the attorney general has fortunately enforced, takes the water and air pollution issues from restricted multi modality into consideration.

Solar keeps future prices down

2008-06-11T13:44:00.000-07:00

We were cash positive after one year from installing solar hot water and PV panels. However the rest of CA continues to face increased rates. Our electric rates have been fixed at 5.50 per month which is the cause of taxes to use the transmission lines. Our gas bill has averaged $15 per month mostly from December-February.

PGE wants to increase rates because of their increasing gas costs. Like fuel prices consumers are trapped by infrastructure. According to the article

"Electricity rates for all customers would rise by an average of 4.5 percent in October and an additional 2 percent in January. PG&E has different rates for different types of customers, and some would see a larger increase than others. The monthly electric bill for a typical home would rise a total of $1.30, to reach $73.43.

While it gets less public attention than oil, diesel and gasoline, natural gas has seen its own wild swings in price. The fuel now costs 63 percent more than it did a year ago, more than PG&E predicted."

Limit freeways to limit fires in CA

2008-06-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

Freeways were known to cause sprawl in the process bring development to the next onramp. City infrastructure can barely keep with the development. At Sprawl Central in 2007, three of the ten fires in LA were caused by downed power lines.

But freeways themselves are the cause of many fires frequently when grass on the side of the road catches fire. Yesterdays Stockton fires started on Interstate 5 and blew out of control. In other blazes today the CHP had to close a lane on 680 so firefighters could get to work.

And a Glenn County blaze was caused by a tanker explosion along highway 32.

Reducing freeways will reduce our exposure to fire as the state dries out from a water shortage and changed rainfall patterns which increase the winter runoff and decrease snowmelt.

Freight to rail does more in this area

2008-06-11T12:53:00.000-07:00

Freight to rail can reduce the PM10 from tires and brake dust that MTC does not have a handle on through 2035 and its impact on bay pollution. Caltrain should include freight to rail in its discussions with other other rail bodies on expanding passenger systems.

But freight to rail can do much more. It can free up space on existing highways thus stretching our highway dollar and allowing us to manage capacity. Adding in pricing can only help. And it takes away one more hungry source of air pollution and diesel consumption at a time of unsteady supply and pricing.

And it can take away the huge expense of Intelligent Transportation Systems that are used to route traffic through neighborhoods after a big rig crash on 101. These crashes are frequently the fault of the single occupancy vehicle cutting in and out of lanes trying to get around the traffic.

Why are commuters rioting over fuel prices?

2008-06-10T18:21:00.000-07:00

You'd think that people would accept the price of a non food commodity. After all if the government subsidizes it the money has to come from somewhere like higher taxes which unfairly burden those who make wiser choices. So why are people upset enough to riot over high fuel costs?

Because planner have designed choice out of their lives. Government is responsible for bad planning that focused only on roads in the last thirty years. The oil shocks of the 70s were not a warning but a invitation to jump into bed with the Saudis- Bush even calls Prince Bandit his brother. And ultimately people are stupid enough to follow a bad example- Paris Hilton need I say more.

The problem is that policy associations like CCAG highlight the problems with conventional thinking in design- Place your foundation on the basis of the available fuel source, not what is sustainable. Why conserve resources for future generations when Cherney is around to ship our children for cheap oil to Iraq? Why build like Reagen when Jerry Brown forecast an era of limits? Because it was free and who doesn't want to look like a hero dolling out a free lunch.

Why reduce driving? Higher gas prices can help

2008-05-31T20:59:00.000-07:00

Reduce how much we drive instead of looking for technological fixes that will not get us to 350 CO2. Amory Lovins, and others, offer light weight green cars like hybrids as a solution to our energy problems from oil. However strip mining the Congo with massive human rights abuses through sponsored resource wars, to keep our hybrids humming, on lithium and cobalt, and colton for our cellphones is an unsustainable and clearly unethical system.

Large lighter cars with present speeds is advocacy for unwalkable cities, against our only real solution. There nothing we can do to teach our kids how not to get run over by a Prius or a monster truck. Walking today is like rolling a dice with cars. I don't know if smaller cars will help but slower anything helps.

People in Lovin's favor argue that there is nothing we can practically do to reduce the necessity for cars. Addressing the properties of cars can reduce their impact on the environment. But our social economy is designed for fossil fuel consumption, and favors those who consume most. Lovin's is like aristocracy surfing the tide of elitism. Healthy cities are a wistful goal, instead of taking the chance out of walking, lets tinker with the machinery of death they say.

Worldchanging and Duany/Zyberk/Speck in Suburban Nation offer alternate visions.

Reducing driving with functional transit in corridors like the El Camino is a real alternative. The access parameters to make it viable need to be developed primarily on time service, shorter commute times versus the single occupancy automobile, expensive parking to not hamper fare box recovery, and improved throughput with grade separation for both bus and train.

High gas prices have delivered many benefits like higher transit ridership, better air quality, and lower congestion. Policy makers for the last 50 years have tried to achieve these goals by spending trillions of dollars on road expansion. In the process people have become trapped in their homes by speeding and scofflaw gridirons of steel. Cancer, lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity have accelerated in the fast lane; but can be cured with higher transit usage. The state has bankrupted itself cutting school programs to pay for road expansion and the contractor lobbyist have muscled the governor not to shuffle the budget.

So you'd think that better transit, air quality and congestion relief would have policy makers thinking how they could improve these issues on the free. A study says commuters can deal with higher prices. Others are downsizing their engines reducing the potential for speeding traffic and producing less air pollution or leaving suburbs. What can policy makers do to improve coffers, reduce costs, and provide choice? Looking the gift horse of high gas prices in the mouth Policy Makers declare.... that gas prices are problem! Congress has an investigation going.

Gas prices may not stall commuters. They only choke our cities and kill our children and force us to leave our homes to retire, to the Sierra's, where we can walk in a retirement community, because not moving with our legs will cause us to end up in a pine box. Higher gas prices can pay for mass transit and help with fare box recovery, especially if we focus on corridors and drop low density service; and give transit authorities control over the landuse decisions within 1500 feet of a transit center primarily to control parking which erodes fare box recovery and makes for unsustainable transit authorities.

We already have the technology to solve our problems

2008-04-16T15:33:00.000-07:00

To solve asthma, global warming, housing prices, and a host of social ills that define an unsustainable lifestyle today, policy makers and talking heads resurrect the spectre of future technologies. Electric cars that can go 100 mph for 100 miles will solve asthma, biofuels will solve global warming, 100 mpg or higher CAFE standards and High Speed Rail will connect people better and reduce that bad air travel.

These are all false choices. As the Iraq war drags on against all popular support, we know what problems technology has created, but are unable to acknowledge the problems future technologies will create, or how to solve our problem today. Electric cars will not solve asthma because battery and electricity production move pollution to other sites while tire dust, break lining and other pollutants from traffic take away any benefit for particle emission reduction after all scenarios have been studies (See graphs 24 and 25.)

Time published an excellent article on how biofuels replace established carbon reservoirs that will take 150 to 250 years to replace, much longer than the 50 year time frame we have to address GW, resulting in a more drastic GW future, while killing streams, starving people and the soil, and killing the seas. And higher CAFE standards and HSR only allow people to commute from far away places where we should keep sequestered carbon sequestered, not allow poeple to buy cheap land agricultural land in Tracy or Chico, or cheap forest land in Modesto.

The problem to solve today is how to live on 20% of our infrastructure so that 80% of our fossils fuels can stay in the ground through 2300 AD because of the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere. Policy makers instead are trying to add infrastructure in the mistaken belief that the carbon we produce today is ok; and going forward we need the latest widget that will produce less carbon than existing technology. We need to take bold steps now that benefit people, the economy and the environment while rolling back carbon in the atmosphere. Now, not in another 20 years.

So stop pushing the next frontier of technology and acknowledge that we are trying to fix the problems that technology has created and new technologies will bring more problems that we don’t have time to fix.

Reduce asthma by drastically reducing todays cars on the road, moving freight to rail AND thus reduce the need for biofuel because we reduce the need for fuel. Create twenty mile per hour high density city cores with higher speed traffic only allowed on trunk arterials outside the core, where dust and carbon and pollution have a minimal impact on fewer people. Link trails up in the dense cores to the landuses of children into an Urban Trail System that takes advantage of the expensive infrastructure in Pedestrian OverCrossings, and use Bicycle Boulevards as urban connectors to open space so that we can eliminate 50% of the trips that are under 2 miles. Create a standard for infrastructure expenditure that looks at the benefit to people, environment, and the enonomy and move projects up based on their sustainable return on investment. Reducing health care costs for reduced pollution and an active population will benefit both people and the environment and help the economy by making local business sustainable

CCAG should be vigilant on biofuels

2008-04-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

Instead of addressing our dependence on cars with pedestrian friendly cities policy makers are rushing to subsidize ethanol. The result is that we are Starving the People To Feed the Cars.

MICHAEL GRUNWALD writes that "by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry.
Four years ago, two University of Minnesota researchers predicted the ranks of the hungry would drop to 625 million by 2025; last year, after adjusting for the inflationary effects of biofuels, they increased their prediction to 1.2 billion. The lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can't be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us."

Lester Brown writes that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year.

Biofuels like corn, which we are subsidizing, threaten streams by reducing their environmental service. As streams weaken in their ability to remove nitrogen from fertilizer, more runoff gets to the sea, where algae grows and dies, creating huge oxygen deprived dead zones.

It would be a poor tradeoff if we killed the seas to fuel our cars.

Parking cashout from or reduced parking ratios

2008-04-09T12:36:00.001-07:00

The Grand Boulevard (and note the great library resource here) should look at a leased parking authority to enable parking cashout. My friend Mike Bullock wrote this on cashout to reduce the required parking ratio-

My proposals for private parking cashout (government allows less parking for cashout, resulting in excess land which is used to redevelop to create cash flow to offset the cashout cost) is perhaps the only way in industrial parks.

For TOD, the Redevelopment Director should buy all parking for a token amount and then operate the parking for the benefit of the potential users, such as employees, or apartment or condo dwellers, transparent to the change in ownership. The Redevelopment Director could make all on-street parking pay parking and let, for example, workers chose either free parking or monthly cash payment. All cars would be detected and charged (owners billed) or detected as a worker getting free parking (but no cashout). Owners of cars without electronic id would have to pay at a pay station, which would be a hassle but would offer the user an easy way to get a car ID. The advantages are

1.) park once, for all drivers to the TOD

2.) shared parking so less is needed

3.) Redevelopment of excess land can support cashout

4.) Cashout results in less drive alone and more of everything else

5.) unbundled parking for residents results in less car ownership

6.) Redevelopment can add to mixed use so as to reduce trips further

7.) On street parking revenue would be used to cover the cost of new technology and upgrades to the street, and then payments to owners

7.) The Redevelopment Director is in a position to coordinate all parking

Humboldt Avenue goes toxic

2008-04-04T16:03:00.000-07:00

CA law prevents the siting of a school within 500 feet of a freeway because of the danger from pollution.

In the largest and longest study of its kind, USC researchers have found that children living within 500 feet of busy highways have significant impairments in the development of their lungs that can lead to respiratory problems for the rest of their lives.

The 13-year study of more than 3,600 children in 12 Central and Southern California communities found that the damage from living within 500 yards of a freeway is about the same as that from living in communities with the highest pollution levels.

However major roads like El Camino and Woodside were found in a Sacramento study to be just as toxic which impacts schools along these routes.

This UC Davis study on air pollution found that notwithstanding lower traffic volumes, "heavily traveled secondary highways" are just as toxic as freeways laden with diesel trucks or major rail yards.

Last week the Air Resource Board said on the effects of diesel that "diesel emissions from trucks, machinery and other sources elevate the risk of premature death, cancer, asthma and other chronic diseases for more than 3 million people living in West Oakland and the surrounding region, according to the most detailed study yet on the issue."

The analysis by the California Air Resources Board, released Wednesday night, shows that the greatest health dangers related to toxic air emissions stems from diesel trucks traversing the freeways and other roadways around West Oakland and the Port of Oakland.

The two-year public health inquiry covered a large swath of the Bay Area - an area of 3,800 square miles that is home to 3.1 million people. The residents had an elevated risk of cancer - nearly 1,200 additional cancers per million people due to long-term exposure to diesel particulate matter than people living elsewhere, the study reported in preliminary findings.

As CCAG continues to maintain capacity, neighborhood streets can become toxic. Traffic planners route increased volume onto neighborhood streets. This unfortunately is what happened to Humboldt Avenue in San Mateo.

Citizens are unable to reconcile the toxicity of their actions as this quote verifies- “I think we have acknowledged that a number of concessions have been made,” said Commissioner Alex Feinman. “We won’t please everyone."

Air quality goals can provide alternatives to cars

2008-04-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

The San Joaquin Air Quality Board has a pdf on landuse changes for general plans for improving air quality. The air quality component update to the general plan is supposed to follow one year after completion of the housing element.

All cities in San Mateo are updating their housing elements right now. In the pdf pg 85 is on bikes and the enforcement is upfront on page 13.

One thing we hear is that we are in attainment of air quality goals in San Mateo. That's almost true. According to the Sustainable San Mateo County Air quality Indicator: For PM10 there was only one exceedance of the state 24-hour standard at Redwood City in the entire year of 2007. For PM2.5 there was one exceedance of the National 24-hour standard at Redwood City in the entire year of 2007. The state 24-hour standard for PM2.5 has not yet been implemented. There were no exceedances in 2007 at Redwood City for ozone, carbon monoxide, or nitrogen dioxide. Sulfur dioxide is not measured in San Mateo County.

However we use a much lax standard than recommended by the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization (2005) has proposed tighter standards to improve public health because “an increasing range of adverse health effects has been linked to air pollution, and at ever-lower concentrations” page 10

Particle emissions kill more people than cigarettes. PM10 needs scrutiny in San Mateobecause nothing proposed- alternative vehicles, alternative fuels, or pricing- will make a dent in targets through 2035, at least for us here in the Bay Area. Same for PM2.5 which is not the national standard till 2015.

The PM10 chart showing the lack of progress from mitigation is chart 25 page 13 chart titled Reduce coarse particulate emissions (PM10) to 38 tons per day. PM2.5 is the second chart 24 on page 12.

So the mitigations to PM10 and PM25 are to reduce VMT through Freight to Rail, transit, and shifting trips to bicycles and walking. Once we accept the challenge of reducing VMT
in our housing elements and general plans we can proceed set goals that can achieve milestones for increased bicycle and walking modal shifts from single occupant vehicles which make up 40% of total Bay Area green house gas emissions. From page 25 "This is where the Air Quality Guidelines for General Plans comes in. This document provides a comprehensive set of goals and policies that promote development patterns, site designs, and transportation systems that support alternatives to the automobile."

Trails in hazardous locations

2008-03-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

The bike trail from Holly to Wipple on the east side of 101 is hazardous to our health. The non stop traffic augmented by trucks create an unhealthy dose of toxins that must be equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes when walking that short stretch of one mile.

These trails need to be put at least 500 feet away from the freeway. Planners lack a perspective on how pedestrians move. The slower pace of walkers leave them in the hazard zone for much longer periods of time than is safe. People who worry about parking never even notice the smell and noise and toxicity of the freeway over the wall.

The analysis by the California Air Resources Board, shows that the greatest health dangers arises from diesel trucks on the major roads.

While accessing the trail from Holly we are exposed to diesel emission from the unregulated vehicles that are used at San Carlos Airport. These vehicles don’t have the traps that were installed as part of the Carl Moyer Program on city fleets.

Finally getting over Holly at 101 to get to the Airport Way turnoff and then Skyway to get to the trail is another adventure. San Carlos seems to forget that there are recreation opportunities east of El Camino- the Bay.

If CCAG and San Carlos included a healthy element in their general plan and airport landuse documents this type of deplorable situation would not occur. And now that we are stuck with this pack of cigarettes, a health element in the General Plan would ensure measures to reduce the risk. For example Planning for Healthy Places', Healthy General Plan toolkit,
Goal 5 says: Pursue a comprehensive strategy to ensure that residents breathe clean air and drink clean water. And then lists objectives to accomplish this goal:
Objective 5.1: Reduce residents’ reliance on cars.
Rationale: Motor vehicles are often the principle contributors of particulate matter,
nitrogen oxides, and ozone, which contribute to asthma and bronchitis. Roads and
parking lots comprise most of the impervious surface in a metropolitan area, leading
to water-contaminating run-off, with auto leaks and emissions contributing the most
non-point-source pollution in this run-off.
Policies
Adopt mixed-use residential, commercial, and office zoning
• where appropriate to encourage walkability
• Build and maintain safe, pleasant streets for walking and bicycling (see
Objective 3.3)
• Work with regional authorities to improve transit service linking residents
with destinations (such as jobs and retail), especially in underserved neighborhoods
• Prioritize new infill development near transit nodes
• Utilize parking restrictions to deter car use (e.g., parking requirement
maximum rather than minimum, congestion pricing)
Objective 5.2: Protect homes, schools, workplaces, and stores from major sources of outdoor air pollution.
Rationale: Populations in close proximity to noxious land uses are more vulnerable
to respiratory diseases and cancers.
Policies
• Locate stationary emitters (e.g., incinerators, factories, refineries) segregated
and downwind from homes and schools
• Locate sensitive uses, such as schools and family housing, at least 500 feet
from highways (and we should add trails and playgrounds in here.)

Net Metering Bills for 08/09

2008-03-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

Senator Leland Yee introduced a bill, SB 1447 on solar buyback and net metering. However, this bill is a spot bill, a statement of intent to do a bill on this subject. His offices intends to evaluate other bills on net metering to see if they are likely to stall; and in that case he will move this bill forward.

1447 is more specific to make it easier to pass. Yee wants to get past the Governor consumer protection of RECs and the PG&E utility's attempt to collar the credits. 1447 is only focused on local government for now, but could end up including schools if we ask. The governor's 2007 veto of SB451 message addressed AB 1969 (Yee 2005) on purchases of renewable power from agencies like water and waste which was expanded by the CPUC to include small producers. The governor suggested in the veto applying a proportional share of carbon emission reduction credits to the utility.

Conclusion- 1447 should include school districts, and maybe, in keeping with the Davis theme, the CA universities. The Davis theme is the basis of all the net metering discussion. It was the first bill by Senator Byron Sher in 2002, SB 1038, to allow UC Davis to have one generation facility that could offset their meters on all other facilities. The specific language of net metering in SB 1038 reads: This bill authorizes the City of Davis to receive a bill credit, as
defined, to a benefiting account, as defined for electricity supplied to the electrical grid by a photovoltaic facility located within and partially owned by the city (PVUSA). The bill would require the commission to adopt a rate tariff for the benefiting account.

NOTE- ONLY for Davis and ONLY for photovoltaic facilities.

Assembly member Huffman has also introduced a bill on this subject AB 1920. This bill has actual language and looks good. Its the bill that Yee is watching to see if 1447 is necessary.

Huffman's bill seems to take into account proportional credit sharing. It also seems to address AB 1223 (Arambula) 2006/7 bill on excess metering for agriculture (and note the background bills on "net metering") which would have allowed agriculture to utilize net metering; i.e. one-site production of renewable energy to offset costs at other sites. This bill stalled on T&D opposition from PG&E.

AB 1920 has a description on Huffman's web site which reads:
AB 1920 (Huffman): Renewable Energy Incentives – Net Metering
Enables residents who produce renewable energy for their homes, small businesses or farms to get paid by their utility company for any excess electricity they produce that goes back on the grid. Level of compensation to be determined by the Public Utilities Commission. Provides utilities with Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) credits for purchasing the renewable energy from their customers. Removes the “size to load” restriction in state law that limits energy customers’ ability to “supersize” their solar electricity systems.

Why net metering

2008-03-21T13:26:00.000-07:00

The lens we view the expansion of solar programs in California must be the ability to pencil out the cost of installation. How do we realign the subsidies that PG&E receives so that smaller local producers can be competitive? The model that makes sense is something simple like Germany's or a combination of all the programs, if we want to get beyond the rich and profitable. We may also want to get beyond the RECs. PG&E is just not going to get them from this governor as he said in the SB451 veto in October 2007.

Our objectives here are:

1- There is a sense of urgency to transition to clean fuels. We are over-reliant on foreign oil to the detriment of our national security, peak oil, green house gases are impacting critical infrastructure like water and fire, petrochemical in the food supply and competition with ethanol are impacting prices, cancer, asthma, pollution, oil wars, burden public health- all because of the costs of using fossil fuels. If we want to make the transition to clean sources of energy, we have to STOP obsessing about our past investments in a fossil-fuel based infrastructure. Trying to recoup rate-payer investments in T&D will only hobble our efforts to make the switch. T&D, if it remains an issue, should be based on what the market will bear.

2- The governor wants to expand solar in CA and has provided many programs to do so including SB1.

3- MPR does not pencil out. It is the COMBINED EFFECT of the present set of programs – Accelerated Depreciation, Federal Tax Credit, PGE rebate, and Retail Net Metering (32c/kWh on-peak) – and bank financing that gets rich, profitable, and creditworthy companies to install solar. If any of the subsidies are withdrawn, then the amount of solar installed will also decline because the returns on investment in solar become less attractive compared to alternate investments. We need more, not less, subsidies if we are to expand to more users. Looking at the various bill in the 2008 legislative calendar we can see that PG&E's opposition stems from their stated intent to recoup sunk costs in T&D.

4- The legislature recognizes the need to expand solar installations and the benefit of locally produced power for efficient transmission. That is why we got feed in tariffs and equal access to the grid. We copied Germany which in addition to feed in tariffs and equal access also passed a guaranteed rate of about $70c per kWh for 20 years. That made people go out and rent roofs to install solar so that they could have access to the income. Germany became the largest installer of solar in the world.

5- The legislature promotes efficiency by charging variable rates so that high users pay considerably more for making the system unstable. If a solar electricity producer is NOT compensated for his excess electricity production (beyond retail net metering), he is being discouraged from implementing energy efficiency measures as they become technically viable. This contravenes California’s loading order of paying for energy efficiency before energy generation.

The renewable energy case for net metering

2008-03-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

PG and E's basic argument against net metering is that solar producers didn’t pay for Transmission and Delivery (T and D) and have already been subsidized by rate payers with rebates. Paying for over production is thus an unfair subsidy to producers which puts additional burden on rate payers.

This is a false argument because it starts out by assuming that solar producers materialized out of thin air instead of being rate payers themselves subsidizing the system all along until they became producers. When did PGE become this charitable institution that looked after the rate payer? The history of utility reform in California has been the ability of consumer lawsuits to force PG and E to comply with its function as a public provider of power. And within the public interest the legislature has granted PGE access to charge Californians to build the grid and land to install it on. In other words PGE functions much like a landscaper I would hire using plants and labor I pay for to install a garden on my property. The landscaper can't come back and ask a fee of my guests who are using my garden. The grid belongs to California and access to the grid means that any CA producer can use it.

Now if PGE has a maintenance cost to upgrade and upkeep, that cost should also be viewed within the confines of our objectives. Renting the grid is ok for surplus power without any division of the RECs. But let’s rent it proportionally since the surplus power is produced in the summer when the demand is largest and the need greatest. Thus PGE should pay the peak rate for surplus power and charge a maintenance rent for supplying it on the grid per kWh at the Market Bearable Rate. New Mexico pays a surplus rate of $1KWH. And Florida uses the Utility Avoided Cost by allowing producers to act as producers! Craig Morris in Truthout discusses the case of Germany with respect to CA.

Upgrades costs need to be distributed by low and high users. The goal of the legislature in requiring variable rates is to discourage high users from maintaining consumption patterns that destabilize the system. Solar producers on the other hand represent the lowest need since they offset consumption patterns elsewhere. In this case PGE should be paying, and one can argue that the rebate meets this requirement, solar installers for reducing the upgrade cost.

SB451, Key existing solar programs, and proposals

2008-03-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

2007, 2008 CA legislative summary- This is complicated. Call your legislative office for help. Senator Yee's office is one of the best. So is Simitian's.

1. AB 1969 Expansion

AB 1969 (2006, Yee) was adopted and expanded by the PUC at the end of
2007. This means that now, any customer of a utility in California may
sell renewable energy (solar, water, etc.) back to the utility at a
predetermined rate, called “feed-in tariffs”. The feed-in tariff is
offered at the Market Price Referent (MPR) to renewable facilities up to
1.5 megawatts. Customers that opt for the feed-in tariff cannot receive
CSI (CA Solar Initiative) or SGIP (Self Generation Incentive Program)
funds to subsidize the building of their renewable facilities.

2. Net Metering

“Net metering” is the process by which the collection of solar or
other renewable energy runs your energy meter backwards. It can only go
back to zero. This is the best deal for solar in California, as opposed
to other forms of renewable energy, because the customer’s meter runs
backwards at “full retail” value. PG&E after a year’s true up does not compensate producers for excess generation. This has been a major liability for school districts and local government because each building requires its own installation. Belmont, through current Vice-Mayor Dickenson and CCAG unsuccessfully carried SB 451 last year to change this- essentially allowing an authority to put solar where it would be best, for example Nesbit, and generate enough for the entire district including foggy Fox.
ftp://ftp.cpuc.ca.gov/puc/aboutcpuc/2007+final+legislative+wrap+up.ppt and search for 451

Other net metering programs in California run at the generation rate, which accounts for the utility’s transmission and distribution (T&D) charges.

3. California Solar Initiative & Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP)

Cash incentives combined with federal tax incentives to build renewable; can cover up to 50% of costs.

Legislation this year:

4. SB 451 (Kehoe, 2007). Vetoed.

This bill would have required electrical corporations to buy renewable energy from any customer at the feed-in tariff rate. This bill was vetoed and is now unnecessary due to the CPUC’s AB 1969 (Yee) implementation.

5. AB 2820 (Huffman): Excess metering

This bill will allow local public agencies to transfer renewable electricity from the public agency’s renewable energy generation meters to offset the energy demand at the public agency’s other offsite facilities. This bill requires a local public agency to pay the investor owned utilities (IOUs) for use of its transmission and distribution (T&D) facilities, as well as any applicable standby charges for renewable energy technologies that are not already exempted under current law.

6. AB 1223 (Arambula): Excess metering for agriculture

Would have allowed agriculture to utilize net metering: one-site production of renewable energy to offset costs at other sites. Issue at the core of the debate was the T&D charges.

7. AB 1807 (Fuentes): Renewable electric generation facilities: feed-in tariffs

This bill would require the PUC to develop feed-in tariffs for eligible renewable energy resources of more than 20 megawatts

8. AB 2573 (Leno): San Francisco Model: Net/Excess Metering. Chaptered.

Options for 2008 to allow compensation for excess production after the True Up:

1. Propose alternatives to AB 2820, AB 1223, or AB 1807 in case they fail. This could be legislation for excess metering for local public agencies. However, challenging points in this area will be the T&D charges and the matter of who gets to keep the Renewable Energy
Credits (RECs) which was the basis of SB451's veto.

2. Propose similar legislation to the San Francisco model provided by AB 2573

3. Change the law so that CSI and SGIP-funded facilities sell the excess energy back onto the market. This would allow them to size to capacity instead of on-site electricity load, and would increase the amount of renewable energy use in California. Key issues: ratepayer subsidies the facilities then also pays for the electricity, and who keeps the RECs.

Buses need the HOV system through San Mateo

2008-03-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

Going north after 92 on 101 traffic is congested because the HOV system ends. CCAG favored metered onramp timing which hasn't worked. Buses like the KX are delayed as a result making one more good commute option unviable; even though this is the best option to the airport on the peninsula.

At a recent Senate hearing of the Sustainable Transportation Committee in Redwood City before Senators Leland Yee and Tom Torlakson the major points of all the transportation chiefs in the Bay Area was
1- we need to plan better to get to a jobs housing balance by taking advantage of the transportation resources that we already have
2- we already know how to build low emissions walkable cities. Now we need to incentivize people to live an alternate or low energy lifestyle.

A low cost option could be achieved for the cost of paint if special legislation allowed the fast travel lane to be converted to an HOV lane, without road expansion, completing the HOV system from the South Bay. This would be a one only case since all the other missing segments are already in the project loop with funding. I-580, I-80 in Solano, 101 in the North Bay and a few other stretches are already planned and partially funded. And such legislation would align with the goals of AB32.

According to MTC:
The 2002 HOV Master Plan Update identifies the segment between Whipple
Ave (the current terminus in Redwood City) and Millbrae Ave (near SFO)
as a Priority 2 segment. Priority 2 segments are those that appear to
have benefits from an HOV perspective but have design or environmental
challenges and for which no funding is currently identified in the
region's long range transportation plan, Transportation 2030. The
thought is that it would be even more difficult to develop an HOV lane
north of Millbrae, and this segment is not included in the HOV Master
Plan Update.

In the absence of ready HOV solutions, the San Mateo City/ County
Association of Governments has been actively pursuing ramp metering,
interchange improvements and a series of auxiliary lanes to improve
traffic operations throughout the corridor.

At this time, there are no more specific plans on the drawing board for
on HOV lane on US 101 through San Mateo County; however, it remains of
general interest since it is an obvious gap in a the regional network.
The segment between Whipple and Millbrae is being looked at a very high
level in the regional High-Occupancy/Toll Network study.

The HOV Master Plan is available on the MTC web site at:
http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/hov/plan.htm
US 101 through San Mateo is addressed on pp 46-47.

Background:
Caltrans tried a lane conversion at the beginning ,when HOV lanes were first proposed in Southern CA for commuters, as a means to reduce congestion for Single Occupant Vehicles. Then the concept was a novelty, widely derided and called mommy lanes because moms with child seats were eligible to drive as HOVs. Taking a lane away at that time was considered a travesty against the lone working male commuter.

Since then both multiple occupant vehicles (MOV)s and SOVs have seen the benefit of these lanes. HOV usage is up and some regions with poor transit like Santa Clara County have congested HOV lanes and are talking about adding a second HOV lane. Commuters today go out of their way to look for a second occupant so that they take time off their commutes as MOVs.

Thus today the situation is completely different than what Caltrans experienced at the beginning of the program. We are looking at closing the last piece of the HOV puzzle. The goal is to provide commuters with a credible option up and down the Peninsula. RTP 2035 has committed money to complete the HOV all around the bay except for the San Mateo section.

Without the San Mateo section drivers are left without a credible HOV system and are stuck in SOV traffic. We think that consumers will welcome a lane reassignment. They have seen the success of these lanes, recognize the need for more such lanes in Santa Clara, and are willing to tax themselves to get these benefits. Consumers recognize that just painting these lanes with lane reassignment is faster, cheaper and benefits everyone since by keeping multiple occupant vehicles in HOVs we create room for SOVs in the remaining lanes. Its the number one proposal I hear from the public whenever I talk about transportation in San Mateo.

HOV, HOT, and BOL are commute options fundable by congestion charging

2008-03-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

Today’s Examiner reports that: The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation board of directors voted Friday to approve a toll that would fluctuate based on the amount of traffic on the bridge, or so-called congestion pricing.

However in a disappointment to Supervisor McGoldrick “An amendment — introduced by San Rafael Mayor Al Boro and narrowly approved by the bridge’s board — specifically stipulates that no revenue generated from the variable toll increases would go toward rebuilding seismically unstable Doyle Drive.”

McGoldrick said that the amendment represented a failure of regional cooperation to use toll revenue for highway projects. However GGB traffic does more than just go down Doyle Drive. In San Mateo County cities like SSF double in population during the day while Redwood Shores sees a factor of twenty increase. And we lose bicycle access, on Ralston over 101, because traffic coming to Oracle and EA caused the interchange to be reconfigured, to allow more on ramps ramps from Oracle, so much so that the interchange has become the number one location for bicycle car collisions in Belmont. And all this associated pollution on the Peninsula could use some alternative choices like rapid bus lanes on the freeways. So what does Supervisor McGoldrick mean by regional cooperation?

On a much sillier note Bridge district Director Charles McGlashan said it’s unfair for bridge commuters to pay tolls to fund a state highway. Where would the bridge be without the highway? And what kind of fair alternative should bridge drivers be presented with? Reconfiguring one lane as a bus only lane would provide a real alternative on the Peninsula for the cost of paint. An HOT could fund additional transit options.

This is an example of how Caltrans and the CMAs like SFTA and CCAG uses regional ignorance to stay in their CarTrance.

San Carlos Transit Village produces 3 tons of CO2 per day

2008-03-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

At the transit village community open house neighbors expressed concern with traffic, deterioration of schools, and access to sunlight. The former two concerns are heard at every development on the Bay. Neighbors agree on a bunch of reasons for opposing traffic from air quality and carbon monoxide to danger to their kids and the unpleasantness of living in neighborhoods with too many cars. They don’t express opposition by quoting the fact that more than 50% of CO2 comes from cars.

Neighborhood issues in San Carlos have been of concern to the community since speeding dangers caused a pedestrian fatality on San Carlos Ave. After a public outcry San Carlos reluctantly found money for another signal light.

Its not just San Carlos which manages itself into a lifeless sewer for traffic to far away jobs. The expanded automotive access on 101 by CCAG creates expanded expectations. There was a letter in the paper after the fuel spill from an irate driver in Palo Alto asking for the Menlo Park city council to restore six lanes on the El Camino. This driver from Palo Alto is saying: Menlo Park needs to bantustan its transit center from downtown, by turning El Camino into a death corridor, so he can use Menlo Park as a drive through. Neighbors know that development brings traffic and reduces quality of life.

San Carlos has proposed reducing the parking requirement to 1.6 cars per unit. The transit operator is asking for replacement of the 300 spots. That means the development will have almost 800 cars. These cars will generate 3 tons of CO2 per day and 1.5 tons of noxious emissions like ozone, benzene, etc which have been linked to everything from asthma to lung cancer.

Caltrain electrification and solar TODs

2008-03-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

Electrified Caltrain would reduce diesel pollution, significantly reduce noise, and allow for TOD that spanned the track. If the transit authority kept the roof they could add panels to pay for the electrified trains.

According to my meter I have averaged 3.2 MW per year from 20 panels which equal 250 sq feet and generate 15% surplus power per year.

So 400 house roofs feeding into the grid would power the 4MW requirement of an electrified train. Working off the 15% surplus 2500 houses would suffice. Which could be translated into roof top space of 625,000 sq ft or about a 104,000 sq feet for six TODs, like the San Carlos Transit Village, each village generating power for 400+ homes from 8400 panels per village. Solar panel covered parking lot can make up for structural deficiencies in the roof area. Sierra Nevada Beer put in a nice shaded solar parking lot.
http://www.gizmag.com/solar-powered-beer-sierra-nevada/8671/

4MW is 1% of the required power at full build out. From the EIR/EIS the accurate power requirements to operate a 100 train per day Caltrain system is approx. 300 MWh PER DAY. A full build out scenario of more trains per day would require 400 MWh per day.

Would 1% from renewable sources from 6 TOD roofs, a little higher before buildout, while providing essentially free power to 2500 households, be worth the investment?

I use BP panels which are inefficient, but sufficient for me, and they are local (Sacramento.) Sanyo, Siemens, Mitsubushi and Honda make much higher efficiency panels which would reduce the roof top area requirement considerably. I also use a south east orientation and have a large oak which shades the house from the western sun, all desirable characteristics in the summer. However a TOD has none of these restrictions. Orienting the TOD to the south, and shading windows from the summer sun, can result in a 20% decrease in the number of panels.

HOT Buslanes or complete the HOV system

2008-03-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

The HOV lane on 101 from the South Bay ends just before 92 when traveling north bound. The result is a backup in traffic and congestion at this location at almost all times of the day. This backup is the primary cause of the delay in express bus service that uses the freeway.

Getting the HOV lane completed to San Francisco would entail a large cost because present legislation requires that HOV lanes be implemented with road expansion. Since this area is built out the cost of land acquisition is huge.

Even better would be convert the HOV lane and the fast lane to SF into an HOT lane. There is no loss for Single Occupant Drivers of lane capacity since the option to buy ones way in is still available. To balance out the equity issue the money should be used to provide enhanced express bus service in these lanes now call HOT Busway lanes.

Transit usage needs help from local government

2008-03-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

Linda Koelling, a Foster City Councilperson, says “It is vital for us to implement a new wave of conservation effort and meet the challenge of getting people out of their cars in order to preserve our environment.” She makes the following points in appealing for people to use transit- The Bay Area is now one big city stitched together by urban sprawl. As a conseqence congestion impacts quality of life everywhere.

Her solution is for us try public transit in the model developed by Peninsula Traffic Relief Alliance. www.commute.org/ However Mz Kolling readily admits that congestion continues to be real despite PTRA having “pretty much covered all the bases.”

Asking people to try transit hasn't worked for good reasons. Bay Area Cities are giving away vital resources like curb side space and streets for free while bankrupting public coffers. People drive because there is no cost to pollute and endanger the public commons, there is no downside to behavior that disrupts public life and endangers public health. Similarly walkers and cyclist, who could relieve congestion, decide not risk their lives on the attention spans of drivers.

So if she really wants people to use transit Foster City should put in place measures that encourage people to use transit like charging for parking and roads. Foster City should especially look at commute times so that transit use is competive with auto usage and not designed to unfairly compete with transit.

She can be reached at lkoelling@fostercity.org.

Alternatives to parking help transits fare box recovery

2008-03-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Notice the in-lieu fee of $9,000 collected for the past three years in San Mateo is insufficient for a parking lot. The city only has $1.5 million. Business wants the parking and pollution. but is refusing to pay for the parking lot.

The number provided in the article “City on quest for parking garage” in the Nov. 2 edition of the Daily Journal for a parking spot, of $30,000 is really low. A parking spot is 10 feet by 18 feet which equals 180 square feet. At $100 per square foot for unimproved land in San Mateo the spot would cost $18,000.

However a parking spot by itself is useless. You also need to be able to access it. Access lanes and street space dedicated to get to parking spots raises the size of the spot to 300-350 square feet. This is similar to the size used when building off-street parking.

You can see that with a little common sense, the $30,000 price is already at the low end for unimproved land. And we haven’t added in the percent of the $30 million publics works and planning budgets for a year for street and sewer maintenance and other issues like stormwater runoff, system overload and sewer leakage, associated with un-permeable streets and parking surfaces; or police and fire services for crashes downtown, or the markup for built structures that typically come in after the land costs exceed $1 million like the movie garage on Second and B streets. My neighbor was hit at Third and B streets and had his bike crushed and his tailbone broken. My guess is the real price is more than $44,000.

Notice the public handout for drivers to take away the fare box recovery of Caltrain and SamTrans or bike access to the downtown is closer to $35,000 per spot and the city is willing to take away local recreation access like the tennis court to get it. What price do you put on an athletic club membership? What’s the price of the quality of downtown life that has been privatized away? What is the price of asthma downtown? These are called external costs. A EU study said that they are typically two more for every one real dollar.

Instead of looking at other funding options, the city needs to put a fair price on parking — like Redwood City — to give residents real options and return their quality of life. An air quality grant from the Cities/County Association of Governments can get a delivery program started for merchant downtown, taking away the need to drive. You can maintain delivery with a parking assessment district. Such a district can also be used to get to zero traffic housing.

Do you know the price of in lieu parking in your city? San Carlos is $7,000. And the Chamber of Commerce complained to me that the cost of bicycle parking amounted to $4.55 at the Arts and Wine festival. Belmont is zero.

This article was printed in the San Mateo Daily Journal
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=83116&eddate=11/09/2007

Transit Camp Bay Area

2008-02-25T16:34:00.000-08:00

http://barcamp.org/TransitCampBayArea

It started out with a presentation by Mark Simon of Samtrans on the issues and data around buses. There was some discussion on the Translink but it is no way as convenient as FasTrak. Also some discussion on modal point a to point b times and aggregating the data for all these modes and looking for equivalence in some corridors. And the big success with the bullet service.

Then Kelly Furgerson and Terry Nagel and a councilperson from Pacifica did a presentation on the Coalition to Expand Transit Services. They pronounce the acronym as seats meaning more seats on the train. But Samtrans runs parallel bus service with Caltrain and there was some talk around how to use the buses more effectively and line them up with the Caltrain schedules including the funding of shuttles. Pacifica was interested in coastside connections which today are missing on weekends. I think we should have both expanded transit service and bullet service.

Andy Chow of Bay Rail Alliance developed a transit wiki. This was great because it sought to present all the info that was missing when people want to use transit like to get into the station and how to use the ticket machine etc. The wiki needs to have trails added and get the bicycle connections flushed out. The bike connector could be augmented with business' around the station that have bike parking and maybe if they give a discount.

Google's presentation was a bit elitist about using maps and other tools to track buses via GPS but that could be overcome if the tools are adopted by agencies and displayed at the station or kiosk.

Then NextBus did an excellent presentation and they said that to make it happen they needed data (like bus schedules) from the agency and a manifesto from Transit Camp which should ask for the data to be released in a public format. Nextbus can provide a full kiosk at a station or a display sign in a bus shelter which Cities in the Grand Boulevard should take into account for the area specific plans involving the El Camino. I talked to Terry Nagel afterwards and said I've known about Nextbus for ten years now and have seen their data displayed in bus shelters in Europe. Nagel said that we need to talk to decision makers and that means the JPB board and the Samtrans board and the SamTA board and perhaps the CCAG board too and the Coalition for Efficient Transit. She said that way everyone can be asking for Nextbus and there could be a move to get the TA to release the data.

The camp was the idea of a couple of techy folks. Adina one of the presenters talked about using blogs and websites to develop opinions on transit issues like say Caltrans and then having more say with policy makers and the news media. And speaking of tech EFF was there too!

Zimride was a bit different because it involved car sharing and didn't quite address transit. However empty seats in cars are the biggest unused transport asset out there so maybe it was cool. I though they could work with cities like Belmont to provide a shared taxi type of service to deliver people to Caltrain. Their main asset is that they present a kind of security because they are designed through Facebook. Jeffery who presented for them thought that the program could be used more locally to help moms get kids to commute to school.

Ryanishungry.com was a cool video site that makes informational videos on how to use transit. Similar to what Lyndon Johnson was doing at BART. The lady who presented did one on taking the train to LA and then using a Metro to go downtown. She had to be downtown in an hour and was able to do it and the total cost was 2.50 roundtrip instead of about 85 one way by taxi. She said that there could be videos on how to get a ticket from the vending machine at Caltrain and how to cross El Camino at Ralston, etc. so people could take the guesswork out of having to try transit.

Ralston 101 mulitmodal issues

2008-02-25T14:30:00.000-08:00

The issues with Ralston numbered historically are

1- Bike lanes or a wide through lane.
The on off ramp needs to be reconfigured with paint from the Oracle
side to provide access on the through lane westbound. A bike lane or
sixteen foot lane would work here. This would fix today's shortfall
providing access over the interchange until the bridge is built.

2- Routine accommodation.
This problem would not have arrisen if CCAG had adopted MTC Resolution
3765. We could have had routine accommodation for the cost of paint.

3- Safety.
Safety funds were used by CCAG in construction of the interchange.
www.mtc.ca.gov/funding/delivery/Annual_Listing_FY06.pdf
We ask that the situation with respect to cyclist auto collisions be
reviewed since the Oracle project was finished in 2004 and fixes
outlined.

4- Fund the Ralston Bike Ped Bridge.
Many users are uncomfortable riding on large roads with crossing
traffic like the reconfigured Ralston 101 interchange. CCAG took this
into account fifteen years ago when this project was proposed in the
CCAG BPAC CBP. At this juncture CCAG should fund this bridge as a top
priority because of diminished access since the Oracle project.

5- Urban Trail System
Users who tend to use separate structures like the proposed Ralston
bike ped bridge include children. These bridges are large and
expensive and in some places provide access to recreation like the Bay
Trail. In others like Hillsdale the access egress is compromised. CCAG
BPAC should propose a connected urban trail system across the county
linked to the land uses of children to take advantage of these
expensive structures. An UTS would use bicycle boulevard, choker and
diverter restricted auto access streets like Bryant in Palo Alto, to
connect across urban built out areas.

Since June of 2004 when the Ralston 101 interchange came on line we have talked to-
Julian Carrol, bicycle coordinator at Caltrans, who first reviewed our
complaints on Ralston in 2004 and put us in contact with Peter
Voramasante in Redwood City. Peter asked us to contact Dwight
Campbell.
Dwight Campbell, the safety engineer at Caltrans, said that the design
team took into account the availability of the bike bridge and he's
sorry that hasn't been built yet.
John Lynch, the head engineer at RWC, last week told us he doesn't
know anything because Caltrans tells them what gets built.
Ray Davis the Public Works Manager at Belmont which co managed the
project with RWC says that Belmont hasn't bought off on the project
and will ask Caltrans about the wider through lane coming from the
east. This item is before the Belmont Bicycle Advisory Committee.
Sue Lempert, MTC commissioner, said that she understands our complaint
and that "Bicyclists shouldn't be penalized today for promises tomorrow."
Belmont police chief Don Mattei said that the south bound on ramp for
101 from Ralston, since 2004, is where the most collisions occur
between bike and cars in Belmont. We think because the access from the
east is so dangerous looking, with the right turning lanes for
northbound on ramp, that riders are using the sidewalk on the south
side of the interchange and running into cars that don't expect them.
Scot Mace saw the design in '98 and warned in a newspaper article that
it would be dangerous.
Belmont BPAC has discussed with City Manger Jack Crist the hold ups in
bridge funding. We've also talked this over with Richard Napier, ED for
CCAG, and the misdirected usage of the Comprehensive Bicycle Plan as a
document for road planning. Napier has offered to bring all the parties
together to discuss the issues.

SB 713 $4 increase in VLF for congestion management is flawed

2008-02-25T13:42:00.001-08:00

NOTE- the actual bill number will be SB 348 (Simitian).

The analysis for this bill shows some of the serious environmental harm that comes from auto usage such as copper and mercury from break lines that gets into our water supply. We also know of many others such as cancer and asthma from emissions of 10 and 2.5 micron particles and that the latter has a three day 1500 mile lifetime and will not be required to be controlled until 2015. We also know that WHO recommends measurement and mitigation at 1.8 microns because “an increasing range of adverse health effects has been linked to air pollution, and at ever-lower concentrations” page 10. Moderate air pollution can trigger heart attacks during exercise. Our kids suffer permanent lung damage within 500 feet of a major roadway. Tire dust is another carcinogen that is difficult to control as the number of vehicles increase which both MTC and ABAG acknowledge. Unlivable cities for our parents and children are such a big problem, that after obsessing all our lives over the cities we love to the point of straining our families, we can't wait to retire and get out of here.

At this point in our history a congestion management program to reduce the environmental impact of driving should reduce driving. The spending goals of this bill are misdirected toward increasing driving. A $4 fee increase is inadequate for reducing congestion through cost. Studies show that despite the recent dramatic increases in gas prices people continue to drive primarily because they feel they have no choice. Thus $4/- is not an appropriate user fees to increase cost sufficient to mitigate the impact of driving on the environment. While this fee shows some minor benefits for users, like higher speeds, it does not address the larger public which has to drink the water and breathe the air and whose children could get run over because of an inability to address congestion at its source.

25% of the total funds collected by this bill are distributed directly to the 21 jurisdictions for congestion related programs and projects such as signal timing, resurfacing, and swales. Signal timing comes under the category of intelligent transportation systems and we have already seen CCAG allocate $10M to this category to retime and control local signals so that traffic on 101 can use local streets to get to El Camino from upto 15 miles prior to a crash. Which we have already said is a problem because the traffic on El Camino should enhance the business district not be cut through traffic that hinders business by making the area polluted noisy and dangerous. Another 25% of the total fund is reserved for countywide projects such as the hydrogen stations which fortunately PG&E, following the electric car debacle, realizes is another boondoggle and has refused to support this $20M wasted program. Hydrogen like BART, Peninsula cities have found, is an illusion which aids driving by consuming huge pots of money that could go toward realistic solutions like hybrid ZEB buses. The funding also involves countywide traffic management systems currently under consideration by the C/CAG technical committees which also fit under ITS to increase driving.

There are many realistic programs that have been shown to work in reducing driving such as traffic calming, parking charges, congestion pricing, road diets, Traffic Demand Management, and just as important multi modal share development especially as co-products in multi-modal corridors like El Camino. Multi modal development on the El Camino could fund a Next bus advisory system, to take the guesswork out of using a bus, presently available in many jurisdictions, and a north south bicycle signage system for surrounding streets.

50% of the bill goes toward stormwater management. Certain traffic calming measures, it turns out, can not only make streets more ped-friendly, but also help make the city's rivers clean enough to swim in. C/CAG approved the contract with Nevue Ngan to prepare a guidance manual for designing "green streets". The guidance manual will be completed by July and contain four conceptual designs for small projects from a $900,000/- grant.

Finally there is a good reason why stormwater mitigation is an unfunded mandate. Increasing driving through signal timing, and resurfacing, which fortunately Belmont has been most level headed about, has not worked to reduce congestion. Instead the magnitude and scope of problems we need to address are increased, which taxes city budgets. Our local news is filled with the inability of city government to fund basic needs like (fire) security, sewage, health, and schools. CCAG should put forward projects under this funding which reduce congestion and improve the environment in defense of residents who would be proud to call their city home in their golden years.