Comments by Carl May

Save The Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

Wow, is it difficult to listen to Mr. Holland talk about the California Coastal Trail when, by lack of reference, he seems to have no idea of the founding concept of the trail as a long-distance trail in the manner of the Pacific Crest Trail or the Appalachian Trail.

He seems to have no concept of the ideal physical nature of the trail as lateral access to the coastline, meaning the route should be as close to the ocean as feasible without being impassible or causing damage to coastal features (the majority of the Oregon Coast Trail is on the beach!). Holland seems unaware of the state’s legislative foundation for what the trail should be as embodied in SB908 (Chesbro) and other measures. Worse yet, for a local meeting, he seems to have no concept of the history of CCT activities here on the midcoast for the past couple of decades through annual Coastwalks (during which time the county parks people cooperated wonderfully with us), through the route taken by CCT border-to-border groups (whose purpose it was to call attention to existing segments of trail and places where the CCT was yet to be established), in the CCT trail guide to our area (with its perfectly functional route through Fitzgerald), in MCC Parks and Rec Committee activities for a number of years (before some newcomers to the MCC let that committee and all it was considering die), etc.

Holland mentions getting grants from bond funds for putting an expensive, artificially surfaced FMR segment of the CCT in a place different from the route that has served trail walkers for the past couple of decades. Do our state and county bureaucrats not know of the fiscal dilemmas we have gotten ourselves into? Of the current intractable fiscal condition of the state and county? Do they not know anything paid for with bond funds costs the naive public roughly twice as much because of the interest? Of course they know about such things. They are simply not responsible enough to care. Well, the public cares. Mr. Holland should note the county’s last attempt to get parks funds with a sales tax failed at the ballot box. My reason for voting against it was to deny the funds to a government that was wasting money on such things as the road across Mirada Surf West—another stretch of non-trail away from the shoreline where it is supposed to be. We are not talking about nuanced waste here. We are talking about orders of magnitude more being spent than necessary and about that money being used to degrade our environment and all the places elsewhere that are degraded to produce such things as unnecessary, joint-jolting pavement.

All that needs to be spent to have an fine official CCT route through Fitzgerald is the money for the little round trail markers designating the existing trail. Anything more is in pursuit of an agenda stretching beyond the relatively straightforward matter of the CCT. Feeling spendy? Touch up a few feet of the existing trail to open it to wheelchairs.

Having gotten away with it for the past couple of years, Holland seems to think getting public input consists of hand-picking committees to do the county’s bidding and of letting the public speak its mind at a few badly scheduled and badly located meetings before going ahead and railroading through what County Parks wants to do all along. Gee, what a surprise from a county that decided to dictate to us from over the hill who could and could not be on the MCC.

What County Parks and Rec is doing with our trails, especially the CCT, is inventing a process to serve its politically-motivated interests, similar to the urban-centric, overdevelopment-serving, so-called charette in El Granada involving outside consultants who know nothing of our area, rather than serving the citizens of our area. As far as the CCT goes, the people of the state are also being cheated. We deserve a lot better; and the coastal features of our geographic area deserve a better steward than a coast- and community-defiling government attempting to dictate a change of our lives to a poorer, degraded, urban condition.

Save The Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

If the article gets it right, the disaster to the local area and the coastal trail concept remain undiminished. In fact, it looks like they might twist the opportunity into using another inappropriate artificial surface that will enlarge the waste of money by 15 percent. Not a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but a 15 percent larger sow’s ear.

Obviously they won’t get it anytime soon. And with the county’s record of pushing for more urbanized recreation that will accommodate more unsustainable overdevelopment here and the county personnel marching to the tune of “Pave It and Paint It Green,” we don’t expect them to. If anyone has the time, stomach, and energy for it, the places on the state level to try to stop this nutso stuff will be at the Coastal Commission and, if Conservancy funds are sought to make this part of the California Coastal Trail, at the Coastal Conservancy. If they try to continue with only a Negative Declaration, a NEPA lawsuit is also a possibility.

Save The Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

For those new to the minutiae of California Coastal Trail babble, this paragraph from the State Senate staff analysis of Chesbro, SB 908, may provide a lead-in.

” ANALYSIS :  According to background material provided by
      the author, advocates for the California Coastal Trail
      (CCT) wish to construct a trail along the entire California
      coast linking the Oregon border and Mexico.  This goal was
      first articulated in legislation in 1975 in the California
      Coastal Plan, which called for the establishment of a
      linked system of trails, to be constructed along the
      oceanfront wherever possible.  Responsibility for the
      acquisition projects in support of the CCT was transferred
      to the California Coastal Conservancy (Conservancy) in
      1979.”

At the state level, SB 908, authored by a State Senator from Humboldt County, Wes Chesbro, and signed into law by then Governor Gray Davis, sets the most definitive guidance for the establishment and management of the CCT. The bill is recommended reading, a rare piece by a legislator who has walked the walk. Looking at the record since, one will find the often urban-think Coastal Conservancy stretching and violating the character of its SB 908 mandate on a number of projects. (Yet doing just fine on others—seems to depend on their internal bureaucratic shuffle, the desires of local governments, and the availability of money from such accounts as state bond measures.)

Several books and hiking guides on the California Coastal Trail have been written, the most well established being the two volumes (northern and southern) of “Hiking the California Coastal Trail” by Lorentzen and Nichols (Bored Feet Press). There are also quite a number of more local guides to the trail that one can find with a bit of Googling.

Save The Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

Got a reference to that report that we can all see, Kevin?

Unless they designate the existing blufftop trail as the California Coastal Trail, there will be plenty of cause for objection at the Coastal Conservancy—if funds for that specific state trail are sought there—and at the Coastal Commission—because the route where the asphalt road would have been does not meet the criteria for the CCT nearly as well. Development for urbanized recreation can be just as harmful to a place as development for housing. The blufftop trail is the route that has been serving perfectly well as the California Coastal Trail for almost two decades.

NEPA suggests cumulative effects and alternatives should be considered along with other things, and switching surfaces only diminishes one of a number of issues on that front. And the times in which we live should be cause enough for everyone to question unnecessary government spending to end up with something worse than what already exists.

If we can get the county to wake up and not put in the ridiculous artificial surface used at the top of the new stairs down to the beach at Seal Cove—a complete waste of money as the pre-existing more natural surface had no problems—all it would take is a little trail-savvy work in the vicinity of the foundation for the old house to have access to the blufftop on the (proper CCT) from the south end for wheelchairs.

I’m blown away at the use of words like “improvement”—by our own MCC, nothing the county does on the negative side is at all unusual—to describe projects that involve degradation of existing coastal features and resources and relocation of coastal access to less suitable locations. It goes deeper than the surface of the proposed disaster.

All of the county shenanigans at Fitzgerald give me pause when I read POST will be transferring its property on Pillar Point Ridge to County Parks. The surfaces on the trails established there are just fine. Are we looking at future county projects to screw them up, too? Will the county try to have a trail on the ridge other than the one closest to the ocean designated as the CCT in order to try to get funds from the Coastal Conservancy for a project that doesn’t need to be done?

Save The Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

As with the proposed road through the reserve, pavement on the slope down to the beach is entirely unnecessary. There are other stable, permeable, all-weather surfaces that would do just fine.

Pavement is so 20th century developer. The massive negative off-site impacts due to the energy, mining, processing, and transport of paving materials involved are seldom considered but are often even greater than the negative effects where cement or asphalt is laid down. This is part of why the reason negative declarations for paving projects are virtually never appropriate. The requirements to consider alternatives and cumulative effects (which gets into total impacts and not just immediate ones) are usually ignored entirely or dismissed out of hand on neg decs.

Fitzgerald Marine Reserve Dardenelle trail walk: This sunday, 10am

Ridiculous. For many years the California Coastal Trail route in this stretch, one that lives up to the mandate of this particular state trail, has been established through preliminary scoping and then through two published editions of “Hiking the California Coastal Trail, Volume One” by Lorentzen and Nichols (Bored Feet Press).

This push for a paved road on a different route is much ado about something else.

16.5’ wide asphalt trail planned for the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

A “wide paved trail” of this design is not a trail. It is a road.

If you can drive a vehicle on it, it is not a trail. If it is built with heavy equipment, it is not a trail. If it wipes out what users want to get close to, it is not a trail.

Beyond the most important point, which is that this project is not even in the right location—which is where we already have an existing and long established California Coastal Trail on the blufftop—the “urban-think” design of the project concocted to spend as much money as possible needlessly should be an affont to anyone who cares about the character of our park, coastline, and community. Castoria’s ignorance simply provides yet another foil for pointing that out.

16.5’ wide asphalt trail planned for the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

Someone just made me aware of a (to be generous) specious article written by Castoria that appeared in the HMB Review on the subject of wheelchair access to the portion of Fitzgerald Marine Reserve where the county is trying to force a misplaced, oversized segment of the California Coastal Trail. So I spewed an oversized reply, as is my wont. Then I thought to myself, “Why burden only one person when I can irritate an entire blog’s readership”? So…

1. There is no official requirement that the entire California Coastal Trail should be accessible to wheelchairs. So the CCT aspect of it has nothing to do with paving for wheelchairs. What most long-time CCT proponents believe is that the trail should be accessible wherever possible.

2. A four-foot-wide trail with an appropriate surface works fine for wheelchairs in most places and provides closer contact with a place’s features than a wide swath of pavement. For a good wheelchair experience, there is no need for a paved road like the mistakes in HMB or on Mirada Surf West. The appropriate surface can easily be packed earth in many places.

3. There are wheelchairs and there are wheelchairs. Those that are set up for outside can do fine even on the current surfaces of most of the trails in Fitzgerald—or on the slightly overbuilt trails on the POST property of the Pillar Point Bluffs. Similarly, for some years, the paved-road advocates for the CCT have tried to use the handicapped as a tool to keep the CCT trail route off beaches in places where beaches provide the best lateral coastal access. But as we all know and as has been going on at SoCal beaches for many years, balloon-tire chairs can be used for whole access to beaches.

(Most bicycles can also use the current trail route flagged in Fitzgerald, and some have been doing this for years by carrying the bicycles across the creek at the north end of the route. Bicycles do not require impermeable pavement. Obviously bicycles should be forbidden on the blufftop CCT route, remembering that there is no requirement that the CCT include bicycles.)

4. Current wheelchair access to this part of Fitzgerald is in and out from two locations on the south end. With a very, very modest amount of work in the vicinity of the old house foundation, wheelchairs could have access to the blufftop cypress forest on the route of the current coastal trail.

5. Where access can be provided, wheelchair people have a right to no less of an experience than anyone else. There is no argument for putting a trail in the wrong place or for partially wrecking a place for the sake of wheelchairs. You don’t get access to something by wrecking the something you want to access, and you certainly don’t get access by not even going to the place you want to access. Without thinking, people like Castoria are paraphrasing an old Viet-Nam era impossibility, “We have to destroy it in order to access it.” ...

From the county viewpoint, the push for expanded, urbanized, artificial recreation facilities is part of the setup for its desired increased overdevelopment of the midcoast, as embodied in the county’s proposed LCP revision. The highway charettes, such as happened in El Granada and planned for Moss Beach/Montara, come off as part of the same deal.

Back to Castoria: he reads as if he hasn’t even been to the place he writes about and hasn’t read about what is proposed. He certainly doesn’t know the meaning of “natural,” as there is very little that is natural about the upland part of Fitzgerald we are talking about—the south end is full of exotic plantings from Doelger’s day, and the entire cypress forest is introduced. However, it does have a somewhat natural feel to it, and that is due to the vegetation and the natural trail surfaces. It is why so many of us local residents think of the place as a respite from the midcoast’s hardscaped urban areas. Some of the more “poetic” even refer to it as an “enchanted forest.”

Castoria also seems to know almost nothing about what is actually needed for wheelchair accessibility. There is a lot of background on this from whole access trail projects elsewhere. So Castoria comes off as ignorant and as supporting the spending of many times as much money as needed for increased wheelchair access to most of the trails in Fitzgerald.

Have you ever been to one of the annual state trails meetings? Every kind of recreationist group and lobby shows up, pushing for multi-use trails everywhere, to include not just bicycles and wheelchairs but also motorized transportation like motorcycles and ATVs. Their kinds of arguments are the sort of thing we are now seeing trotted out for Fitzgerald by those with an urban mindset. They become tools for the people who make money off big paving projects and who advocate urban development.

Every time developer types force paving a road and calling it part of the CCT, it fosters and supports the same bad behavior elsewhere. That is why principles are important in addition to our parochial concerns. One reason why this Fitzgerald stupidity is so difficult to fight now is because the county got away with it on Mirada Surf West.

County showing its plan to widen Hwy 1 in Pacifica, Tuesday

Oh, I think they got the message. Which was “we will have to railroad this thing through with as little wiggle room for public dissent as possible.”

16.5’ wide asphalt trail planned for the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

Wrong size for the wrong project in the wrong place. Design and location of the thing indicate San Mateo County and its rubber-stamping local parks committee found something for out-of-work freeway bypass designers to do. If state and local governments are chronically short of money and unable to budget for what they want to do, shouldn’t they spend their meager funds on public needs rather than wrecking places the public uses (freely, one might add) for revitalization and enjoyment?

There is plenty of urban smear on the already sacrificed bayside for people who prefer that kind of environment.

Measure E passes with 70.7% of vote

I note that during the campaign, many who previously opposed this kind of tax on well-considered principles were silent. The principles haven’t changed, so I can only guess that some, like me, were weary of repeating themselves time and again. I know others are simply bored to sleep by the plodding nature of repeated parcel tax measures.

Then there is the specific aspect of dumping money into the poorly-directed, dollar-pulverizing mess of the CUSD. The measure and campaign was, essentially and once again, an emotional “trust us to help the kiddies” whitewash rather than an earmarked distribution of new tax monies to areas of proven need. Given the decades-long track record of management in the CUSD, there is little chance any improvement in education will result due to the increased taxes, so folks shouldn’t be disappointed if they don’t see the results they were led to hope for. Only some (politically popular) jobs will be saved because there will still be a budget shortfall.

That shortfall will grow, as usual, and there will be additional pleas for more money in the years to come unless the state’s methods of funding school districts changes for the better and fundamental changes are made to services and spending in the CUSD. There is a better chance that we’ll be inundated by sea level rise, living on a dead coast due to ocean acidification, or furiously knitting long underwear because climate has flipped into the next ice age before we see objectivity, responsibility, and justice enter the arena of public educational funding in California.

Pacifica examines widening part of Hwy 1 to six lanes

Again, look at the numbers in the link for 2008 that Lowens gives. Pacifica numbers for either end of the proposed six-lane segment are well past double the 20,000 figure. Capistrano is pushing it and at that figure for a peak month.

But daily numbers are only a rough guide. For dealing with our local traffic backups, you need to know peak hours and peak days of the week. As we know, weekday trafic on the coastside occurs in pulses due to commuter and school traffic, not evenly distributed over the day. And we all know weekend traffic on nice days goes into multiples of what it is on not-nice days. With Capistrano numbers pushing the guideline on the more forgiving average daily numbers, one can reasonably ask whether or not the hourly and certain weekend figures might be considerably worse for a roundabout’s potential capacity. In other words, roundabout pushers are currently flying blind on the most critical midcoast traffic issues.

Given that a “modern” Capistrano roundabout would already be very busy according to the guideline provided by Lowens and that the crossing realities at Capistrano are being ignored, the very real possibility of a costly suburban-style white elephant comes to mind.

Charging ahead in the traditional manner of our urban county planners and with the overgrowth and urban mindset of many of our local environmentalists, might be par for the course hereabouts, but so would be the degradation of coastal features and values and community disruptions that so often go with taking a flyer at a rolling doughnut.

Accident between car and cyclist has closed Hwy 1 southbound at Devil’s Slide

When you put everything suspect to you under the umbrella of a “bogeyism,” this is what you get.

Pacifica examines widening part of Hwy 1 to six lanes

Have a look at the numbers in the Lowens message and 2008 link above. The intersections at either end of the possible widened section in Pacifica are already way beyond roundabout possibilities, it would seem.

And it looks like Capistrano numbers (El Granada/Princeton) are already pushing the limit. What I don’t get out of the link Stephen provided are hourly numbers, which would seem to be the most critical for the kinds of heavy periods we have when traffic backs up the worst.

Pacifica examines widening part of Hwy 1 to six lanes

No, Route 1 does not become a freeway north of Reina del Mar in Pacifica. There is side traffic from the police station, the orchid nursery/GGNRA trailhead, Mori Point Road, and, especially, the dangerous intersection of Westport after RdM. Then the highway becomes the freeway that created high noise levels in places, disrupted communities, and killed a fair amount of business in the northern half of the city.

The 2008 traffic figures add some real numbers to the mix. Though trips to Vallemar School and the high schools undoubtedly increase the congestion, they are most likely not more than a thousand given the enrollment of the schools involved and the use of SAMTRANS buses by some students. This would not begin to get the numbers down to the approximate roundabout levels quoted by Stephen Lowens.

The often-mentioned “low hanging fruit” is reduction of the number of cars going through the Fassler and Reina del Mar intersections during peak times. True, the evening commute backups are not usually as bad as the morning ones; but they, too, are unacceptable—especially at Reina del Mar.

Pacifica examines widening part of Hwy 1 to six lanes

Given the well-known effect of school traffic on traffic congestion from the midcoast through HMB, possible busing in Pacifica would seem worth studying. Vallemar School is a K-8 campus with a good record of achievement, and at least some parents in the elementary school district who prefer that scheme drive their kids there. At the other end, Fassler is a route for the kids heading to Terra Nova High from the north. I’m not sure state highway monies can be transferred to school districts for busing. Probably makes too much sense where it would lighten the load.

But never look at that particular stretch in Pacifica without keeping the quarry property (on the ocean side of the highway) in mind. Past objections to and votes against quarry overdevelopment in Pacifica have been partially based on the inevitable traffic clogs that extensive housing and commercial development there would exacerbate. More lanes there might well be a ploy to pre-empt such objections in the future (using everyone’s tax money rather than making it the developer’s expense), even though common experience tells anyone traffic with six lanes in that particular stretch and at those bookending intersections would still be a big mess due to the highway with fewer lanes at either end. There are also businesses on the east side of the stretch to be widened that will be damaged.

Another thing we can’t forget, however, is the long-term campaign to have a freeway through the rest of Pacifica. Continuing bad traffic in an interloping six-lane segment between the intersections would help promote extension of the freeway as an ensuing highway “solution.”

Consultants’ plan for Hwy 1 lacks awareness of our environment and community

People interested in the California state trail known as the California Coastal Trail, especially what kind of a trail (or trails) it might be, can get into it by Googling “California Coastal Trail SB 908 Chesbro.”

Chesbro, out of Arcata, is an interesting state legislator in that he was first a state senator who is now a state assembly member. One might say his future is past? We once met him at the abandoned townsite of Wheeler on the Lost Coast, where he was backpacking with his sons. That was the only time we saw evidence that the outhouses at Wheeler had been cleaned in the recent past. I guess state parks wanted the senator to enjoy the experience.

Consultants’ plan for Hwy 1 lacks awareness of our environment and community

“Many of your neighbors don’t care. They want a bike and foot path, as it provides access to some coastal and community features in our area.”

For those who don’t get out except to go from their car to their front door, and to those so separated from their world that they think pavement is in the natural order of things:

There are already bike and foot paths where the recreational roads are proposed and being paved on the midcoast. Nothing is being accessed that isn’t already accessed. California Coastal Trail access in Fitzgerald Marine Reserve is being removed for trail users by the effort to move the designated trail away from the best route along the bluffs (the closest all-weather route to the ocean and the route that fulfills the established spirit and mandate of this state trail). The bluff route is the one that has been considered the coastal trail in presentations to the county’s trail committee for decades as the committee reviews the county trail plan, it is the one that was used by Coastwalk (a coastal trail walking organization) starting with the first San Mateo county Coastwalk in 1988, it is the route designated in the first northern California coastal trail hiking guide published by Coastwalk and Bored Feet Press and remained the route in the revision of that guide, and it is the coastal trail route used by hikers for decades—not the (perfectly adequate) dirt bike path downhill along the faultline being proposed for pavement at an outrageous cost.

Where paved roads are constructed in place of trails, access to the more forgiving natural surface is removed for walkers and hikers. There is a negative cumulative effect on the bodies of people who walk or run on paved surfaces, especially on joints, that does not occur nearly as readily on natural surfaces. Literally, our bodies did not evolve for locomotion on hard paved surfaces. Thus, pavement on trails degrades the recreational opportunity for many. You spend money to make things worse.

For the California Coastal Trail (CCT), at least part of that money usually comes by way of a grant from the Coastal Conservancy. This money almost always comes from a state bond fund designated for the purpose as part of parks and recreation bond measures passed by the voters of California. (In past statewide polls, walking and camping on the coast has been one of the top recreational desires of Californians.) Anything paid for with bond funds costs roughly twice as much as paying cash on the barrelhead because of the interest on the bonds. Accordingly, such money should be used as efficiently as possible for the purpose(s) designated. For the CCT, this means getting as much of the trail desired by Californians as possible with the money available and not blowing away the bond kitty for very few miles of “trail” by spending precious trail funds on paved roads build with heavy equipment. See HMB’s paved coastal road for one example of how to waste money. See the recently built road across Mirada Surf West away from the ocean and away from the pre-existing trail for another.

What we are seeing is the urban mentality at work, wrecking, couhnty project by county project, our already much-diminished scraps of nature and open space along the ocean on the midcoast. The urban-oriented government units involved love it for the money it brings into their departments. Money that will continue to be spent long after the initial construction destruction is over, thanks to the much higher maintanance costs involved versus a more natural trail (see recent resurfacing of HMB’s coastal “trail”) and to such things as managing runoff and pollutants from the pavement.

Consultants’ plan for Hwy 1 lacks awareness of our environment and community

With Sabrina’s examples, which are among the dozens, and possibly hundreds of different ones available, the same old problems for our midcoast remain:

All but one of the examples show a suburbanized, scene totally dominated by development and not a scene that fits our coastal context.

Where ya gonna put ‘em in the context of a two-lane highway in our actual place with our actual intersections?

Fine for carrying light traffic, not encouraging and with guaranteed continued backups for heavier traffic. It is already the heavier traffic times that are the problem for our intersections. In light traffic times, green light priority makes intersections fairly effective, enough so that improvements that might come with roundabouts at light times seem hardly worth the effort.

The crossings of roundabouts, set back from the roundabout, are a joke for our area when it comes to known behaviors of pedestrians and drivers in, especially, heavy traffic times. My, how nice, polite, and trusting everyone is in the crossing example. Is this roundabout in Stepford? No way for crossing Highway 1, where traffic will have to be stopped in some mandatory manner for at-grade crossings—and that means backups at crossings. At-grade crossings would be even worse if the traffic entering a roundabout is multi-lane. And though slower, traffic leaving a busy roundabout is dangerous for pedestrians because the status of people in crossings do not come into clear focus until the driver approaches their desired exit, this at a time when drivers are paying attention to other vehicles in the circle (that’s the shape, folks) and are thinking about speeding up to the next roundabout. Note the absence of crossers in the Hamilton, ON, example (a roundabout I might have actually been through when visiting one of my leading photographers at McMaster).

So, after a lot of theoretical discussion, the inappropriateness of roundabouts and other expanded pavement and associated road development embodied in the charette’s suggested approaches remains. Safe crossings at intersections and between intersections remains a completely unresolved issue. Roundabouts of an appropriate size and number of lanes for the amount of traffic at busy times would require additional private land at all but possibly one or two of our intersections and landscape-changing grading at all. A changed alignment for Highway 1 will involve community disruption.

Large amounts of additional hard paving for those on foot and bicycle involve unnecessary expense, destroy existing access to some coastal and community features in our area (for example, access to less developed open space and more natural areas of parks), follow undesirable routes in order to accommodate the pavement, and carry an unnecessary environmental cost (both locally in direct environmental degradation and beyond in terms of the energy costs and pollution involved in pavement, both asphalt and cement).

Remembering our limited and overdrawn local resources, increased road and other development will create a setup for further overdevelopment and overpopulation of our area and all of the social, financial, political, and environmental burdens that go with it. And the overdevelopment may well be exempted from environmental review at the state level because the transportation scheme sets up possibilities for SB375 exemptions.

Expanded, suburban-style road development also plays right into the schemes of our county politicians and their developer “owners”/buddies, schemes obvious in the revised LCP our urban-thinking Supes are trying to lay on our area, in the affordable-housing fronts for market-rate housing developments we must battle every decade (people in Moss Beach are particularly sensitive to these), in their “Laughco” promotion of consolidation of our area with HMB to dilute our small measure of community control even further, and in the cornucopian approach to oversized water development.

When planning changes that should bring needed improvements to an area, it is best to be realistic. The people best qualified to be realistic are locals—and not just those locals selected for their inclination to roll over for outsiders.

Consultants’ plan for Hwy 1 lacks awareness of our environment and community

Having failed to read well enough to see I did not “equate” roundabouts with traffic circles, Tim continues to confound by several times referring to HMB and not our midcoast where all the crappy road suburbanization under discussion would go. He simply can’t deal with the subject meaningfully without dealing with the locations where the bothersome intersections are and where any roundabouts would be. And he has no clue what adequately-sized roundabouts would cost here once Caltrans takes over and designs them.

Again, whatever the label on the circular traffic device, it needs to be scaled for the heavy-period traffic loads. The greater the traffic, the bigger the circle and the more lanes it needs. At-grade crossings at roundabouts are a no-go due to the steadily-moving vehicles, so the entire safe crossings issue remains with roundabouts, whether or not there are safe refuges halfway across the roads for pedestrians and bikes to regroup before chancing the other half of the traffic. In fact, where we need safe crossings between major intersections, there is no reason to weld them onto the roundabout issue.

Look at the examples in the consultants photos. Nothing close to a busy-period Highway 1 there in the paved-over urbanized development, or setup for urbanized development, shown.

Back to the beginning—the outside consultants lacked awareness of major midcoast realities and didn’t pick them up in the short time they were here. I dread what they might come up with for Moss Beach and Montara with such an approach. We have enough problems with the county and a few locals wanting to pave an unnecessary road in Fitzgerald and call it the “Coastal Trail.”

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