Comments by Carl May

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.”

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

The four-lane freeway through the northern half of Pacifica certainly does speed traffic. But it screwed the neighborhoods and business districts that it bifurcated. Very few locals use the two pedestrian overpasses a mile apart.

I’m real touchy today on the subject of places shafted by highway development because we just got a notice that our convenient, accommodating, even friendly branch of First National Bank in Eureka Square will be closing permanently in a few months for consolidation with the branch being remodeled at Linda Mar. It is anyone’s guess how long the remaining bank in the shopping center can hold out.

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

Again, Tim, I posted no misinformation on roundabouts. All my examples exist. The circular device, whatever it is, must be scaled to the traffic, and I get the feeling you seriously underestimate our traffic load and jams here on the coastside due to overdevelopment and visitors combined. Safe crossings of the highway are a critical factor, and at-grade crossings would be impossible at any kind of roundabout with the constantly moving vehicles approaching from whatever direction. Heavy coastside traffic stopping when it sees someone wanting to cross? Especially at night? Get real.

You also seem to have no concept of the available land at our major intersections on the midcoast. Or the cost of redoing the highway for roundabouts at those intersections—much more than installing traffic signals. Or the need to keep the highway to a two-lane configuration in its rural stretches. Or the need to keep the highway alignment where it won’t destroy community features—including homes, businesses, intra-community access routes, and levels of safety now existing in the communities. It isn’t the concept of roundabouts that is the problem, it is the need to have real-world solutions for what exists.

We aren’t starting with a blank slate or the bucolic French countryside here.

MCTV MIA on tsunami: “No one called us”

Maybe MCTV thinks the big Mavericks waves they have been showing almost incessantly for the past few weeks cover the subject adequately?

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

Again, Tim deals in idealized notions that are not applicable as solutions in general to the realities of our existing situation—not applicable to when and where our heaviest traffic occurs; not applicable to our non-vehicular needs on the midcoast, especially highway crossings; not applicable to many intersections with the highway due to lack of real estate that could be used without damaging positive features of our current communities, including highwayside residences and businesses; not applicable to the cornucopian and pollyannish growth schemes our local pro-overdevelopment developers and builders push for with county government; not applicable to our elected officials who manage county government; not applicable to our county planning and park bureaucracies; and, especially, not applicable to the local behavior of our self-serving state transportation agency, Caltrans, through which all highway matters must flow.

Look at the title of this thread. It is not about hypothetical designs that can be imposed on blank slates. It is about what exists on our midcoast—physically, socially, and governmentally.

What Tim does get right is that we should not be mindlessly growing in terms of additional development and population until we can get a handle on sustaining what we have and on assurances that additional development can be sustained with local resources and healthy ecosystems. To sustain means to support even in the leanest of times. As stated before, the proposals flowing out of the charette look like they are created primarily to serve ill-considered and inappropriate additional development that benefits few, whether or not that is the desire of everyone involved.

When it comes to the highway, David is more focussed on doing something about what exists on the ground. Good luck with that parallel highway for through traffic. No place to put it on our narrow coastal terrace without causing extensive damage. He mentions the Carmel situation, which damaged a number of properties and was resisted mightily by many locals who care about their town. It is a fact now, but it did not go in without harm to the community. And there is still heavy traffic backup on it at times.

One of the best things David has done several times is boil down the focus on safe crossings. There is no final solution to this problem on our midcoast because some locals and visitors will always cross the highway between whatever crossings are provided (note the people who will not walk a few hundred feet to cross with the Coronado light at Surfer’s Beach) and some of these will be killed or injured. That in no way means we should not produce safe crossings for those with the intelligence of the average anthropoid ape. Or maybe the intelligence of the average mammal in general, given the relative success of wildlife crossings built on freeways and other busy highways.

New crossings at grade are the first possibility to be eliminated locally for most spots—they are impossibly bad for our heavy traffic times and roundabouts of any design wouldn’t help one bit. We still pedestrian injuries and deaths at signaled crossings, the ones at Frenchman’s Creek in HMB and Capistrano being undeniable examples. That leaves tunnels or overpasses. Pedestrian tunnels might work in one or two spots out of the most obvious dozen, or so, highway crossings needed on the midcoast; but tunnels have safety and water problems associated with them that people have not fully considered in their endorsements. That, then, boils down to overcrossings, which disturb some people visually (but are, in fact, not as big or ugly as some of the two-story houses and commercial buildings that are built along the highway in our area). We must deal with the issue because of the lives that are already at stake. The question becomes what cost and blight are people willing to accept in exchange for a degree of safety?

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

Not to worry, friends, I actually enjoy seeing the predictable urbanite/suburbanite rollover for wider roads, more pavement, and community degradation in favor of the more artificial, built environment preferred by many disconnected from nature.

Let me remind all that most of the preferences for idealized development behave as if the proponents are starting with a blank slate, not a specific place with the natural attributes that make a place coastal—with the ecosystems, geologic land and water forms, and resources characteristic of a coastal place. Ultimately, human residents must decide to live sustainably in such a place, accepting its features and the natural subsidies they provide to their lives, or to wipe out and artificially redefine where they live, a position that depends heavily on import of materials and resources from elsewhere to support the overbuilding and overpopulation inherent in their preference.

Already having overdrawn some of our inherent local midcoast resources and being on the brink of exceeding others, it is the latter, artificial, short-term-thinking preference that prevails in all suburbanization/urbanization growth trends being pushed on the midcoast, whether slow or of the more rapid hit-and-run developer/builder variety.

Also, lets be reminded that Caltrans is one of the co-sponsors of “charettes” like this—they never saw bigger roads or more hardscaping they didn’t like.

We don’t have the luxury of creating idealistic roundabouts of a sort that may work well in Europe (with very different urban layouts from the subdivided grids of the midcoast); and yes, we do have streets with much less traffic intersecting with a more heavily traveled highway. What we will get, if anything, is a Caltrans design created for that bureaucracy’s narrow and self-serving purposes. (Never forget that the Caltrans budget is larger than the entire state budgets of about 60% of the states in the U.S.—we are not dealing with concerned and cooperative public servants on local matters in their case.) If anyone did not get the gist of my earlier messages, it is the heavy traffic on 1 that must be accommodated while still trying to get safe crossings, maintaining access to the highway throughout the midcoast, keeping 1 to two lanes in more rural stretches, and not wiping out community and landscape features with highway expansion at the numerous intersections where roundabouts might be suggested as replacements.

Darin, you waste your life at public meetings being channeled from the start by a particular mindset or testifiying before government groups that already know how they are going to vote? Maybe that works for a progressive suburbanization advocate and government wonk, but I have a living to make and a more challenging, interesting, and enjoyable life to live. By what holy edict or first principle am I supposed to rearrange my existence in order to contribute to someone else’s transparent development game, a contrived game operating from the outset without an awareness of many aspects of our particular coastal place and populace? Have you read the Supes’ proposed LCP revision with its resource-and-landscape ignorant development guidelines that set up a urbanized wipeout of our midcoast? This charette, beginning with the outsiders chosen to conduct it, plays right into that scheme—or at least it has so far. Do you see the potential for creating SB375 exempted development?

And still we are only discussing highway intersections and not the many more interacting aspects of accessing and moving about through our communities and along our coast without wrecking the place. Who knows, roundabouts, where there is the real estate for ones capable of handling whatever traffic they must, might be improvements in particular places. I assume many of us have seen small ones applied well in locations where they didn’t wreck anything not already wrecked—such as freeway overpass and ramp intersections in Arcata.

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

Barry put a roundabout photo at the top of this item, and that is one of the abstract ideas that would need a lot of study before it might be considered appropriate for Highway 1 on the midcoast.

Roundabouts, also called traffic circles when they are big, need to be sized appropriately to handle traffic flow. That’s obvious. But, as examples, pictures of suburban roundabouts are highly suspect when it comes to the midcoast traffic load on 1 during commute hours and, especially, on sunny weekends when it seems the whole Bay Area decides to go for a drive on the coast or hit the beach. Look at the multi-lane circle in the photo. It uses a lot of real estate. Yet, we know, instinctively, a smaller, one-lane circle with the slow speeds involved would not handle our heavy traffic. If at Capistrano and 1, the size of even this “modest” circle would probably help force the alignment of the highway inland, through El Granada, with the attendant added noise, pollution, and safety issues it would bring to the town. The old train station, most recently an upscale Asian restaurant, would probably have to go to make room.

What if bigger traffic circles had to be designed? What buildings and other parts of our highwayside communities, including businesses, would have to be sacrificed for each one? (Or, to use Viet Nam era thinking, how much would we need to destroy the communities being accessed in order to “improve” access to and through them?) In constantly-moving heavy traffic, how could people on foot or on bikes get across the highway or the feeder streets in crosswalks just outside the circle? Put in lights for them and you are right back to backups at a signaled intersection. Such considerations are the sorts of things that are addressed when designers actually know a place instead of trying to impose idealistic urban designs after looking at a brief workshop “snapshot.”

Even huge traffic circles do not always move vehicles well. Before the interstates were built in northern New Jersey, there was heavy congestion at a number of circles and roundabouts on major routes. Before I-95 was built north of Boston, the Portsmouth traffic circle regularly backed up Friday and Saturday traffic for miles across the stretch of New Hampshire between Massachusetts and Maine. South of Boston, between the canal and Falmouth on the Cape, there is still heavy backup of weekend tourist and recreational traffic on 28, especially the circle at Bourne—similar to the kind of pulses we get, though ours are not as large. (Google Earth the circle at Bourne, Mass., and you’ll see one of these backups in the picture currently being used.) Forget pedestrians at larger circles like these. And there is no place on the midcoast to put circles of that size, anyway.

So, roundabouts/traffic circles are easier to sell in the abstract and to people who have not dealt with them on busy highways than they are on the ground for our specific coastal applications. They are easier to implement in new development than existing. They are difficult to reconcile with land use plans and regulations, such as our LCP. With Caltrans’s shoddy record of designing for traffic on 1 in our locale consistent with coastal values—the intersection at Capistrano is a relatively recent example—can they be trusted to design roundabouts that would do the job for our area? How would safe, useful crossings at the roundabouts be handled? Suburban designs from elsewhere don’t begin to address these questions when applied to our specific local highway intersections.

And that’s just intersections.

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

As usual, Kevin’s attempt at ecofreak baiting misses both the person and the issues it tries to deride.

Like the outside consultants for the highway and trails in the El Granada area, some of our would-be local community redesigners and pro-urban-development ideologues would benefit from getting out and spending some time experiencing their coast’s features and learning about the coastal resources and ecosystems that support the human population and its way of life.

CUSD lays out $2.5 million in school budget cuts

Ah, yes, the board’s usual CUSD parcel tax campaign threat. Predictable.

Traffic and Trails - Report and next steps, Weds

Absent from this outside consulting effort last year were
1. An awareness of the coastal environment in general—what it means to be “coastal”—and our local coastal environment in particular.
2. An awareness of the California Coastal Act and our LCP.
3. An awareness of the history and character of our local communities.
4. An awareness of the numerous past considerations of vehicular and non-vehicular transportation in our area.
4. An awareness of the essential natural and financial resources of our area, in concert with what development our area can absorb without being degraded.

What we saw was a set of “principles,” etc., for imposing the designs of landscape architects and community planners on, essentially, a blank slate. In every example of their work elsewhere, we saw designs that resulted in greater development and the increased hardscaping that goes with it. These people are for increased building and pavement—at least that is what their designs show. They do not know the physical difference between a road and a trail. They don’t recognize huge energy and pollution costs of industries involved in implementing their designs—for example the cement industry. Some of their ideas would come close to creating de facto transportation corridors and hubs that would exempt, via last year’s SB375, surrounding new development from vital environmental regulations and reviews. Such simple matters as their prolific use of tree “walls” in their designs would block coastal views in El Granada that some residents have rightfully fought to preserve for decades. (There were no native trees on our coastal terrace.) Rather than restore the now-parking-blighted Burnham Strip to the community commons it was originally laid out to be, they would cut off edges of it for widened roads. The runoff from the additional paving in their designs would add to the problems we already have, further degrading some local creeks into the storm sewers they are becoming.

Now I’m well aware some locals, including our urban environmentalists, like the idea of turning the midcoast into a putatively-“upscale,” artificially-designed suburbia, not unlike some of the planned and paved-over coastal communities created or retrofitted in Southern California and Florida. But I’m hoping those who appreciate the remaining coastal character of our communities and who prefer to live more in harmony with our area rather than institute ever more expensive efforts to dominate it will push for genuine improvements to our roads and trails and not fall for this setup for further urbanization. It is difficult to see this consultant’s work as anything more than justification and a step toward the overdevelopment our county supervisors are trying to foist on us in their (so far unapproved) revised LCP worded for the benefit of their developer and builder buddies.

Help save California: circulate petitions for the Majority Vote Initiative

“Reeks of Barney Frank complaining about the filibuster power in the House, when things don’t go his way.”

As a sidelight, tell us more about these filibusters in the House. Or is Barney just doing one of his flashbacks to before 1842?

Photo: Pacifica’s Nurdle Beach

There is no beach on the California coast not subject to styrofoam pollution. Even the most remote beaches of the Lost Coast, sometimes said to be the longest stretch of undeveloped coastline in the lower 48, have it to some degree, especially after storms, though not to the intensity of the above photo.

Maybe Kevin is trying to say why worry about a monster concentration of pollution in one region of the Pacific when acidification and temperature change are likely already affecting the whole darn ocean?

SFPUC may ease recreational access to Crystal Springs Reservoir property

Not much more to it for the Sweeney-North Peak stretch (Whiting Ridge, if memory serves) than opening it up. It’s a road, for gosh sakes. A bit of signing at the gates might be in order—the watershed is a designated Biosphere Reserve, among other things. It would be a simple matter to ban horses, but equestrians already had—may still have for all I know—special access to the watershed for years in the form of privileges given to members of the Sheriff’s mounted patrol. The main issue would be responsibility for keeping hikers and cyclists on the esisting road.

The ridge road south on Montara Mountain to Scarper Peak would be blocked in this scheme but could be considered as a separate possibility for opening, as it runs just outside what will be GGNRA property. It, too, would make a fine, ready-made stretch of the Bay Area Ridge Trail.

Any additional watershed impact due to hikers and cyclists confined to these ridgetop roads on Pilarcitos and Crystal Springs would be nil—any runoff problems are already created by the roads, themselves, and the vegetation-removing fire breaks. (Of course our local urban environmentalists would probably want to pave everything up there, a la Sawyer’s Camp Road, what they fostered on Mirada Surf West, and what they want to do in Fitzgerald. Then runoff would become more of an issue.) Even more wrong would be to cut another trail through the scrub and chaparral in addition to the existing roads. Trails sometimes need to piggyback on past developments and mistakes, but making new mistakes is not necessary.

We looked at all this in some detail on GGNRA’s Sweeney Ridge Trail Committee, which looked at access to Sweeney Ridge for all kinds of users from all directions—in addition to trails on Sweeney Ridge, itself, when the GGNRA took the property. Some cool possibilities for the public, such as hiking over the ridge from San Bruno, staying in the hostel in Montara, and hiking back the next day. That report must be around in some dusty file somewhere.

A more open process is needed for the county’s Charter Review Commission

Took one look at the makeup of the Charter Review Commission, saw the deck was stacked, and moved on to more positive, interesting, and productive subjects. The group doesn’t have the potential for making fundamental improvements becaause it is “owned” by the status quo.

Big Wave “trails” are hardly worthy of the name

If you can drive a vehicle on it, it isn’t a “trail.”

CUSD’S “Push Poll” for a Parcel Tax

The regular reapplications for the senior exemption required in past local parcel tax measures are a hassle anyway. It’s easier for a senior to just say “no” at election time if not having to pay is important.

A Solution for Surfers Beach in Sight?

Re-sand the beach and the bluff retreat will slow way down. The logical, least expensive, most enduring approach to this lets nature do the work by re-establishing longshore drift southward of the sand now piling up in the harbor. Geologic engineers should be able to figure out how to open the breakwater in spots without losing its major protective benefits. Restoring flows in the harbor might also have pollution-dispersing benefits, depending on the design of the project.

This suggestion has cropped up a number of times in the past but has never been given serious consideration. Too sensible for the artificial urban mindset. I believe something like this is what Frank Long is saying in the message above.

Current HMB City Council’s slate sweeps the field

I must have blinked, because I missed the notification that the same old guard philosophy and the same old guard gang members that have been making a mess of HMB for all but a few of the past 50 years, as they use the town for their own narrow self-gratification, has somehow become enlightened and is now going to do a 180 to make city government more honest, more responsible, and more supportive for its citizens.

How can one claim a “mandate” in any election when most registered don’t vote? (Yes, I realize it is a favorite term of spinners because they don’t feel it necessary to provide any supporting facts.) The “mandate” from most HMB voters that might be guessed at is that no one on the ballot looked like someone they wanted making decisions for their city.

And they wonder why most of us on the unincorporated midcoast who have had to deal with our backward, politically corrupt neighboring city for many years want no part of joining with it. It’s remarkable, really, when you consider this preference endures in spite of the county’s gross misgoverning of our own towns and surrounding landscape.

Coastside election results 2009, GSD still too close to call

Not only is the tallying of different kinds of votes going slowly, much slower last night for the precinct votes of yesterday throughout the county, but voting itself is an insanely slow matter on the electronic machines. I stood there for minutes twirling the dial and pressing “enter” to vote for exactly one person for the fire district. I could have finished at least half, and maybe all, of a long ballot from the prior hand-marking, machine-reading days in that time.

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