Comments by Leonard Woren
September 12, 2006
To KWeber, regarding "you still have buses?" How many of the other districts are semi-rural? What's the average distance from home to middle school in Cabrillo compared with in Bay-side districts? This District has different needs. What'd I'd like to see are statistics comparing only with other rural and semi-rural districts. My guess is that they still run buses. When CUSD cancelled busing, they said "we're in the education business, not the transportation business." My question was and still is:…
September 12, 2006
John - if they were currently proposing to build "homes of various sizes, the largest having a half acre lot with 900 square feet of floor space" would we still be arguing the point? A 900 sq ft house on a half acre (22,000 sq ft) parcel would allow a lot of habitat preservation. What's destroying the Coastside environment isn't only the number of houses, but also the size relative to their parcels, and the way they're built by clearing the entire lot of every shred of anything growing, and then…
September 09, 2006
This sounds good, but as the resident cynic I have to wonder whether it'll actually make it out to the Coastside, and whether stretch “west to Half Moon Bay” according to some reports includes the rest of the Coastside outside of the city, at least up through the northern boundary of Montara. One other interesting aspect of this is The service will be free at one megabyte per second downstream. The reason that's interesting is that Comcast cable internet (when it works... it was down again this…
September 04, 2006
Darin - I'm not referring to watching it again immediately -- clearly that works fine. Suppose that I want to watch it again some time later, after it's been pushed out of the cache or I've had to clear the cache to solve some other problem? And that also doesn't address the issue of how to get it to people who are on slow connections. Once upon a time I could search the cache and copy the file to a more permanent location. But the latest QT is storing it in a protected format so that it can't be…
September 04, 2006
MPEG and DiVX are far from universal. They're the closest thing to universal that you will see in today's world of digital video. Now you can even buy DVD players which will play DivX. I haven't seen one that'll play Flash. All that a Flash interface gives is 100% access to the information. I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. I sent a url to a friend of mine who doesn't run Winblows and he couldn't view the page because he won't install flash. DiVx requires downloads, codec installs and…
September 04, 2006
There is also a long proud history on the Coastside of developers doing illegal things starting late Friday afternoon preceeding a 3 day weekend, for the reasons given in the first paragraph of the story. In the unincorporated parts of the Coastside, developers know that they can get away with anything during off hours because the County has no penalty for violation, and rubber stamps "after the fact" permits with just a little slap on the wrist (increased permit cost). Their motto is literally "forgiveness…
September 04, 2006
I don't understand why one closed proprietary format is recommended over two other closed proprietary formats. "No external codecs or tools required" is a red herring, since the flash player itself must be installed, which isn't always practical or desired. I'd suggest an open standard. About the closest that you can get these days is probably MPEG and DivX. MPEG support is near universal. Current levels of DivX provide astounding levels of compressing for high quality video. The major downside is…
August 28, 2006
The Monstrository, er, Beach House Inn (the wart on the beach in front of El Granada), was built in 1995 and has always been a condo hotel because the developer couldn't get financing to build a normal hotel. I wonder if all the Coastal Commission requirements for public access are being met there. If I had to bet, I'd bet that none are, even though they are conditions of approval on the Coastal Development Permit. (When it was first built it was called the Conservatory, which was adding insult to…
August 26, 2006
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
August 22, 2006
How is a local board deciding to contract out operations a "takeover"? To me, a "takeover" is when the state comes in, for example to a local school district as has happened recently in the East Bay, and says to the elected officials "you no longer have any authority to make decisions, we're making all the decisions from now on." HMBFPD and PMFPD contracting with CDF is not a CDF "takeover". We will still have one or two (?) local boards making service level decisions.
August 16, 2006
Links to PDFs of the proposals were in a previous article on Coastsider, and Kathryn repeated them in this article.
Brian, you have misread this article. The CDF proposal cost is lower than the District's revenue, so the difference can go into reserves. My understanding is that both this budget year and the FY just ended drew down reserves substantially because expenditures were higher than revenue. Revenue doesn't change depending on the service provider -- only expenses change.
August 11, 2006
When considering whether to vote for Jolanda, it would be appropriate to remember her participation in that sleaze during the previous CUSD election by rereading the Review's followup article.
I can't wait to see how the Review ignores or whitewashes that one this time in order to endorse Jolanda. This will be a bright-white-line test of the Review's journalistic ethics.
August 10, 2006
The consultant was hired for the specific purpose of facilitating consoldation. To my knowledge, evaluating whether it should be done was not in his scope of work. Carl, I know that you don't like going to meetings. But if you're against consolidation, wouldn't it be better to communicate that to the decisionmakers? You can do that via letter/email, which would allow you to explain your position without the 3 minute constraint of a public meeting. Earlier this year at one of the consolidation meetings…
August 24, 2006
Anyone claiming not to be pro-growth should demand alternative safety fixes for SR 1 before continuing to push for 4 lanes. 1. Add a center median / left turn lane / merge lane everywhere it's needed. 2. Add dedicated right turn lanes anyplace where there is sufficient traffic. 3. Fix the existing merge lanes so that they're not so difficult and unsafe to use. The merge lanes are always too short, too narrow, too close to the through traffic in both directions, and poorly marked. The way they're…
August 13, 2006
When were the 4-lane sections of SR 1 in rural areas made 4 lanes? If it was prior to 1976, they're grandfathered in. Could you provide a maps.google.com full url to 4 lane rural sections? (Find the location via that site, hit "link to this page", then copy the full url from the address bar.) Or perhaps photo numbers from californiacoastline.org? In 1993 (when visiting up here), I drove back from Santa Cruz to L.A. on SR 1. Other than the portions which pre-date the Coastal Act such as around Malibu,…
August 11, 2006
Ray, clearly there are sections of SR 1 which are more than 2 lanes. I believe that from Santa Monica to near LAX, Lincoln Blvd is SR 1 and that stretch is mostly 6 through lanes. But I'm not aware of sections of SR 1 in [u]rural[/u] areas which are more than 2 lanes. I do not see the volume of traffic on Devil's Slide as anywhere close to requiring or justifying 4 lanes. I've driven it during commute times and it's just not congested. (Busy is not the same as congested -- it's busy but traffic moves…
August 11, 2006
Ray, section 30254 of the Coastal Act begins "[u]New or expanded public works facilities shall be designed and limited to accommodate needs generated by development or uses permitted consistent with the provisions of this division; provided, however, that it is the intent of the Legislature that State Highway Route 1 in rural areas of the coastal zone remain a scenic two-lane road.[/u]" A downloadable PDF of the California Coastal Act is available on this page of the Coastal Commissions's web site.…
August 10, 2006
Barry, I've suggested that they paint the inside of the tunnel to look like the view from the current alignment.
August 09, 2006
Matt Wrublewski compares dimensions for the Eisenhower tunnel and the Devil's Slide tunnel to justify the oversized Devil's Slide tunnel. However, this is apples and (sour?) grapes -- the way I read it, Matt and Carl are both saying that the Eisenhower tunnel is two traffic lanes in each bore. The Devil's slide tunnel is supposedly one traffic lane in each bore. If a traffic lane is 12 feet wide, the Devil's slide tunnels should be 40-12=28 feet wide. Therefore they are grossly oversized. The Devil's…
August 03, 2006
I kinda figured they'd do that, in order to avoid a land-rush lineup of people wanting to be first.
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