Three parking spots per unit downtown?

On 3/25 Belmont approved a 24 unit complex at 1000 South Rd on a mitigated negative declaration with three parking spots per unit. This is the wrong approach to the downtown.

1000 South is only 1500 feet from the transit center in Belmont at Ralston and El Camino. It is at the intersection of South and Ralston. What is the vision for the downtown? Residents dodging cars doesn’t cut it.

What does Council Member Dickenson mean when he talks about efficient transit? What does the council mean when they want to reduce cut through traffic on 6th Ave one block east of the South development? How will residents get around the downtown when we are older? Do council members intend to live here when they get old?

Samtrans just gave us four accordion buses to help additional kids get to Ralston Middle and Carlmont. What message are we sending about the role of buses in this important transit corridor with a three car per unit policy? Three cars per unit need access lanes, which means clogged streets, and additional lanes and parking requirements. This increases the visual blight of ugly parking lots in the downtown while reducing the fare box recovery of transit. Cars also move more rapidly than people. This means longer blocks like we have on 6th and 5th and El Camino which reduces the fine grain grid that makes for a successful pedestrian district.

What did Council mean when they agreed with past council member Warden that cars were as dangerous as cigarettes? How does going to a 3 car per unit residential requirement solve that problem?

We inhabit a time when green house gases from cars are a challenge to the Bay Area. Both MTC and ABAG say they don’t know how to reduce particulate emissions with the expected growth in vehicle miles traveled. Three cars per unit in of all places the downtown feeds into unsustainable practices. Unaffordable units, as another speaker pointed out, add to the dilemma of how we can sustainably house our parents and our children. This is unfortunate because I have three elderly neighbors whose children bought homes in Belmont. It was obviously a nice place for families to live in. Today, as in the case of Mrs. Johnson, just walking down the block is a major enterprise.

This is also where council wanted to put a roundabout because of traffic from South. Despite increasing traffic on South with the development, Public Works said it was withdrawing the roundabout from the developer mitigation requirement, in reply to a question from Council Member Wozniack.

The Problem of Energy Use

Modern society rewards fossil fuel consumers with wealth, and penalizes those who don’t consume fossil fuels.

More than 5o% of natural gas and electricity and water is consumed by four communities in San Mateo County, Hillsborough, Woodside, Portola Valley, and Atherton, who make up .3% of the population of San Mateo County. Anecdotally these communities also make disproportionate use of the airport, a green house gas (GHG) generator that has no immediate fix; and drive most of the low mileage cars in the county.

In the Bay Area 50% of GHG comes from transportation mostly the private car. See page 17. This problem will worsen because Vehicle Miles Travelled is increasing. A roundtrip to the moon (RTM) is 477,736 miles. In 2000 in SMC we did 35 RTM. In 2015 we will average 39.

Solutions
Walkable cities are the key to the GHG puzzle. In State of the World 2007: Worldwatch writes that cities cover 0.4 percent of the Earth’s surface but generate the bulk of world carbon emissions, making urban areas key to alleviating the climate crisis. More than 70% of GHG come from cities.

Molly O'Meara Sheehan writes in Volume XXXVIII, Number 1 2001, of the Department of Public Information that, "As cities grow to accommodate motor vehicles, they push built-up areas over forests and farmland, pave over watersheds, and invite accidents and pollution from ever-greater vehicle traffic. Various reports suggest that car-reliant cities not only damage the environment but also worsen social inequities and impede economic growth. As the world becomes more urban, a major challenge for societies will be to reorient current patterns of urban development away from car-dependent sprawl and towards walkable neighbourhoods connected by networks of bicycle paths, bus routes and railways."

Dead? Whew-Traffic not affected

Why do traffic articles on freeway crashes involving deaths turn on the issue of congestion? In this case a person is found dead by the freeway and the articles ends by saying: Traffic was not affected by the incident, Chase said.

Its the same reason why so much of the news is dedicated to congestion. Our time is more important than anyone else's life. Its irrelevant what we use our time for- TV, iPod, sports, gossip or fast food.

Drivers will charge down our roads heedless of pedestrians trying to save a minute of their time at the expense of a locals life. I watch in amazement every morning as I try to cross O'Neil or Emmet and traffic is bent on getting to work without consideration for the neighborhood around.

Automobiles are toasting the planet. But in the process they've turned the neighborhood into a jail and made our notion of time auto dependent.

Global warming and spraying for the LBAM

Gail Raabe, SMC Agricultural Commissioner, says she hasn't heard any opposition to aerial spraying for the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM). A group of legislators have introduced legislation to prevent spraying- San Mateo is not one included.

My position, which is a farmer's market consumer position says:
- The problem with LBAM comes about because the food is transported by air these days. It used to, and should, come by ship, which is a lot more fuel efficient and the long trip was detrimental to the moth which would metamorphosis and then die at sea. Today's airborne moth, while generating tons of green house gases with travel food miles, gets to arrive, metamorph, find food and raise a family here.

- The fix against this moth used to be "targeted pheromone baited sticky traps" tied to a fruit tree. This works for small farmers with a few acres under cultivation. It doesn't work for corporate farmers who farms hundreds of acres and won't hire the labor to bait all the trees each month. Therefor USDA's spaying essentially supports large farms and is an anti local, one more disincentive, against small local farms.

- I buy from the farmers market which is where small local farmers go to find consumers like me who want fresh tasty food. They are now in competition against an imported airborne moth from fruit picked early so it can travel well and whose price is artificially low
because of global subsidies like the war in Iraq.

- Where is the problem? As a Sierra Club article states the moth has been in CA for years with no damage. However exporters, large farms with global connections, again in competition against my farmer market supplier, have to spray outgoing shipments, and it is this "perpetual quarantine" that worries USDA which has no interest in the family farm or the consumer. This business model doesn't add up in an era of climate change.

The CA Sierra Club has taken a position opposing spraying for the LBAM. See A controversy coming to a neighborhood near you on page 3 but for different reasons. Baited sticky traps are mentioned here, as is perpetual quarantine and absence of a problem.

We should instead-
fight global warming and protect the family farm by not spraying. Instead give a portion of the money allocated to this emergency to family farms earning under $30,000/- per year to pay for targeted pheromone baited sticky traps and let larger corporate farmers pay for their own programs.

Calculating CO2 from cars

If someone knows a better way to calculate this please post-

Every 1000 cars at a school dropoff produce 4 tons of CO2 and 1 ton of noxious emissions.

Every 1000 commute cars produce 12 tons of CO2 and 3 tons of noxious emissions.

- 21 mpg average CAFE standard

- 12 mils is the average one way commute trip in the bay area. The "average weekday daily VMT" in the Bay Area, was 157,172,000 in 2007, or 80 roundtrips to the moon every day and increasing.

- 20 lbs of CO2 in one gallon of gasoline. One gallon=6lbs produces 19.4 lbs of CO2

- 2.25/1 is the ratio between the Honda Civic hybrid/Prius average and the CAFE average.

- 50% of trips in the morning commute are school related

- 43% of all trips are two miles or less when the engine is most inefficient. This is why we need to account for children landuses in general plans.

Other MTC numbers quoted by car here

The Problem of Energy Use
Association of Bay Area Governments report on the Bay Area GHGs says 50% of CO2 from mostly the private car. (page 17)
and recommendation (including staff)-

Noxious emissions
The EPA monitors 188 air pollutants.
The CA state Air Resource board identify three sources of particulate matter Area, Point, and Mobile; with mobile sources being by far the largest problem. These sources, coming from vehicles, generate two kinds of particles presently measured- PM10 from vehicles, construction sites, unpaved roads, factories, wood burning, and fuel combustion at power plants and in industrial processes and PM2.5 from fuel combustion and combination with other pollutants.
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. However EPA has't gone far enough even with staff's own weak recommendations. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who heads the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, sharply criticized the agency's decision, "Once again, the EPA has rejected the recommendations of its scientific advisors and failed to protect our communities from dangerous air pollution." Lifelong damage is found in 13-year study of 3600 Southland youngsters living within 500 yards of a highway. Major roads like Ralston can be just as toxic.

Council Agenda Tuesday, February 26, 200: Financial Overlay Map-

Public Works director Ray Davis described a council agenda item for bringing garbage services in house. As expected there were large costs associated with labor and equipment maintenance. However there was a marked difference in costs for the district areas, Carlmont and Downtown, and the hilly neighborhoods. A fleet of smaller side loading trucks was necessary in the hills with their unique maintenance requirement. Understandably hills were almost 50% of the total cost but unevenly spread between the districts and the neighborhoods. From a development perspective we should look at how these costs can be equitably distributed.

City Manager Jack Crist addressed another agenda item on sewer rates. Again there was a marked difference between the downtown and the neighborhoods but in the downtown there was a marked difference between residences and businesses, the primary difference being the area of landscaping that gets watered. The city is proposing that costs be averaged out. This means that low flow users will get penalized for using less and for requiring a lower infrastructure development cost for city services. There was a marked difference between low flow ($225) and business ($22,500) in the new rate proposal which would lower the business cost and raise the low flow cost so that they were essentially equal.

At an earlier meeting Ray Davis had described the $30M requirement for rebuilding city streets. Again access , equipment, and manpower are issues here between neighborhoods and districts.

These unequal costs are widely spread. Andres Duany in Suburban Nation says that the primary reason for the loss of neighborhood postal centers was the need to establish large offices with huge parking lots to access the sprawled out neighborhoods that developed after WWII and which overextended the small electric postal vehicles causing a shift to polluting gasoline vehicles and higher costs.

Financial overlay maps which showed the cost of infrastructure and services would make useful planning tools.

Council Agenda March 11 2008: FATP

Describing a council agenda item on the protection of the San Juan Canyon area Community Planning Director Carlos Demello introduced a fabulous concept called Floor Area Ratio Transfer Policy which was shortened to FATP.

FATP allows for the city to permit landowners, to move their development rights, from an area with desirable protection characteristics, to an area where development is preferred. This is similar to transfer of development rights known as TDRs.

Carlos said that the receiving attributes would need to be developed. As an example of a receiving area he offered the downtown, which everyone agrees needs a density characteristic tied to the business type we want to attract and retain. Coralin expressed concern that the sending characteristic should not increase development on the street or neighborhood, and the receiving characteristic should include a cost factor linked to a developed street, so as to not drain the city budget.

Another model would be start with the Association of Bay Area Governments and Metropolitan Transportation Commission criteria of defined Priority Conservation Areas and Priority Development Areas. Overlay on the PCA wildlife, riparian, and connected trail corridors. Add attributes to the three corridor elements such as open space, parks, urban pocket parks, children’s landuses, species, and a countryside preserve.

Develop a FATP financing mechanism that preserves the neighborhood model and enhances the district model. This can be done with financial overlay maps which identify where the infrastructure and service costs are cheaply available and preferred, and what desired feature of each model, such a traffic speed, needs to be controlled.

Then go out and get an ABAG/MTC grant to make it happen.