You’re a citizen, an advocate for democracy with this first step, paying attention.
Citizen Tip = Face value is rarely enough information to compare and contrast.
Let's take roadwork as the subject. There are all those who use the roadways including motor vehicles, bikes and pedestrians. Some of these may be commercial, buses or visitor vehicles just passing through and using the roads. By all measures the vehicular traffic is the most dangerous, the most polluting and the hardest on the roadway infrastructure. And car-centric changes to streets are far more expensive than those for biking or walking trails.
Everyone who uses, benefits from the roadways have a stake in these streets serving each driver's, biker's or walker's purposes. Safe movement is the highest priority with convenience following. (In practice accidents are often caused by an individual making that second priority overtake the first with high speed and carelessness for the sake of convenience).
The regulatory bodies are the city's traffic engineering staff and the traffic commission who report to the city council. Besides local ordinances, regulations include state and federal laws governing roadways. As witnessed by a recent state ruling to raise the speed limit on Quail Drive, logic and common sense fell victim to a ruling that basically rewards speeding. Long story, see clip. In another instance, this time San Elijo Avenue stretch of roadway (part of Manchester) included this clip by residents who lived there virtually begging for street calming solutions for this treacherous curve.
Seems safe for you to assume that residents pleading for safety are key. You would be wrong. What we do not see on the surface are the dealings with large land owners, housing or commercial development projects that are officially and unofficially vetted by the city staff. We have no way of knowing where and when such projects might be scheduled.
Case in point this week is a street, traffic study contracted last summer for a portion of Manchester. Despite this being a street where no residents had complained about problems, had relatively low accident counts a contract for almost $147,000 was awarded. All the council agreed to the study despite nobody except Jerome Stocks whole-heartedly endorsing the study claiming the road was far more treacherous on his bike with his child than highway 101 or El Camino Real. *ahem*
Here are several more clips with the public speakers. All of these contribute to the deliberations.
One thing hasn't changed in years, these public speakers were never properly informed and they were not informed for this week's meeting either.
For an edited clip of the presentation with some of Maggie's comments, click here. For Teresa Barth's statements click here.
These clips, the links to the the other road width, speed, curve issues here and in yesterday's post give a wealth of background to what actually hold most sway over the planning and engineering staff's priorities and council majority decisions. It is not a one size fits all challenge or solution. None of this happens in a vacuum and it is too simplistic to point out a few scapegoats, even the mayor or a state law. There are solutions if our staff and council would be open to alternate solutions. There is institutionalized preference given formula solutions and large land owners or large development projects are weighted far above and beyond reality or resident information, experiences and perceptions.
