HomeMy WebLinkAbout12/9/2020 Item 4, Schmidt
Wilbanks, Megan
From:Richard Schmidt <
To:Advisory Bodies
Subject:Fw: Active Transport Plan -- Planning Commission
Dear Planning Commissioners,
This is a note I hurriedly put together for the council's ATP discussion, and offer it for yours as well.
Richard Schmidt
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Richard Schmidt <
To: E-mail Council Website <emailcouncil@slocity.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 8, 2020, 2:45:15 PM PST
Subject: Active Transport Plan
Dear Council Members,
Your holding a directive discussion on the Active Transportation Plan during its public comment period certainly caught
me off guard. I just found out about it, and cannot do a deep critique on this timeline.
But you need to read what I have to say, and pay attention! Why will become obvious as you go through this statement.
The new part of this plan is ACTIVE WALKING, and that part of it is dreadful, worse than nothing. It utterly fails to
fulfill what such a plan must do, to plan how to make walking a safe and desirable mode of transportation (as opposed to
recreation or mere meandering). The walking plan before you should be junked and a fresh start, focused on things
that actually matter, made.
Starting point: understanding current deficiencies in walking infrastructure and safety. The main issues as this long-
time transport walker observes them are these:
1 Sidewalks, especially in older neighborhoods, are decaying, uplifted near-continuous trip-and-falls. This is because of
this city’s long history of not caring. At this moment you have miles of existing sidewalk that need complete rebuilding, and
additional miles needing regular maintenance. Neither is happening.
2 A lack of curb cuts at corners, the minimum “accessibility” measure for making walking friendly to the less abled.
3 Obstruction of sidewalks by garbage cans on days other than garbage day (an unenforced law violation the city should
enforce), cars parked across them, and the like, which limit accessibility further.
4 Obstruction of corner street crossings by cars parked illegally close to the corner.
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There is every evidence in the draft plan that its authors have no clue about these issues.
Instead, we are offered three major policy points for determining walking infrastructure improvements.
1 Sidewalks will be fixed when major capital improvement projects are undertaken.
2 Sidewalks will be fixed when adjacent streets are repaved.
These are current policies that are responsible for the degraded condition of our sidewalks.
They are the problem, not a solution. There is no nexus between CIPs or repaving and the current needs of
pedestrians. Bad sidewalks need to be fixed when they need to be fixed, not wait for years till some unrelated
project comes along.
3 Continuous walking routes throughout the city. Well, of course we need continuous routes, but that’s not what this
measure actually promotes. It proposes to build sidewalks in front of every parcel where there’s not one. What’s wrong
with that?
a. It creates ridiculous redundancy in outlying neighborhoods.
b. It is incredibly costly in dollars and in misappropriation of resources better spend fixing what’s broken.
c. It unnecessarily adds still more infrastructure to maintain forever.
d. It destroys qualities of livability and causes invasive changes, such as major excavation of hillsides, construction of
ugly retaining walls, and unnecessary removal of beautiful trees.
e. It is a radical redefinition of long-standing city policy that recognized the above and decided a continuous route on one
side of a street was sufficient and a wiser way to go.
• For example, Serrano Drive, by long policy, has had a sidewalk only on its north side, which is entirely adequate. This
plan proposes sidewalks on both sides, which makes no sense.
• For example, the Anholm Greenway insists upon a sidewalk on the uphill west side of the 100 block of Broad, which will
cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars, involve extensive grading and retaining walls, and removal of a heritage-
quality live oak that makes the block a better, more pleasant place, to create a totally unneeded sidewalk redundant to the
perfectly fine “continuous route” already on the east side. The funds would better be spent rebuilding the decaying
dangerous trip-and-fall sidewalks typical of the Anholm district. But even if built, the redundant new sidewalk will not
create a continuous path since there are three blocks of Broad lacking sidewalk on the west side largely due to
topographical conditions.
• There are places lacking a continuous route sidewalk that need one. How, for example, has the south side of Foothill
west of La Entrada been neglected for so long? But indiscriminately planning for sidewalks everyplace they don’t exist is a
dumb distraction from such needs.
This proposed indiscriminate new continuous sidewalk policy needs to go away. In its place we need a more modest
measurement of what’s actually needed to make continuous routes from Point A to Point B.
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Now, for some examples of issues.
1 Sidewalks in the Anholm district are in dreadful shape. The city needs to rebuild several miles of sidewalk. At a cost of
about a million dollars per mile, this needs serious funding. Anholm is not alone. Similar problems exist throughout the
city, especially in older areas. The plan must have a robust funding quota for neighborhood sidewalk
repair/rebuilding of million$ per year till the backlog is fixed.
2 Minimal accessibility accommodations for persons with disabilities must be vigorously funded and
constructed. This issue isn’t so much as mentioned in the draft plan, which is entirely understandable given the plan’s
ableist tilt.
The city has done a terrible job providing accessibility for persons with disabilities in its neighborhoods. The Americans
With Disabilities Act is now 30 years old, and before that there were earlier regulations requiring accessibility measures
like curb cuts, yet in our arguably most-senior-dense neighborhood there are still few intersections with curb cuts. Even
within one block of the Village, the city’s largest senior complex, there are intersections lacking curb cuts. I watch seniors
with walkers get to the end of the block, then have to turn around and go back. 30 years and the city still hasn’t fixed this.
This shouldn’t be.
Note, this has to do with continuous pathway which is unrecognized in the draft plan. For persons with disabilities, even if
one intersection is accessible, if the next one isn’t, the walker has no continuous path even though there may be a
sidewalk useful for others.
On my morning health walk loop (Serrano then to top of LaEntrada to Ramona and back to Serrano – 2 miles) despite
relatively good sidewalks, there are more than a dozen trip-and-falls sufficient in magnitude to stop a wheelchair or
walker; more than a dozen corners with no curb cuts; cars blocking the sidewalk; garbage cans permanently blocking
the sidewalk. And that’s not to mention mal-designed curb cuts, like the one with a fire hydrant in its ramp preventing
legal ADAAG space clearance, or another that fills with water all winter, then in summer, due to zero city
maintenance, is a slip-and-fall from the silt accumulated in it by winter rains. Or the bus bench set on the narrow
sidewalk instead of behind it, so that when is use there’s no way for a walker or wheelchair to pass. These sorts of facts
demonstrate a shocking disregard for persons with disabilities as well as parents with strollers and walkers in general. The
draft plan fails to acknowledge, let alone propose fixing, any of this.
On my alternate morning health walk (Broad, Lincoln, West. Murray – 1 mile through Anholm) I encounter the dreadfully
mal-maintained dangerous sidewalks typical in Anholm and feel perpetually like I must look out for trip-and-falls instead of
briskly walking; and then on Lincoln-West east of Chorro, there are no curb cuts at any of the many intersections.
While curb cuts are essential for persons with disabilities, they are also appreciated by many other segments of the
walking public. The city’s indifference to them is shocking, and needs to change.
3 As an architect conversant with “universal design” and forced to stay conversant with “ADA issues,” and now a person
with disabilities, I want to impress upon the city the importance of advancing the premises of universal design (i.e., design
that works for the widest range of ages and physical abilities) in planning your pedestrianscape. Much of what’s in the
plan is space occupied by unfocused irrelevancies (like the fixation on street fairs and sidewalk dining, both of which have
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nothing to do with Active Transportation – and are actually impediments to getting from Point A to Point B if one’s route
goes through them). The plan needs to focus on essentials, like fixing the list of essentials with which this letter began.
And a good template for judging policies might be: Does this policy serve the needs of persons with disabilities?
If the answer is not “yes,” you’ve got a problem.
Meanwhile, you’ve got an immediate problem: years of dawdling and stonewalling the needs of persons with disabilities
and a huge backlog of sidewalk issues to fix. What happens if the city continues in do-little mode?
Well, consider what happened in Sacramento where officials had behavior similar to what we have here. Disability
advocates finally got fed up, filed a class-action ADA suit, and Sacramento had to pay more than $1 million to plaintiffs
and their attorneys, and must spend 20% of its transportation funding on pedestrian accessibility improvements for the
next 30 years.
You can face the same. Or, you can do the right things: immediately start fixing your backlog of broken sidewalks and
missing corner ramps right now (with Measure G you cannot plead poverty), and adopt a plan that actually promotes
walking as an alternative mode of transport by dealing with actual problems.
Sincerely,
Richard Schmidt
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