HomeMy WebLinkAbout3/7/2023 Item 6d, Schmidt
Wilbanks, Megan
From:Richard Schmidt <slobuild@yahoo.com>
Sent:Saturday, March 4, 2023 11:47 AM
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Agenda Correspondence 6d (Anholm)
Attachments:council anholm bid opening REV2.pdf
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Dear Council,
Please see the attached letter which urges you to use the huge overbid to finally get this project right.
Richard Schmidt
1
Dear Council,
The city has more pressing financial needs than spending over $6 million on this project. Please
put this on a diet and work within the already-available funds.
When the Anholm bikeway was first presented for approval by the council, council was told it
would cost a bit more than $1 million. When recommended by the bicycle committee the
estimate had been even less, about $800K. Last year we were told the cost was up to $3.4
million. Now the bids are in and the low one is over $6 million, nearly double the already-much-
inflated bid estimates put forth just months ago, leaving about a $3 million funding gap. This
morally evil, nasty and unnecessary project has had astonishing runaway costs.1
Given the runaway costs together with the toxic treatment the project inflicts on residents of
affected streets, it’s time for this council – none of whom have ever voted in favor of this – to
recalibrate details to get this right.
My thoughts on matters requiring changes are summarized here.
1. The adopted plan amounts to intentional and knowing discrimination by the
city against the frail, the old, the disabled, who constitute a significant portion of
adversely affected residents.
If it had been the city’s aim to make war on its weakest citizens, it could not have done so more
explicitly than with this project’s design.
Our lives will be diminished and our ability to remain in our homes threatened by a plan that
deliberately privileges youth, athleticism and able-bodiedism over all other demographic
concerns. Instead of finding a way to support both cycling AND resident needs the city’s bike
planners and activists turned to textbook solutions that in no way respond to the residential
context, then dug in and insisted on things being their way, and no other way.
The radical removal of residential parking on streets already densely parked by residents is the
root of much of the trouble.2 When the hardships this presents especially for the frail, elderly
and disabled were pointed out, the city snidely dismissed our concerns, saying we could find
parking within 1,000 feet of our homes, though that might be “inconvenient” for the disabled.
You think?
The plan displaces parking entirely from one side of both Chorro and Broad. It displaces
additional parking from the side of each street where parking nominally continues to exist. So it
1 And this despite cutting some very expensive components, like sidewalk on the west side of Broad which would
have required extensive grading and tall retaining walls (ugly, noisy, unnecessary – glad it’s gone).
2 Root of much of the trouble, but not all. The plan also forces granny, with her stiff body, twitchy eyesight and
hearing, to back out of her driveway through two opposite directions of bicycles into a third line of vehicular
traffic. What could possibly go wrong? Do you think that’s smart traffic management, or even fair to granny?
removes more than half the parking on streets where resident needs already demand far more
than half the existing spaces.3 That means there will be a scramble among residents for the few
remaining parking spaces, and few to none for our support systems (passenger pickups and
drop-offs, visiting friends, caregivers, mobile veterinarians, household helpers, yard helpers,
plumbers, electricians, painters, or any of the other tradespersons who must park close by their
worksites, etc.). I’d like the Council to consider how a parking place “1,000 feet” away might
accommodate the frail, elderly and disabled and their needed support. Oh, and don’t forget
about lugging multiple bags of groceries home.
Persons DMV-classified as disabled and lucky enough to still have parking in front of their
homes can get some limited relief through state housing law (as I have done). But what
happens if there’s no parking in front of your home? How does that person continue to live in
their home?
This is not an abstraction. My disabled M.D. neighbor across the street cannot drive and is
dependent (since this city no longer has taxi service) on friends or gig transport to take her
places. But the bike plan will remove all parking on her side of the street, so there will be no
place for her to be picked up or dropped off in front of her home. So how’s she supposed to
continue to live in her home? Is she to take comfort in knowing there will be some indefinite
place within 1,000 feet of her home where a ride can stop to pick her up or leave her off, then
to hobble home as best as she can? The mean ageist and ableist city council that approved this
dreadful plan knew what it was doing but didn’t care; they said as much, one council member
remarking harms to the disabled are “a tradeoff worth making.”
You are a new council, of -- I believe -- better people, more decent human beings, and this is
not your project.
Your council has just reaffirmed that one of its four top goals is to “Further our commitment to
making San Luis Obispo a welcoming and inclusive City for all . . .“ Those are fine words. If you
are serious, please show you mean them by fixing the inequities this project will inflict on
affected residents, including especially the old, frail and disabled whose life needs vary greatly
from those pushing this harmful project.
A word about disability law. The civil rights of the disabled are protected. The 1990 Americans
With Disabilities Act, often confused with building regulations by use of colloquial inaccuracies
like “ADA ramps,” is a civil rights law that grants to the disabled rights co-equal to those
accorded to racial minorities by the 1960s civil rights laws. So, by logic, any city on top of DEI
issues should be on top of this one.
3 The city has suggested a parking district would somehow alleviate this problem. It will not. Parking districts are
useful when parked cars belong to people who don’t live in the districts. They do nothing to help our problem,
which is competition among the street’s residents. The impact of new housing law will make our street’s parking
situation worse: already we’ve seen off-street parking removed for insertion of additional, denser units, with more
resident vehicles than before but less off-street parking, at both ends of my block, and more of that’s sure to
come.
And indeed, SLO says it is. “Historically underserved, underrepresented, or marginalized
communities are groups of people who experience the systematic process of being relegated to
the lower outer edge or margin of society,” according to a release from the City News Center
just days ago (Feb. 27). “Marginalized communities have typically referred to Black, Indigenous,
People of Color, LGBTQ+, women, low-income, and people with disabilities.” So how can our
city both hold such truths yet push forward with this plan’s obvious and uncaring
discrimination against the disabled?
Let me cast this plan’s ableist discrimination in a harsh light to show how improper what
you’re about to do actually is. One issue that’s absolutely clear in disability law is that in
undertaking any project the city must improve accommodations for those with disabilities. In
this instance, the city project takes away accommodations that already exist – i.e. ready
access to our own homes from the street, disability-accessible parking that’s always been
there. So you’re not making things better, you’re diminishing existing accommodations.4 In
the event some aggrieved resident were to litigate loss of accommodation for accessing her
home, how do you think the city would do in the court of public opinion? I doubt the city
would do well. It’s time the city did the decent thing with this project on behalf of its frail,
elderly and disabled constituents, and stop considering diminishing their welfare “a tradeoff
worth making.”
For all affected residents, this project is toxic; for the disabled it’s outright discriminatory. The
irony – which the city has refused to examine – is it’s also toxic for cyclists. So even if you only
care about cyclists and don’t care a fig for the disabled you’ve got a need to revise this plan.
2. This bike project from Highway 101 to Foothill is dangerous for cyclists,
especially for kids; it’s far less safe than the status quo.5
4 The notion the project’s adding a few corner curb cuts gives the city a pass on disability matters is offensive; the
city has been derelict by moving so slowly in providing this minimal accommodation it should have completed
decades ago, and has no excuse, for example, that 32 years after enactment of the ADA it still has not completed
curb cuts within one block of The Village, a huge senior housing complex with lots of disabled folks. Curb cuts are
required, period; they are not an extenuation for taking away the existing reasonable accommodation of access to
our homes.
5 When the project first appeared on the horizon I questioned the claim there was need for it due to alleged safety
issues on the Lincoln to Ramona residential section, so I did a public records request of the PD, who reported they
had zero accidents in the previous 5 years. We’re now closing in on a decade with no accidents. So the alleged
safety issues are hypothetical and propagandistic, not actual. Meanwhile the city does nothing to improve safety
on Foothill exactly at the northerly end of the Anholm project – the Foothill killing grounds, where cyclists are not
only injured but frequently killed. Clearly the Anholm project is more about ideology and propaganda than safety
or need; if it weren’t, the city would make Foothill its top bike priority rather than this silly, unnecessary, mean-
spirited project.
It has been sold as providing a “safe and low-stress” ride (and walk)6 from downtown to
Foothill. Sounds good, but it’s untrue.
In fact, the bike project as planned from 101 to Foothill would be more stressful and more
dangerous than that stretch is today. The malignant two-way death tracks on Chorro and
Ramona are of a design that’s denounced for safety reasons by the world’s foremost bike route
designers; they take the safest part of any ride, mid-block, and make it dangerous. Where the
death tracks end, at intersections, which are the most dangerous part of any ride, the plan
requires death-defying zig-zagging of cycles through and across vehicular traffic. How can this
lunatic scheme be called, in any terms other than propaganda terms, “safe and low-stress?” In
the interests of safe cycling it needs not to be built.
Furthermore, the route itself makes no sense; it doesn’t go to the destination where most bike
traffic headed out Chorro from downtown is trying to go – Cal Poly. The notion there needs to
be a major route from downtown out Broad to Foothill is a theoretical abstraction without
merit – it seeks to direct cycle traffic where it’s not naturally going, where very little bike traffic
in fact goes. So, to accommodate the Broad fantasy, cycle traffic is gathered on the wrong side
of Chorro for going to Poly, leaving Poly-bound cyclists trapped there at Mission Street to figure
out what to do next. (I suspect the Broad-centric plan is an unexamined holdover from when
the bike masterplan envisioned a “North Broad Bike Boulevard” similar to Morro Street
downtown, joined to downtown by a bike/pedestrian bridge over 101. It is certainly not
justified by actual bike usage on Broad, a mere few dozen per day.)
A bike route serving actual bicyclists’ destination needs should be designated, and one based
on theoretical abstraction abandoned before spending million$s building it. (A more detailed
discussion of safety issues is in Appendix 1 below. That is essential reading J.)
3. A Better Path Forward From Here.
As I see it, the council has three choices in dealing with the huge cost overrun.
1. Scotch the project.
2. Proceed full speed ahead. Your staff will “find” (well, actually steal from other funds) money
in this time of declared fiscal emergency, and the project’s malignant and unethical features
will be allowed to metastasize at this obscenely huge monetary and social cost.
3. Pare back the project to only those features that demonstrably improve conditions for
cyclists and foot people and don’t harm residents of the Anholm district, including the disabled,
and eliminate the malignant features, the “branding,” the costly propaganda elements that
serve no purpose other than, well, being propaganda.
6 The “walk” part of publicity for this project is pure bunkum. Aside from the broken down sidewalks which the city
has said it doesn’t plan to replace as part of this project, walking through Anholm is just fine as is, thank you. It is
already safe, low stress and pleasant. Be honest: This is purely a bike project.
I urge you to choose #3, building only the good stuff and dropping the rest; and doing what
should have been done in the first place: designating an actual low-stress route through this
residential neighborhood by turning to one of the obvious, but rejected, lower cost and
entirely sensible but less textbook-sexy alternatives, i.e., a more traffic-calmed neighborhood
and encouraging cyclists – especially those Poly-bound -- to use the Lincoln-West loop as an
alternative to riding the residential collector streets.
In actuality, what would this better project look like?
Keep: Cyclist and foot people improvements from Monterey to Highway 101; pedestrian
improvements (new sidewalks and curb cuts) from Lincoln to Foothill; path through Mormon
property between Ramona and Foothill.
Cut: Two-way on-street death tracks on Chorro and Ramona; deadly lane changes required of
cycles at Chorro/Lincoln, Chorro/Mission (this one’s not demarcated with green paint by the
plan but is required for Poly-bound riders who use the death track), and Broad/Ramona; totally
unnecessary neighborhood-livability-killing one-direction track on Broad; all branding including
whatever “name” the city may ultimately pull out of a hat for the 7th, 8th, or whatever the next
sequential name may be (we’re already up to 6, which demonstrates the silliness of the
unnecessary naming exercise -- and the latest name is a geographically erroneous descriptor
that makes no sense); all marking of streets with the words “green way” (melting these thick
plastic extrusions onto streets is something an environmentally-aware city wouldn’t do in the
first place, and profligate, wasteful dispersal of plastic into the environment and emission of
carbon to melt it to the street for mere propaganda is inexcusable); public art; additional street
lighting within neighborhood where it’s already impossible to have a healthfully dark bedroom
due to the existing level of lighting (lighting Highway 101 underpass is ok).
Add: Minimal signage designating Lincoln/West east of Chorro as a low-stress bike route (zero
construction required); additional traffic calming on Broad and Chorro to slow traffic (200 and
300 blocks of Broad badly need humps to lessen speed); build corner curb cuts at all
intersections on Broad, Chorro and Lincoln/West (east of Chorro) that do not yet have them.
Appendix 1: The Adopted Design is Unsafe – WORSE THAN STATUS QUO
Our city tells us 2-way on-street cycle tracks (Chorro and Ramona), that include street gutters7
and cross dozens of driveways, including commercial driveways, are safe.
Better, more experienced8 experts disagree.
7 AASHTO design guidelines say gutters should not be considered part of a bike lane/track’s width due to pavement
irregularities, slope, drain inlets, and pavement change break between concrete gutter and asphalt road surface.
8 Our city staff are beginners at this sort of design. They’d never designed cycle tracks before the Anholm plan.
When I asked their experience I was told they looked at various specifications and laws – in other words their
experience consisted of consulting “textbooks” without any locational context. To get a feel for how dangerous
their products are, I’d suggest looking at the already-built “safe route to school” at Nipomo/High. Drive south on
Nipomo. Vehicles southbound on Nipomo, just before High, can encounter oncoming little kids blithely riding out
of the “safe route” to vehicles’ right, on the wrong side of the street, the last place in the world a driver would
• The city of Davis warns against cycle tracks that cross driveways because each one amounts
to a dangerous unsignalized intersection. Davis, arguably the most experienced American
bicycling city, doesn’t build infrastructure like this. Davis uses tracks sparingly, mainly on
arterials where there are no driveways, or for short connectors between Class 1 bikeways and a
destination, like a school. Davis has 171 miles of bike lanes, paths, routes, etc., of which only
one mile is cycle track.
• An Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) study of bike facility safety concluded 2-
way on-street tracks like designed for Anholm are less safe than bikes riding in traffic.
• Arguably, the best facility designers are from northern Europe, where biking is much older
than in North America. In Denmark 2-way on-street tracks like proposed here were dropped
from best practices about 30 years ago. Says the blogger at Copenhagenize, Denmark’s
foremost bike designer (which also has a Canadian office), “The thought of putting such cycle
tracks into cities that are only now putting the bicycles back -- cities populated by citizens who
aren't used to bicycle traffic, makes my toes curl.” He continues, “The bi-directional cycle
tracks we see in emerging bicycle cities can't possibly be put there by people who know what
they're doing. . . If someone advocates infrastructure like this and actually believes it is good,
they probably shouldn't be advocating bicycle infrastructure.”
The narrow 2-way track on Chorro requires drivers backing out of driveways to negotiate not
only vehicles going both directions but also bicyclists going both directions. Drivers must back
through two separate 2-direction traffic streams. To turn into a driveway requires crossing the
2-way track, with bicyclists approaching in the driver’s blind spot whether turning right or left.
What could possibly go wrong?
The 2-way track on Chorro has northbound cyclists riding in a narrow lane between southbound
bikes on their left and southbound vehicles on their right. Is that safe? It’s certainly unsettling
and not a relaxed, pleasant way to ride. One little mishap or misjudgment and a cyclist is under
a vehicle.
(Remember that in a track, the cyclist is physically confined and when danger is perceived
cannot take the range of evasive action a cyclist on street pavement – including in a painted
bike lane – can take.)
The 2-way track on Ramona crosses the main neighborhood vehicular entry/exit from a busy
shopping center. Exiting right turners are going to be looking left for on-coming traffic, not right
for bicyclists coming in the “wrong direction.” There’s an existing crosswalk just to the right of
the exit, and its pedestrian users, like myself, are well aware of the dangers from right-turning
drivers looking left. Again, what could possibly go wrong?
The Ramona track also crosses the main delivery driveway for the shopping center, a busy place
due to the grocery market’s deliveries. So little kids on bikes are competing there with 18-
wheelers, a truly horrifying idea.
expect such an encounter. Nipomo’s a low-traffic street. Replicating such dangerous design on high-traffic streets
like Chorro, Broad and Ramona should make the council’s “toes curl.”
The northern block of the unneeded one-way track on Broad would have cyclists, after pedaling
across oncoming traffic to get from the far (“wrong”) side of Ramona onto Broad (another
dangerous mid-intersection maneuver mandated by the two-way track on Ramona), making a
downhill run with increasing speed across the main entry to The Village, whose aged residents
may have diminished reaction times, thus creating yet another type of driveway-crossing
danger. After that, just as on Chorro, there are many residential driveways presenting complex
entry/exit dangers.
Coming from downtown, to get into the two-way cycle track on Chorro, bicyclists heading north
will have to make a diagonal movement through the busy Lincoln/Chorro intersection, from the
bike lane in the right gutter to left side gutter cycle track. This intersection is full of impatient
drivers coming from or heading towards the 101 freeway. Requiring bicycles to make this
diagonal maneuver through hostile traffic is insane. Is this a good design for 7-year-olds on
bikes?
To get out of the Chorro cycle track at its north end (Mission Street), those continuing to Cal
Poly, which is where most Chorro bikes are headed, will have to make another diagonal through
an intersection to get back to the right side of the street where they will mix with vehicular
traffic. Unlike the zig-zag at Lincoln which will be decorated with green paint, this zig-zag is
unmarked. Bikes will be on their own to duke it out with vehicles.9
Further illustrating the fallacy of “improving safety” as a rationale for cycle tracks, on Broad
Street there’s to be a 1-way track headed south – for “safety,” but northbound bikes will
continue to mix with traffic, as at present, which the city says is also “safe.” There’s no safety
difference between the two directions. The factual reason for this oddity is bike advocates
demanded a track but the street’s too narrow (34 feet at its widest point) for anything more
than one way.10 Given the scant bike use of Broad, there’s no need for any cycle track there.
But when politically-powerful bike advocates demand them, we get cycle tracks, needed or not.
Finally, it’s worth noting few bike accidents occur mid-block compared with at intersections.
Nothing the city proposes makes intersections safer (while the cycle tracks make accidents
more likely mid-block). The cycle tracks end at intersections, leaving bikers unprotected, and
the forced diagonal movements into and out of cycle tracks at Chorro/Lincoln, Chorro/Mission,
and Broad/Ramona make those intersections more dangerous for bikes than the status quo,
especially for children.
For residents of the west side of Chorro, getting into their driveways presents a special kind of
hell, often described as making a “left turn from the right lane of a multi-lane street.”
9 This sort of stuff is why I suspect experienced cyclists will avoid using the dangerous ineptly-designed cycle tracks
and keep riding in street traffic, which they have every legal right to do.
10 Though one prominent bike advocate said parking should be removed on both sides so there could be a cycle
track on both sides.
Normally such a maneuver would be grounds for a traffic ticket, yet the city’s baking this
maneuver into cycle tracks alleged “safe” for 7-year-olds.
Normally when you turn left into your driveway, you watch for oncoming traffic and turn when
it’s clear.
Turning left across Chorro’s two-way cycle track, you must watch for on-coming vehicles, on-
coming bikes both within and outside of the track, and bikes coming up behind you on your left,
in your blind spot. Dozens of driveways cross the Anholm cycle tracks, each, in the words of
Davis bike planners, a dangerous “unsignalized intersection.”
Experienced experts call this out as a serious safety issue. Our city’s less-experienced experts
dismiss it as nonsense.
It’s worth noting that an analogous blind-spot issue exists for right turns into driveways across
cycle tracks; it’s not normal, when approaching a driveway, to have moving traffic to one’s
right, in one’s blind spot.
The dangerous maneuvers required getting into driveways plus the backing-out-of-driveway
problems discussed earlier show how dangerous and poorly-conceived this infrastructure is.
Why would the city sanction something this irresponsible when there are good alternatives
that are much cheaper, less toxic and less discriminatory to residents, and safer for cyclists?
Finally, a word about safety concerns regarding the so-called “safe route to school” through the
Mormon church property. This is on a narrow strip of land immediately adjacent to the
shopping center delivery driveway on Ramona. Immediately adjacent! That means kids coming
towards Ramona on the “safe route” have a solid masonry wall between the bike route and the
delivery driveway. They will be exiting blind and making a right-angle left turn into the Ramona
death track right where 18-wheelers (and other delivery trucks) pull out across the death track!
Is that safe?
While the Mormon route is a nice off-street touch, its combination with the Ramona death
track is dangerous. One could keep the Mormon route and eliminate the death tracks and
greatly improve kid safety.11
In conclusion, the bike project is advertised as a safe and low-stress improvement, but it
proves to be anything but safe and low-stress. This is a powerful reason to abandon the high-
danger high-stress features in favor of something less costly, less intrusive, less toxic, less sexy
but actually more safe and satisfying, more integrated into the residential setting, such as I
have suggested above and will elaborate on below (Appendix 3). This could become a
win/win rather than a lose/lose as it is at present.
Appendix 2: The Design Increases Vehicular Speeds, Diminishing Safety for
Cyclists and Pedestrians and Quality of Life for Residents.
In the city’s pogrom against cars, used to justify wholesale residential parking removal in this
project, it is overlooked that parked cars on both sides of collector streets like Broad and
Chorro are traffic calming devices that reduce vehicular speed and thus actually assist in
providing safety for vehicles, bikes and pedestrians. Without parked cars, speeds can be
expected to increase.
This principle is well understood in city planning circles. On-street parking on both sides of a
street narrows the “effective width” of the street’s traffic lanes. Effective width of traffic lanes
influences a driver’s perception of the appropriateness of their own speed based on the
proximity of other vehicles, in this case between stationary parked vehicles on the right and
moving vehicles coming forward on the left. High parking densities on narrow streets like Broad
and Chorro reduce the effective width and can dramatically slow speeds. One of the benefits of
existing bi-lateral parking on Chorro and Broad is calming vehicular speed.
11 I do have some concern about the Mormon route itself since it’s a narrow block-long chute fairly invisible from
elsewhere, and such places, with no “eyes on the street,” may tend to be unsafe and uncomfortable for legitimate
users.
With the bike project as designed, parking will be removed on the west side of Broad and
Chorro. For vehicles, that means parking friction disappears in the southbound direction on
both streets. From the vehicle driver’s visual perspective, the bikeway becomes open street
space, so suddenly, instead of width-decreasing friction, there’s a wide open space providing no
friction. That means speed goes up since, based on effective width perception, it seems safe to
increase it.
This is not hypothetical. We have an actual example on Broad. When the Village was expanded,
the fire department demanded red curb the length of the property. So in the southbound lane
of the 0-100 block, we see increased traffic speeds where parking friction doesn’t exist, and
thus cars accelerate markedly between speed humps. When they get to where on-street
parking begins, they slow, and do not accelerate markedly between speed humps. In this “slow”
zone the city plans to remove parking, transforming it too into a “fast” zone.
The city appears oblivious to the dangers parking removal presents for pedestrians, who are
supposed safety beneficiaries of this project. As noted, parked cars provide a structural layer of
protection for pedestrians from moving multi-ton hunks of steel. With the prohibition of
parking that protection disappears. Two examples illustrate the outcome. This week a speeding
SUV on Ramona bashed into several parked cars and flipped over. It was a serious wreck. Had
there been sidewalk pedestrians, they would have been terrified but physically safe. By
contrast, a speeding Tesla on Sacramento Drive recently killed a couple and their dog because
instead of parking that might have protected them there was only a bike lane separating them
from moving vehicles. The city can inflate its balloon about the Anholm project’s safety
improvements, but removal of parking that does so much for neighborhood safety today is
definitely not among legitimate safety talking points.
It's impossible to see massive removal of parking making anything safer for anyone.
• Higher speeds mean more danger, for cyclists, pedestrians and vehicles, and will diminish
residents’ quality of life.
• For pedestrians, removing parked cars also removes a structural buffer (i.e., the parked cars)
protecting them from moving vehicles.
• Higher speeds will compound residents’ problems using their driveways.
• Parking removal is the crux cause of the discrimination against those with disabilities that
marks this project as a blot on the city’s DEI program.
• Removing parking does the opposite of what the project purports to accomplish – improve
safety and neighborhood quality. Every constituency -- cyclists, pedestrians, vehicles, and
residents – becomes a loser. It’s LOSE/LOSE/LOSE/LOSE.
Removing parking, which plan advocates proclaim some sort of divine victory over the Satanic
motor vehicle, actually hurts all parties. The idea needs to be dropped, for both neighborhood
toxicity reasons and for safety reasons.
Parked cars in the 100 block of Broad tighten the driver’s perceived width of the southbound
traffic lane by suggesting a narrower traffic lane, thus acting as a speed reducing device. The
adopted plan will remove parking and thereby increase vehicular speed.
Without parked cars the same street feels wider, higher speeds feel safer, and drivers generally
will drive faster. Note, a cycle track doesn’t limit the visual perception of space at driver’s eye
height, and small/low objects demarcating a track’s edge lack the “lane narrowing” impact of
large solid objects like cars.
Appendix 3: The Lincoln/West loop and Neighborhood-Wide Traffic Calming – A
Better Way to Accommodate Bikes in Anholm.
The Lincoln/West loop is such an obvious alternative to the adopted plan it’s mind-boggling
how (and why) the city has so stubbornly opposed it. The opposition was set in concrete after
the strident chair of the bicycle committee proclaimed it unacceptable because riding it “takes
one minute longer.”
• This is the obvious low-stress ride through Anholm, which provides excellent access to Cal
Poly, the major bike destination coming out of downtown, which the adopted route does not
serve since it veers off to the west and thus away from Cal Poly.
• Zero construction, no visual cacophony of pavement markings, nothing other than a sign or
two is needed to make this a bike “route.” It’s ready to go.
• Minimal cost, maximum safety, no neighborhood disruption. What’s not to like?
• West Street rejoins Chorro a few hundred feet (three houses counting the two on corners)
from Murray, where Poly-bound bikes can turn right, Broad-bound bikes left. Murray, the most
beautiful street in the city and a joyful ride, is already a de facto bike route which CalTrans has
accommodated at Santa Rosa with a rider-activated signal change button.12
While the Lincoln/West route should be the heart of what the city designates, further traffic
calming in the Broad/Chorro corridor would encourage cycles to filter through the entire area
and its cross streets as individual destinations make desirable. This will lower traffic speeds to
further increase livability and safety and reduce rider stress. It is a non-toxic way to help cyclists
without harming residents. It’s the WIN-WIN that’s missing from the existing.9 plan.
12 The Downtown/Lincoln/West/Chorro/Murray/Casa/Foothill/California route is the direct – and cyclist-favored –
route to Poly. So it’s amusing the city has responded to criticism the Anholm route negates that preferred route by
claiming Anholm does go to Poly, via Highland, which route is more than one mile longer! So in the project’s self-
justification “one minute” is unacceptable but more than one mile is something to feel good about.
This is Lincoln Street. What a marvelous ride – nearly level, wide and smooth, quiet, attractive,
almost no traffic, already traffic calmed to slow the occasional errant driver. This offers
everything in terms of safety and low stress riding that Chorro does not. Why should one even
make a pretext of “improving” a busy, noisy street like Chorro when this peaceful alternative is
just one street over?
Lincoln is entirely separate from Anholm’s high traffic streets yet connects back to them through
four low stress cross streets, plus Murray. Three streets (Center, Mission, Murrray) cross Chorro
at a stop sign making safe passage for the minority of cyclists heading to Broad. (The current
plan attempts to legislate where the cross-over to Broad happens – at Mission. This
rigidification-of-the-route is paper planning that has no relevance to life as lived.)
Lincoln will be a beautiful bike route.
Appendix 4: When One Thinks About a Problem Incorrectly, One Arrives at
Incorrect Solutions: Are we thinking correctly about this?
How one conceptualizes a “problem” shapes how one “solves” the “problem.” Problem-solving
professionals like architects understand that problem solving requires: 1, approaching a
situation with an open mind rather than preconceptions, 2, extensive data gathering, 3,
extensive contextual analysis and 4, detailed and careful site study prior to attempting to
articulate any solution.
None of that happened here.
In the Anholm project, the “problem” was defined as “we want sexy bike infrastructure there
like we’ve seen on the internet or in (fill in the city name).” In other words, the solution was
“defined” by ideological preconceptions about what bike infrastructure should look like before
any problem solving took place, and the solution didn’t grow from actual conditions in the
neighborhood, nor from the factual and physical context into which the intervention would be
built, but from image and textbook perusal and arbitrary selections from those images and
textbooks.
That’s a lousy recipe for urban design.
This was facilitated by the city’s odd notion of serving the public interest, called “stakeholder”
politics. So the “stakeholders” of this project were never “we the people,” but rather a faction
of well-organized and city-supported bike radicals with their own staff “stakeholder”
representatives and their own “stakeholder” city advisory committee whose work is unvetted
by more catholic advisory bodies like the Planning Commission prior to coming to the council.13
These stakeholders were allowed to advance their idiosyncratic plans with no checks and
balances. Affected residents never had a role to play; we were never consulted throughout the
process; we were not at the table, we were on the menu. And thus the project’s resident-toxic
features mushroomed out of control.14
13 Although the stakeholder route was designed so the project would bypass the Planning Commission, at the last
minute it did unexpectedly have to go there because it involved a general plan amendment. The commission held a
hearing, then voted to reject the Anholm plan. The council ignored them. Anholm residents also secured two
negative rulings from the council, but then – in the most malicious political maneuver I’ve ever witnessed – at the
council meeting immediately following the second rejection (a vote taken in front of a room full of concerned
Anholm residents), Mayor Harmon conspired to have a room full of bike fanatics demand a revote, which took
place in an unagendized unadvertised ersatz “public hearing” conducted right then and there, when Anholm
residents had no clue that what they thought was a settled matter was being undone by a faithless, dishonest city
council. And you wonder why affected Anholm residents are ticked off? This is representative of how we’ve been
abused throughout.
14 Late in the process the city polled affected Anholm residents on the plan, and 74% disapproved with the
remainder split between like it and don’t know. But even this remarkable majority had no impact on the council;
one member told me “Your neighbors are split on this.” I guess nothing short of 100% rejection would have
impressed him.
And that, dear council, is why today you have a project that is so inept it serves nobody’s best
interests – not cyclists, not pedestrians, and certainly not affected residents.
CONCLUSION
• This project is way over budget.
• The project has many bad and evil features and outcomes.
• The project does not serve its stakeholder cyclist constituency by increasing safety; in fact, it
decreases safety from the status quo.
• The project harms affected residents and their neighborhood’s quality of life and livability.
• The project discriminates against a federally and state protected DEI class, those with
disabilities.
If the worst features of the project’s design were dropped and better alternatives substituted,
the project could be brought back to budget while being made a better, more sustainable, more
equitable, less divisive project.
Please make use of the opportunity presented by needing to deal with the extreme cost
overruns to fix this toxic mess.
Richard Schmidt