HomeMy WebLinkAbout2/6/2018 Item 12, Schmidt (3)
From:Richard Schmidt <slobuild@yahoo.com>
Sent:Thursday, February
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Agenda Item 12
Attachments:Council bikeway rev Feb 18.pdf
Dear Mayor and Council Members,
One more note regarding Item 12, this one dealing separately with three different subjects:
1. Smart cities are planning to accommodate burgeoning elderly population so they can age in their homes.
2. Inconvenient quality of life questions about proposed cycle tracks for which city has no answers.
3. Three really "dumb" details for Broad Street segment which illuminate bike planners' lack of contextual
understanding/concern: undoing long-established traffic calming and promoting flooding of our properties.
Attached below.
Richard Schmidt
1
Smart Cities and the Aging Population
The biggest demographic change looming ahead is our aging population.
Smart, progressive cities are jumping on that bandwagon to make sure their elderlyʼs
needs are considered in all plans, not creating conditions – like the wholesale removal
of residential parking -- that deprive existing elderly of the ability to continue to live in
their own homes and make entire sectors of cities unlivable for future elderly, as the
cycle tracks would do to our senior-rich1 neighborhood.
Many in our area view the cycle-track parking removal proposal as generational warfare
in which you seek to drive seniors out of their homes by making conditions impossible
for them. In your eyes that may be an extreme view, but itʼs being bandied about with
seriousness in a context of great dismay about and distrust of the cityʼs motivation.
Creating such psychic distress among seniors is not what a progressive city should be
doing.
To regain trust, before distrust spins out of control, you would be wise to shelve this
proposal permanently, and move on to using its $3 million to complete the railroad trail
and find something simpler, like the Lincoln “alternative” or my proffered 1-2-3-4 Plan,
for biking in this corridor.
Inconvenient Neighborhood Quality of Life Questions for which there are No
Good Answers
These are examples of questions asked for which the city has no good answers:
1. If the cycle track is in front of your house, what do you do with your three city-
mandated garbage cans on pickup day?
• Canʼt block sidewalk (if you even have a sidewalk, which some houses donʼt). I
asked the garbage company if the arms on their trucks can reach across the cycle
track to pick up cans on sidewalk, and they said no.
• Canʼt block cycle track.
1 Perhaps the council is unaware of our neighborhoodʼs age diversity. Just on my side of
my block, here is an age breakdown by household: in utero, 2; under 10, 2; Primary
householders in 20s, 1; 30s, 4; 50s, 1; 60s, 3; 70s, 2; 80s, 2. There are 4 households
with blue disabled parking placards, and an additional household that should have one
but the guy hasnʼt bothered to get one yet. This is a snapshot of just one side of one
block. Every block Iʼm familiar with has seniors and disabled on it, and similar age
diversity. This is one of the things that makes the neighborhood special. When I arrived,
I was one of the 20-somethings, now Iʼm at the other end. Our neighborhood also
includes the Villages senior complex which adds to its senior density. It is wonderful to
see the more frail among them out on our public sidewalks with their walkers.
• Canʼt block traffic lane.
• So, how exactly does the city plan to deal with our garbage. You canʼt seriously
expect everyone to wheel all those containers back and forth across streets with
4,000-7,000 vehicles per day? How does that work for pregnant women, people
temporarily on crutches, the elderly, the frail, the disabled? How does it work for
anyone? The spectacle on garbage day would make the city look as if itʼs run by
mean fools if thatʼs your unspoken plan. But from whatʼs been said to date, it
appears the city actually has NO plan. The issue has not been considered.
2. If the cycle track is in front of your house, and you need to replace an underground
utility line beneath the track, how does that work?
• The track will be disrupted, so where do the 6 year old alleged beneficiaries ride
their bikes? They cannot be expected to figure this out with adult minds. Since with
tracks the streets are too narrow to allocate part of the traffic lanes to a temporary
cycle track, whatʼs the solution? Requiring the homeowner to employ a full-time
kiddie escorter and a full-time flagperson for the duration of the work? Is that a
reasonable financial imposition on someone whoʼs already being imposed upon by
having the track in front of their home?
• The track involves costly special construction different from the street itself -- curbs,
surface treatments, perhaps landscaping – which will be disturbed by underground
utility line replacement. Who pays for that extra cost? If the homeowner, is this a
reasonable additional financial imposition on someone whoʼs already being imposed
upon by having the track in front of their home? Isnʼt it discriminatory to inflict such
extra costs upon a few homeowners hand-picked by the city itself? If the city, how do
you plan to come up with the necessary funds?
(Long term maintenance costs of the tracks, which are substantial, donʼt seem to
have been addressed to date. Shouldnʼt understanding them be part of your
decision-making?)
3. If the cycle track is in front of your house, how do you make home improvements or
maintain your home?
• Concrete trucks need a place to park on the street and unload to a pumper (with its
hose to the worksite) for prolonged periods of time, often over days or weeks. Are
you proposing traffic on these streets be shut down throughout such private
construction jobs so big vehicles can block already narrow traffic lanes for the
duration of such work? No solution for this obvious problem is offered by bike
planners.
• If youʼre having your house painted, having the plumber fix a leak, ream the sewer,
redo a sink or toilet, getting your carpets steamed, having mow-blow-and-go do their
weekly cleanup, where to such trades people park? They canʼt hike in with all their
stuff. The carpet steamers have hoses from their trucks. All these need ready access
to their trucks, as they always have had with 2 sides of on-street parking.
• Where does the lumber yard truck park to unload building materials? These canʼt
be schlepped in from a parking spot 1,000 feet away – or even across a busy street.
These things are all normal parts of day-to-day neighborhood life that cycle tracks on
residential streets make impossible. Bike planners offer no solutions.
4. With cycle tracks, how do we get routine deliveries?
• Where do Fed Ex, UPS, USPS park to unload parcels? My hunch is theyʼll say they
canʼt deliver, and recipients will have to go to them to pick up parcels that are
supposed to be delivered. This causes nuisance, delay, and additional greenhouse
gas emissions from our extra driving back and forth across town.
5. With cycle tracks, how do we unload groceries?
• Surely the council will not buy into staff assertions we seniors – and even the
disabled -- can hike with them from 1,000 feet away?
• We typically return from Saturday shopping with 10 heavy bags of groceries,
park in front of our house, and in about 7 loads ge t them inside. I calculated
what it would mean had that unloading been from 1,000 feet away. Staff
alleges itʼs a 5-minute walk (maybe for 30-somethings like themselves, but not
for 70-somethings like me). Thatʼs 5 minutes each way, meaning 7 trips at 10
minutes each, or a total of 70 minutes of walking, half of that with sacks of
heavy groceries. Of course, a 70-something would go slower, so it would take
longer, plus thereʼs steep ground involved – steep hills all around -- , and the
70-something would need to rest, so getting the groceries home, if the 70-
something were even capable of doing it, would take hours! Surely the
council cannot endorse this as decent treatment of a neighborhoodʼs
residents?
• “Groceries” are a surrogate for so much more. Young mothers with a couple of
squirming kids to get into the house are as impacted as seniors. This is not mere
“inconvenience” – itʼs city-sponsored meanness against people who lack alternatives
to street parking.
6. With cycle tracks, how do our friends come to visit?
• Does the Council really think weʼll be able to continue to enjoy the companionship
of friends if they must hunt for a parking space and park blocks from our home when
they want to come visit?
7. What problem is solved by a Parking District, which staff says weʼll have to have?
• A parking districtʼs purpose is to prevent outsiders from monopolizing
neighborhood parking. Thatʼs not our problem.
• Our problem is the city is taking away about half the parking used by people who
live here. So there will be too few parking spaces for ourselves. A parking district
offers no solution for that.
• Cycle tracks involve removing about half the neighborhoodʼs parking. The
neighborhood is way over half parked already, which means residents will be without
sufficient parking spaces. A parking district offers no solution for this either.
• A parking district, far from solving any problem created by removing parking, will be
simply another bureaucratic hurdle to make living in our neighborhood that much
more difficult. It solves nothing for us. Keeping street parking is the solution.
• Remember, many of our neighbors have no choice but to park on the street. Itʼs our
ability to park our cars your parking district will be hassling, not outsiders.
8. Why does staff substantially misrepresent the parking impacts of cycle tracks?
• On Broad, for example, the project report states 15 parking spaces will be lost. This
is patently false information. The truth: on the west side of Broad, 32 parking
spaces will be lost. Thatʼs more than double what staff says the total loss will be.
Why is such crucial information, which can be easily checked on-site by anyone, so
incorrect?
• How many additional spaces will be taken from the east side of Broad for bulb-outs
and the like? This is not revealed in the report.
A Few Really “Dumb” Details in the Plan.
Unfortunately, this plan, which imposes a tough regime on our neighborhood, has been
put together by people who must lack understanding of basic neighborhood safety facts.
Here are three little details that probably slipped by all of you, which are serious
erosions of neighborhood safety.
A. Removal of the double yellow line on Broad so cars can pass slow bikes.
• Aside from the basic question why on such a narrow bike-centric street the city
would want to encourage cars to speed around bikes . . .?
• Some history of traffic calming on Broad, the cityʼs first traffic-calmed street:
• Early 1970s, speeds to 70 mph documented by city staff.
• About 1974, four stop signs installed, prevalent speeds down to 35-40 mph.
• About 1982, four speed humps added, prevalent speeds below 30 mph.
• Sometime later, to deal with cars engaged in dangerous passing, double yellow
line (atypical then for residential street centerline). Prevalent speed 26 mph.
• The double line is an important part of controlling speed and bad driving on Broad.
Removing it takes us backwards in terms of safety and neighborhood quality of life.
Not to mention cycling safety.
B. Removal of speed humps and replacing them with speed cushions.
• The humps have more than a 35 year history of working well to control speed and
slow down trucks. Why should there be any talk of removing them?
• The cushions, with their “free pass” gaps in them, supposedly for the benefit of fire
trucks (which donʼt need them on Broad since they use adjacent Chorro for cross-
town travel), will promote highway truck traffic on Broad (how is that compatible with
bike safety or neighborhood quality of life?) and a variety of reckless driving by
others.
• Highway trucks use Broad in violation of truck route rules. However, with the
humps trucks must slow to a crawl, which means they donʼt speed, and they slow
vehicles behind them, which promotes traffic calming overall. With speed
cushions, however, they can drive right through the gaps without slowing. This
means weʼll return to the days of speeding semis on Broad. How is that a good
thing?
• Observers of traffic choreography on Broad will be struck by the jerky drivers
who donʼt slow for the speed humps, but instead pull all the way over to the edge
of the street so one side of their vehicle can make it through without being
“humped.” Now imagine the enticement to these drivers if they can get one wheel
going through the gap in the speed hump! And the real winners will discover they
can get one wheel in the gap and the opposite off the edge of the thing. Bye, bye
speed control on Broad!
• It seems speed cushions are a new toy traffic planners want to deploy
someplace, so theyʼve decided to include them in these plans, just for the heck of
it. Might I suggest that instead of undoing proven traffic calming they find a place
with no existing speed control, and try them there instead?
• Removing these proven speed humps is the wrong thing to do.
C. Flooding the Neighborhood to Make a Point.
• The plan includes raising the Broad-Murray intersection to sidewalk level. Thereʼs
no explanation what this is supposed to solve, but it will cause our properties to
flood.
• Typically raised intersections are for speed control. This intersection, however,
is a single hop, skip, and jump from a speed hump which controls speed quite
well.
• Broad-Murray is the low point in our neighborhoodʼs streets, where flood water
pours to and collects from both directions on Broad, from the Bressi culvert when
it clogs and overflows, from Serrano, from Benton and Murray, from Chorro, not
to mention from the cityʼs deficient sewers which last winter spilled some 60,000
gallons of dilute poop into this intersection.
• Broad-Murray sits atop the huge Old Garden Creek concrete triple-culvert, and
5 storm drain drop inlets in the intersection drop flood water directly into that
impressive engineering work. Typically one or more of these storm drops gets
clogged and is useless in an emergency. (Many a storm Iʼve been out there with
a rake trying to get them to work again – the city canʼt keep up with the clogs,
and Iʼm getting to where I canʼt either.)
• The proposed raised intersection will cover 3 of the 5 drop inlets. That will
cause flooding in every moderate storm. Making new drop inlets would be a
major project since it involves cutting into and partially rebuilding the concrete
culvert below.
• Raising the intersection will cause water to pool at the three entries to the
intersection – on the two separated lanes of Murray, and in both directions on
Broad. Whereas at present, water can flow across the intersection from any of
these and have access to any of the drop inlets, with a raised intersection cross-
flow will be blocked till the water reaches sidewalk level – in other words, till itʼs
high enough to start flooding neighbors.
Like so much of whatʼs proposed, these 3 “dumb ideas” illustrate bike planners are
attempting to impose solutions on places where they are inappropriate, without
understanding site, context, history or culture. A plan this deficient in careful analysis
and so mean to neighbors must not move ahead.
Thank you for considering these points.
Richard Schmidt