Dear council,
I was disappointed in your decision on Tuesday to punt on staff's proposal to remove parking along El Camino Real in order to install a median.
You heard from staff that although the proposal was not ideal from a street layout perspective, waiting would potentially increase the cost of the project (because Stanford might not be required to fund it) while delaying other projects.
You also heard that the creative ideas pitched from the dais would only be possible with millions of dollars of hardscape changes.
But it was hard to tune out the appeals of the small business owners who expressed fears about revenue loss. At the time I thought that your reluctance to proceed stemmed from a desire to look for solutions that maximized safety gains while minimizing trade-offs. Understandable.
So I was flummoxed by the ease with which you made the next parking removal decision (along University Drive). Here, too, a business owner submitted concerns about loss of convenient parking. The proposed solution was incremental in nature, promising an improved sight line for drivers exiting the side street onto University but doing nothing to reduce speeds or improve bike/ped utility of that corridor.
The difference? One of these decisions (University) pitted convenient business parking against marginal but useful improvements in driver safety. The other (ECR) pitted convenient business parking against marginal but useful improvements in pedestrian (and eventual cyclist) safety. Please realize: as a resident who regularly bikes, walks, and drives places, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that I am more cared for/respected by you when behind the wheel of a car. (ouch. literally.)
Moreover, as a city, we made bold and visionary commitments to building complete streets, adopting vision zero, and reducing vehicle miles traveled. Achieving progress towards these goals was never going to be cheap or frictionless. But no changes ever made everyone happy (except maybe the Guild?)
This is where the big visions come to life–in these small but important improvements that you make, block by block. Failing to commit to the necessary incremental changes and somehow hoping that we'll end up where we want to go anyway? That would be like me proclaiming my commitment to be strong and healthy...and then opting each day to eat cheesecake for breakfast and skip my workout. (Not that I've ever done that...gulp.)
And holding out for perfection is a trap. I, too, would like to see fully protected bike lanes, wider sidewalks, a more substantial median, etc. along this giant stroad that divides our community and shatters any illusions of village character.
But all of those things are apparently not possible to accomplish within the existing hardscape, and our community has displayed little appetite for major, hugely expensive streetscape changes (or the lane reduction that could also make these things possible.) Somehow we have to keep the ball rolling forward, even slowly, and not let our thirst for perfection, or our reluctance to make near-term tradeoffs, stymie any attempts at improvement.
Setting aside the question of goals and values, I question the claim that a lack of storefront parking will necessarily doom an otherwise viable business. If this were true, Stanford Shopping Center and Safeway wouldn't exist, and you'd never have closed parts of Santa Cruz Avenue to drivers. To be fair, all these options have large parking lots. But those parking lots are consistently full, all the way out to Sand Hill Rd/Menlo Ave. Apparently people are willing to walk some distance for goods and services that appeal to them. (Meanwhile, there are empty storefronts on Santa Cruz that *do* have convenient store-front parking.) It seems unlikely to me that an upscale hair salon and a delicious cheesecake shop, both of which provide unique services to at most a handful of customers at any given time, would go out of business if their customers had to walk an extra 100 ft. (How many steps does it take to work off a cheesecake, anyway? More than a few...not that I'd know.)
And this is before we even consider the major improvements happening in their immediate vicinity: where they once had empty lots and then endless construction noise, they will soon have a much larger potential customer base. Residents of 500 ECR are not going to want to get into their cars just to cross the street for a cheesecake, a bike tune-up, or a haircut. Enhancing the ability of pedestrians to access those shops (not to mention cyclists, eventually) should increase the value of that retail strip, not diminish it.
Thank you for thinking this all through. Please don't waste too much time before approving the changes we need to make this area safer and more vibrant.
Katie
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Katie Behroozi
650.804.1812 (cell)
