Thank you, I appreciate the urgency that you are giving to this matter. If we are confirmed for the next council meeting I will let the Willows Neighbors know so that we can attend and speak on the topic. I do not know if I will have time to get a small group together to come up with suggestions, but I will try. Best Regards, Brian Gilmer From: Kirsten Keith [mailto:kkeith_at_(domainremoved) Sent: Thursday, November 9, 2017 10:29 PM To: Brian Gilmer Cc: city.council_at_(domainremoved) Subject: Re: Please help adress this serious issue Hi Brian, Thank you for your email. I live in the Willows and completely understand your frustration and that of all of our neighbors. I’m so sorry that your car was hit. That is very scary. Amy Roleder wrote in earlier this evening and I have already written to our City Manager about trying to find some immediate solutions to the serious increase in traffic in the Willows. I usually reply directly to people who write to me on CCIN, but thought this warranted responding to CCIN. I will add this to our 11/29/17 or 12/05/17 council agenda so that we may discuss short term solutions that we can quickly implement. I will also confer with our city attorney about the possibility of discussing this topic at our next council meeting, 11/14/17. Again, thank you for writing to me. The City will address these concerns. Best regards, Kirsten Keith, Mayor of Menlo Park On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 8:38 PM Brian Gilmer City Council Members, I am writing today to bring to you attention a matter that poses a serious safety hazard as well as impacting the lives of my family and many of the residents in the Willows. That matter is the cut through traffic and the impact it is having on our lives and safety. I know you are aware that cut through traffic in the Willows has been an ongoing issue for many years, I have lived here for 50 years. We have a lot of cars trying to avoid University Avenue and Willow Road by cutting into the Willows neighborhood, driving down residential streets not mean for a high volume of traffic and then back on to Willow at O’Keefe, Durham and Chester. While driving through the Willows many of these drivers fail to obey the posted speed limits and in many cases run stop signs at various speeds. With the number of children in this neighborhood this poses a serious threat to their health and well being. As bad as this problem has been in the past it just became much worse, dare I say untenable. The Willow Road / highway 101 interchange work is progressing and as part of that work two additional stop lights have been activated on Willow Road. This has created a traffic debacle. Congestion is much much worse now. Starting at about 4:00 PM myself and many of my neighbors on O’Keefe are not able to leave our driveways due to the line of cars backed up trying to turn right onto Willow Road East. This back up eventually extens well past Laurel Avenue three blocks south of Willow Road. I have spoken to my neighbors on Durham and if anything the backup is even worse there. I can only imagine how bad it must be on Chester. I am enclosing some pictures I took this evening. Starting as just after 4:00 PM the cars on O’Keefe street extended from Willow past Arnold. By 4:45 they extended past Regal and included buses from Facebook. I challenge each of you to attempt to drive from City Hall to Bayfront express way at 5:00 on a week day evening in under 1 hour. When you find that a near impossible challenge I invite you to walk through the Willows neighborhood and observe the congestion on the residential streets and the impact it’s having on our families. If a fire truck or other emergency vehicle was needed it would take a very long time to get through. Finally I would like to add that as I was writing this letter one of the construction crew working on my house came in to inform me that my vehicle had been hit by another vehicle attempting to squeeze between the traffic trying to get onto Willow and my SUV parked on the street due to day time construction. This is the second day in a row that has happened, with the car breaking my driver side rear view mirror yesterday. This has never before happened to me and just indicates how drivers are in a rush and are driving dangerously. Please do something NOW to address this. We can’t wait for another 3 years while another traffic study is done, issues are debated, etc. Someone is going to get hit by a car speeding through the neighborhood or need an emergency vehicle that cannot reach them in time. Sincerely Brian Gilmer and Zhanna Sardaryan Two photos attached. One of the line of traffic down O’Keefe toward Laurel taken from the middle of the 500 block. The other the cars blocking the drive ways so we cannot get out. The line grew even longer but it was difficult to get a good picture when it was dark. -- Best regards, Kirsten Keith, Mayor of Menlo Park Received on Fri Nov 10 2017 - 08:23:14 PST
