Posted in planning, tagged NIMBY on November 28, 2020| 1 Comment »
The “zoning” doesn’t exist in nature. Its rules come from city councils and landmark preservation commissions. Those with most influence over making the rules have been white homeowners and NIMBY’s – which is why for 40 years most economic gains have gone to the top.
Posted in planning, transit, tagged San Jose, VTA on November 27, 2020| 2 Comments »
The timing would have been fortuitous. Had the VTA simply stuck with its original cut-cover tunnel plans for BART phase-2, then some of the most disruptive construction might have occurred during the COVID shutdown.
As most know, the BART phase-2 tunnel was originally planned as conventional cut-cover, and considerable engineering work had been done on that design. But the cut-cover plan was derailed when San Jose demanded a more complicated deep-bore design. This led to years of delays (not to mention billions in cost overruns).
The reason for the unusual demand was to reduce disruption of local business. Those businesses have now been destroyed anyway by COVID — so all the extra tunnel expense was for nothing. Downtown San Jose will now get a double whammy: COVID followed by BART construction. This was probably not the outcome they were expecting.
One can imagine in some alternate universe that the VTA took advantage of the COVID shutdown to expedite construction. While the pandemic was not predictable, any major delay in the planning pipeline reduces flexibility in construction scheduling. Compare to the controversy over the LACMTA Purple line extension through Beverly Hills. Rather than give in to irrational demands, the LACMTA stuck with original plans, and then expedited that plan when COVID hit.
Posted in automotive, bicycling, pedestrian, tagged Berkeley, Oakland on November 21, 2020| 5 Comments »
Sacramento St in Berkeley is currently under construction for what is described as a “complete streets” project. Here is the existing conditions:
As you can see, this is an extremely wide 4-lane arterial running through a residential neighborhood. The roadway has very low traffic volumes, leading to speeding and dangerous passing. The obvious solution would be a road diet to reduce speeds and space for buffered bike lanes (or perhaps even cycletracks). Instead, the city is only proposing to put in some new intersection treatments without doing any lane reductions or other measures to reduce speeding.
Let’s compare to a very similar project going on along Oakland’s 14th Ave. Here is the existing road configuration, which as you can see is also a 4-lane residential arterial:
Given the similarity of the two streets, one might expect these neighboring cities to implement similar solutions. But aside from the intersection treatments, the approaches are quite different. Berkeley is not adding bike lanes and will maintain its street as a dangerous high-speed thoroughfare. Oakland is doing a full road diet to calm traffic. Thus, the Oakland project is complete, the Berkeley one is not. The sad thing is that the Berkeley project sits directly outside a BART station and connects to a popular bike trail. The top community concern in meetings was slowing traffic, so how did Berkeley end up doing the bare minimum?
Posted in automotive, tagged fracking on November 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »
By now you may have heard about Governor Newsom’s controversial dinner party at the posh French Laundry restaurant. Most criticism has focused on whether the party violated COVID social-distancing rules (almost certainly it did).
The cherry-on-top is that the party was to honor Jason Kinney — an oil industry lobbyist. Kinney had worked on getting permits approved for a major expansion of fracking in Kern County. The Newsom Administration approved those permits less than a month before the party:
The exquisite dinner was held to celebrate the 50th birthday of Kinney, a Newsom insider and lobbying firm partner with a knack for getting his way in the corridors of power. For example, Newsom — who claims to care deeply about climate change — came under fire from environmentalists after his administration approved fracking permits for Aera Energy. Who represents Aera in Sacramento? “That company, Aera Energy — a joint venture of Shell and ExxonMobil — is represented by the lobbying firm Axiom Advisors. Axiom’s lobbyists include Jason Kinney, a senior advisor to Newsom while he served as lieutenant governor,” reported Steve Horn of Capital & Main.
Systemic Failure 