The Burlingame Voice

High Cost Rail - Part 143 $27M per Day

Not much else to add besides what the LA Times is reporting on burgeoning expenses that aren't even burgeoning enough

LOS ANGELES —The California bullet train project has cost state taxpayers an average $3.1 million a day over the last year —a construction spending rate higher than that for the Bay Bridge, Boston's Big Dig or any U.S. transportation project in recent history.

But still it's not enough, planners say.  In order to hit its 2033 deadline and $77 billion budget, the California High Speed Rail Authority will have to increase daily spending by up to nine times over the next four years or risk putting the already-delayed system further behind.  Russell Fong, the authority's chief financial officer, acknowledges the goals will be difficult to achieve.

Still, officials said they are beginning to ramp up spending, and the estimates were officially adopted by the rail authority board in its 2018 business plan.  But outside infrastructure experts question whether the $27 million-a-day outlay necessary under the plan would even be possible.

"That burn rate is ludicrous," said civil engineer James Moore, director of the University of Southern California's transportation engineering program. "It is so far outside standard experience that it doesn't make sense to assume it will occur."

"Outside standard experience".  I like that and will use it going forward.

Train Horn Non-update

Like many B'gamers, I wish this article in today's Daily Journal was about the B'game city council working on a quiet zone, but it's about San Mateo trying to get started.  I'll just pluck a couple of the technical and money points to highlight the challenges both cities face

To mitigate the uptick in risk associated with not sounding the train horns at crossings, the Federal Railroad Administration, or FRA, requires cities requesting quiet zones to implement safety improvements at the crossings, said San Mateo city engineer Jeffrey Tom. Among the measures Tom said could be taken to reduce the risk of crossings are:

• four-quadrant gate systems, which block both directions of traffic on both sides of the track
• installing medians to prevent drivers from crossing the tracks when the gates are down
• converting two-way streets into one-way streets and
• separating the tracks from the street level by building an underpass, or a grade separation project.

But those measures will be costly, Tom explained, with the least expensive option — to install four-quadrant gates at Second, East Fourth and East Bellevue avenues — to cost at least $9 million.

That would be $3 million per quadrant gate by my math.  I'll just play my broken record for a moment-  we have $100 billion dollars for an unneeded high-speed rail system that will probably never be finished, but $3M per gate is likely to take years.  Typical.

Massage Envy Lawsuit

Here's some news that has gone national that we really didn't need.  The East Bay Times is reporting with a local photo and all

A Bay Area resident and five other California women have joined a national wave of litigants suing Massage Envy on allegations that the spa giant routinely turned a blind eye to male employees who sexually assaulted their clients, enabling the men to victimize again.Massage Envy was sued this week by six California women for allegedly protecting masseurs accused of sexually assaulting clients, including some who were later charged with sex crimes. One plaintiff is a victim in a case involving the Burlingame location pictured. 

The latest lawsuit, filed in San Mateo County this week, involves massage clients who patronized the spa chain’s locations spanning from Orange County to Burlingame, the latter involving a former massage therapist who last month was charged with more than a dozen counts of sexual battery for his alleged conduct on the job.

“This is happening everywhere,” said Bobby Thompson, whose Burlingame-based firm filed the suit alongside Philadelphia-based Laffey, Bucci & Kent.

The Bay Area victim, a San Francisco resident identified as “Jane Doe #1” in the lawsuit, visited the Burlingame Massage Envy location in November and described an encounter where during a session, 28-year-old Brandon James Davis sexually assaulted her. Doe is one of the victims behind the sexual battery charges against him.

We have heard rumblings of a different sort about massage parlors on Broadway and elsewhere in B'game but this is the first charges of this sort.  The only positive is that the news may cause more victims to come forward if they exist.

Drive-in Reality on the Bayfront

I suppose it is appropriate that the old Burlingame Drive-in, home to many a night of virtual reality viewing through car windshields, would become the home of the Facebook Oculus virtual reality (VR) business unit.  The Daily Journal is following up on the SF Business Times' piece and television newscasts with a story today about the proposed lease

Mayor Michael Brownrigg expressed his enthusiasm over the social media titan’s announcement.  “No more ‘Boring-game,’” declared Brownrigg, who said the decision is further indication of the city’s viability as a hub of industry.

Under terms of the agreement approved by the commission, Facebook will be the sole occupant of the 767,000 square feet to be spread across two five-story buildings, one seven-story building, one eight-story building and a two-story amenities building.

Furthering that transformation will be other developments in the area east of Highway 101, where adjacent to that site, interest has been expressed in developing property owned by the State Lands Commission into a hotel. North of the proposed site, sports entertainment enterprise Topgolf is slated to move into the city’s driving range.

A proposal has also been filed to build the SFO Technology Center, slated to house more than 239,000 square feet of office space, about 11,000 square feet for a restaurant and more than 8,000 square feet of retail space at the former Hyatt Cinema site.

You should click through to read the fine print about traffic and the usual platitudes about "alternative modes of transportation".  Pardon me for not being quite so enthusiastic about a million plus new square feet of Bayfront development without a traffic plan already in place.  And exactly what are the alternatives?  The Broadway overpass is done and functional at the current load, but probably not much more.  Any Anza access is years away.  Facebook better try to put a pier in for ferry service!

Another Time, This Place

I don't want to push the misplaced Stop Sign post down from the top, but the Voice needs to stay fresh so here is a little "thought piece" that starts 69 years ago.  If you find it boring, just scroll down to comment on stop signs, scooters, wildfires, SFO runway noise, our lack of water security, BHS woes, empty stores on the Avenew, etc, etc.

I always loved Herb Caen's take on EssEff life.  In the '80s and '90s, I read him every day and twice on Sundays.  I also read and reread his books.  His 1949 classic, Baghdad by the Bay, starts off chapter 28 with this paragraph

San Francisco, brought to life by the lusty, gusty roars of the gold seekers, has never taken itself too seriously.  From the very start there has been life and laughter in Baghdad-by-the-Bay, with every citizen a potential comedian, every stuffed shirt the inevitable butt of a joke, every facet of the city's life wide open to the snide observation.

Herb would be so disappointed by the EssEff of 2018.  There are so many stuffed shirts strutting around SF that it is positively regressive--in a progressive sort of way.  The City is a mess and I am afraid the effluent will taint B'game even more than it already has.  It's bad enough that they control our water supply, let their airport disrupt our sleep and keep trying to make socialist rent control seem mainstream.  The November ballot will be packed with sneakily written propositions and innocent claims about dangerous initiatives.  Let's hope we can channel Herb Caen and keep our sense of humor and whatever the noun is that goes with "snide".

A Stop Sign We Don't Need

Is anyone else struck by the irony of the City spending $3 million bucks on a roundabout on California Ave to speed up traffic and improve pedestrian safety while simultaneously adding a new stop sign in front of the library's pseudo-roundabout a block away?  Doesn't seem to make sense to me.  We don't need more ways to impede traffic downtown.  In less than 5 minutes I saw a couple of cars blow right through the stop sign--no doubt locals who have been navigating the circle for decades.  And I also saw a near rear-ender when one car did stop as directed but the next driver was taken by surprise (not an excuse for them, just an observation).

I'm not sure what problem we are trying to solve.  If it's pedestrian safety there would seem to be other alternatives.  The posted sign nearby says this is a one-year pilot that will then be evaluated by the Traffic Safety and Parking commission ("T-spoon").  How about a one-month trial followed by removing the stop sign?

Sr. Engineer Andrew Wong at the City ([email protected]) is awaiting your input.

Scooter Dangers

Two months ago we looked at the economics of the rent-a-scooter-by-the-minute business here.  It is a compelling equation with a two month payback that is attracting plenty of capital.  Last week Russ and I made a field trip to San Jose and we happened to dine on W. Santa Clara Ave downtown.  In an hour we saw more than a dozen scooters whiz by on the sidewalk.  It was a bit of a wake-up call for me that was followed by this bit from the SF Chronicle last week

A hospital conference room is an unlikely place to assess a budding transportation revolution, but a team of San Francisco trauma specialists and researchers who gathered there sees its work as essential to ensuring the safety of residents in a city of high-tech guinea pigs.  “We don’t know what we don’t know,” Dr. Catherine Juillard, a trauma surgeon at San Francisco General Hospital, said during the meeting in late June.

After a brief absence, shared electric scooters will soon return to San Francisco, and the city and the doctors at the meeting want to track the injuries — from skinned knees to head trauma — that result from the scooters and other transportation options flooding the city.

“I can say that several years ago that I didn’t see these types of injuries happening, and now I do,” said Juillard, who is also a professor researching injury prevention at UCSF. “But we have to do the hard work of looking at the data to determine if there’s truly a trend.”

I hope the doc is looking at pedestrian injury rates and severity as well since cyclists almost always ride in the street while my tiny survey showed the scooterists preferring the sidewalks.  Here is a pic of a nicely dressed lady in heels getting on her Lime scooter--what could go wrong?

 

Walking Through B'game History

The Historical Society put on a fun tour through three parts of B'game yesterday.  I only caught the Burlingame Ave. tour given by Joanne Garrison and Jennifer Pfaff which started at the train station and took about 50 people past the new Greetings mural, down the Avenew, past the library and stopped at City Hall.  The crowd got an hour and fifteen minute whirlwind introduction to a number of prominent architects from B'game's formative years including A. Page Brown, Geo Howard, William Weeks, W. H. Toepke & Havens, Col. Norberg, Charles Weeks, and William Whifler.  The combination of some of their life histories while standing in front of some of their designs made for a delightful afternoon on a busy Sunday on the Ave.  Hopefully a few new members signed up as a result.

Quelling the Infernos

The headlines are burning up with reports of numerous wildfires all over the state.  Today's headline notes that Gov. Brown thinks we are in "uncharted territory".  That's only because he has been ignoring the obvious precedents that have peppered his whole time in office including the Tubb's Fire of last year that should have been a third or fourth wake-up call.  Luckily some state Senator from Orange County that I have never heard of, John Moorlach, has a firm grip on the obvious as noted in this piece in the SF Chronicle.  I'll chop it down to the essence, but you can read through it at your leisure while you ponder the foothills and Mills Canyon as the potential next hotspot while also pondering that the B'game Fire Dept. is doing its part to help up north by sending some of our team elsewhere--just like they did last year.

    3 practical steps to reduce wildfires in California

1. We should revisit Senate Bill 1463, which I authored in 2018 but was killed in committee even though no one testified in opposition to it. Called “Cap and Trees,” it would continuously appropriate 25 percent of state cap-and-trade funds to counties to harden the state’s utility infrastructure and better manage wildlands and our overgrown and drought-weakened forests.
2. We should stop funding the high-speed rail project with cap-and-trade dollars — $621 million this year, according to the analysis of the fiscal 2018-19 budget by the Legislative Analyst’s Office — and divert it to protecting our forests.  Some of this may involve prescribed burns in our forests, as authored this year in Senate Bill 1260 by my Democratic colleague, Hannah-Beth Jackson of Santa Barbara. 
3. Where such burns are impractical, such as around homes and developed property, we can employ mechanical thinning. 

Moorlach also notes

A single forest fire can release four or five times as much greenhouse gas than are reduced by a year’s worth of government-regulated industry and personal vehicles emission. Oddly, the California Air Resources Board doesn’t even count wildfire greenhouse gases in its carbon-reduction reports.

With the Ferguson fire (Yosemite) nearing 60,0000 acres burned, I'll bet that estimate is way low.  #2 is so obvious that I hope even Gavin Newsom gets it.......

Cars in the Park Roared

Saturday was another beautiful day to see a lot of gorgeous cars in Washington Park at the annual Lion's Club Cars in the Park show.  The number of local (i.e. B'game) entrants was excellent and the overall quality was superb.  The food choices were a little limited compared to prior years and one wonders why the Off The Grid trucks don't latch onto this as a fun and profitable place to be?  I particularly liked this classic beauty which gets the Voice award for 2018.