The Burlingame Voice

A BART Non-answer

I'm catching up with the January issue of the free San Francisco magazine that magically shows up in the mail every month.  It's often worth a quick read and can venture south of EssEff once in awhile like four years ago when we were deemed Utopia-qualified.  This month has a piece profiling the newly-elected BART board member, Janice Li.  Her claim to fame is as a bicycle advocate.  She also "still thinks it is scary, weird and absurd to be an elected official".   But somehow she has the elected official's non-answer answer down pat as seen here:

Q:  Riders south of San Francisco don't get to vote for BART elected officials, even though there are BART stations there.  Is that a good idea?

A:  There are two sides to the San Mateo problem.  Some people say that the people who live there aren't paying their fair share.  Others say that they are losing out because they have no representation.  I'm not totally sold that BART should even have a voter-elected board.  It's extraordinarily rare.

If you are waiting for the rest of the response, join the club.  I'm not feeling super confident about the future direction of the Caltrain and high-speed rail connections at the intermodal station in Millbrae.  You?

Affordability Problems Explained

The former CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, T.J. Rodgers, has been an outspoken critic of much of what goes on it Sacramento for decades.  His latest pointed critique of brand spanking new Guv. Gavin brings some well-known statistics together in one place in reply to Gavin telling the business community I should (must?  will?) do more about affordability.

When I was CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, I chose Round Rock, Texas, over San Jose, Calif., for Cypress’s second wafer-fabrication plant, and I chose to locate our third plant in Bloomington, Minn. Other CEOs made similar decisions. Silicon Valley barely has any silicon left; there are now zero state-of-the-art wafer-fabrication plants here. We had to move because government has made Silicon Valley uncompetitive for manufacturing.

Despite boasting the second-highest gasoline tax in the U.S., California’s roads are so potholed it actually pays to buy tire insurance. California power costs around 15.7 cents a kilowatt-hour, compared with 11.2 cents in Oregon and 9.7 cents in Washington state. But even those state-regulated windfall rates aren’t enough: Pacific Gas & Electric is about to go bankrupt again.

California took in record tax revenue in 2018, beating estimates by $1 billion according to the Los Angeles Times. But Mr. Newsom demanded even more: “I want to see the [companies in Silicon] Valley step up and match our contributions,” he said.

Rodgers also invokes the dreaded NIMBYs but doesn't dwell on that aspect of the housing supply equation.  Nice to know our electricity is 62% more expensive than the State of Washington's juice.  Anyone know where you can buy good tire insurance for those trips on El Camino?

 

Parking Wishlist: 2019

It's not too late for another 2019 New Year's wish, so here goes.  To me the idea of a "Compact" parking space being any different, i.e. smaller, than any other parking space is a sad little joke.  Nobody pays any attention to the Compact markings, if they can even read them after a few months.  Their existence is a ploy to meet a parking requirement while making the parking lot more inconvenient (and occasionally expensive due to ding and paint repair) for people using the lot.  These Compact spaces fill up with SUVs and large sedans like any other space and I have never seen any enforcement.  Nor am I suggesting that the BPD or private security like Safeway has in place enforce it.  It's hopeless.  So dear city planners, let's just dump the idea and make anyone, especially the forthcoming "high-density" developers, put in real parking spaces all around.  As evidence, here is a row of "Compact" spaces at Safeway on a recent day.

Bad Dieting Ideas

I can't link to the Wall Street Journal site behind the paywall, so I will just give you some highlights of a piece from today on the perils of "road diets".  They are becoming popular in the Bay Area including Menlo Park that just made one example permanent on Middlefield Rd. and, of course, our very own Carolan Ave. example.  I suppose you could add the roundabout as another example.  But.....

Los Angeles, like cities nationwide, is transforming its streets. In July 2017 the city installed a “road diet” on a 0.8-mile stretch of Venice Boulevard in Mar Vista, reducing four lanes to two and adding bike lanes separated from traffic by parking buffers. The project is part of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Vision Zero initiative, which aims to eliminate traffic fatalities in the city by 2025. Launched in 2015, Vision Zero is the most radical transformation of how people move through Los Angeles since the dawn of the freeway era 75 years ago.

By almost any metric it’s been a disaster. Pedestrian deaths have nearly doubled, from 74 in 2015 to 135 in 2017, the last year for which data are available. After years of improvement, Los Angeles again has the world’s worst traffic, according to the transportation research firm Inrix. Miles of vehicles idling in gridlock have reduced air quality to 1980s levels.

Lane reductions, bike lanes, new meridians and other innovations designed to reduce vehicle speeds make it difficult for bulky ambulances and fire trucks to respond quickly to emergencies. 

Let's just file this under the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Here is our local example which is OK.  It gets a little confusing up at Broadway for both cyclists and drivers, but doesn't inhibit fire trucks and such.

 

BHS Pool Fix at $6.4 Million and Climbing

Oddly enough, I was a long ways from B'game last week when the issue came up of the BHS pool being closed for the long-term.  It was just after this meeting took place as described in today's Daily Journal:

With the price tag for rebuilding the swimming pool at Burlingame High School continuously floating higher, city officials are examining ways to help pay down the cost for the highly-valued community facility.  The Burlingame City Council discussed during a study session Monday, Jan. 7, strategies for collaborating with San Mateo Union High School District officials to address the reconstruction.  As officials from both agencies have watched the projected cost for the total rebuild rise to $6.4 million, Burlingame Mayor Donna Colson expressed some sticker shock over the continuous construction cost hikes.

City and school officials will share the reconstruction cost, as the pool is on school district property but city programming accounts for most of its use when students aren’t swimming.

As you dive into the rest of the article you see the weakness in the California approach to having the school districts being separate from their host cities--unlike where I grew up in Massachusetts where the schools were just another department.  C'est la vie.  Perhaps the Big Glass Box of a new Rec Center will get some further cost engineering to carve out a couple of million?  Here is a shot of the pool as it stands now--very sad.

Entertainment Wishlist: 2019

Let's face it B'gamers.  After about 9:30 pm both B'way and the Avenue pretty much roll-up the sidewalks.  There are a couple of bars that have business, but no entertainment to speak of.  Broadway Grill is one exception usually one night a week and Behan's has the occasional band as does the Vinyl Room.  But if you are looking for that cool, late-night, take-your-girl-out-and-talk to her, jazz vibe, it ain't here.  That is my entertainment wish for 2019.  One model is Savanna Jazz on the south end of Laurel Ave. in San Carlos.  Great spot for jazz several nights a week and weekend afternoons.  That may not be sustainable with rents the way they are in B'game-- even if the struggles retail is having cause plenty of empty space.  Several locals express wonder over how any landlord could prefer 6, 9 or 12 months of empty space to a lower rent coming is regularly.  But they apparently do.  So the next option is to tag onto a restaurant's night with jazz after the last plate has been served.  That is the hope for 2019.  In the meantime, feast your eyes on Savanna Jazz' scene in San Carlos.

A Dry Start to 2019

The most common response from local politicians to the question of "where will we get the water to support all of this development?" is "there's plenty of water".  That response is underpinned by a study titled "2015 Urban Water Management Plan for the City of Burlingame" dated June 2016 by Erier & Kalinowski, Inc.  One of my 2019 goals is to dig into this study and check its calculations and assumptions--every forecast has assumptions that may or may not be stated explicitly.  In the meantime, all questions of water eventually work back to the source; which we see is not off to a great start this year per the Comicle piece:

A lot more snow will have to fall if California is to have enough water this year to fill reservoirs, nourish salmon, help crops flourish and moisten the fire-prone hills long enough to avoid another catastrophic conflagration, state officials said Thursday.  California’s top snow surveyors, in the Sierra on Thursday with measuring poles and electronic sensor data, concluded that the state’s frozen water supply is just adequate, at best.

The water content of the snow in California’s mountains is 67 percent of the long-term average for this time of year, according to the first of the official monthly measurements in 2019 taken by the California Department of Water Resources.

January is too early to raise the alarm bells on this year, but the 10 year trend line tells me it isn't too early to raise the yellow flag on some of the more aggressive development plans in Northern California.

Happy New Year from the Voice

Russ and I wish all you intrepid Voice readers a very happy New Year.  During the course of 2018 we surpassed one million views, approached the 5,000 post milestone (4,790 to be exact) and almost 30,000 comments have been added over the last 15 years.  The themes have stayed consistent and will continue on in 2019 because, well, the issues pretty much stay the same.

For starters, as outgoing mayor Michael Brownrigg said during his speech at the council rotation, we have to guard against "asphyxiating on our success".  I'm as worried about dehydrating from our success as asphyxiating, but that is a topic for another post or two...or three.  At one holiday party this past week, I had a chat with a long time Silicon Valley exec who does not pay much attention to local politics--he's focused on growing his latest start-up.  As I described the prevailing politicians' view that we can build our way out of the "housing crisis" he looked at me like I was joking.  "Don't they understand that the more they build, the more we will build?"  The we is the biotech, information tech and whatever-is-next tech industry.  I told him "no".

You can peruse the right hand frame of this page to see all of the categories of interest.  Locals bemoan the quality of our local restaurants, but I think they are improving...slowly.  And maybe there will be some improvement in SFO runway noise as it garners more attention.  At last night's NYE party, without any prompting from me, five B'gamers just ripped the new roundabout.  And I could not agree more with two of the Daily Journal's Jon Mays New Year's resolutions:

• Perhaps someone can build something that actually improves traffic with the increase in bridge tolls and sales tax for transportation. Perhaps there could be some paving work done on El Camino Real with our gas tax revenue as well.
• If you are a politician advocating for mass transit, take it semi-regularly, not just on occasion.

I'm hoping for more Best of Burlingame postings about locals who add to our quality of life and here's hoping for some developments that move us in that direction--like getting Top Golf going on the bayfront and hearing more live music on B'way and the Avenew.  I'm working on the live music dream myself, so if you know of any venues (mostly restaurants) that might be interesting in hosting, please let me know.  Have a safe and happy 2019.