The Burlingame Voice

It's Really Sacramento's Sidewalk

You really have to love the commonsense approach that our state legislators take on local issues.  Here is the latest example, now signed into law by Gov., soon to be ex-Gov. Brown

TAKE IT TO THE STREETS: Senate Bill 946 (Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens)

As the Trump administration ramps up its immigration enforcement efforts, California is attempting to bring street vendors, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, out of the shadows. The state will now prohibit local governments from banning sidewalk sales of food and other merchandise, and require them to set up a licensing system if they want to regulate the practice. Violations of local rules can only be punished with citations or fines, not criminal charges, so as not to alert immigration authorities.

And who pays for the "licensing system" to be designed, built, advertised and maintained?  We do.  Nice work.  Definitely got your priorities right, legislators.

Bike Lanes Bloom

I enjoy biking around B'game especially on the side streets and the bay front and I get that sometimes bikers need to use some of the main streets to get where they are going.  The new bike lanes just going in on California Drive (not "Avenue" as the contractor's sign says at the roundabout project) are the latest to bloom on our streets.  What I don't get is why the green lanes are not further to the right next to the curb?  From what the Merc's Roadshow column says, this is a point of confusion for a lot of motorists

Q Can you please remind drivers of the proper way to make a right turn when a bicyclist is present? I am terrified as I bike toward an intersection and a driver to my left or behind me waits until the last moment to make his move for a right turn, often cutting me off. … In my cycling experience, this is the single most dangerous habit of motorists that puts us cyclists at risk.  

A It’s time to remind drivers about a question that motorists get wrong more than any other on DMV tests: how to make a legal and safe right turn at an intersection when a bicyclist is present. Drivers, here is the right way to do this:

 

-Merge into or across the bike lane before your right turn, all the way to the curb. You can do this on all streets, whether they have bike lanes or not, within 200 feet of the intersection and only after ensuring there are no bikes in that lane.  (Ed:  so in many cases the turning car is blocking the green lane regardless of whether it is curbside or 4-6' off the curb)

-If you think there’s a chance that merging wouldn’t give a rider behind you enough time to slow down or pass on the left, then don’t do it. Slow down, and merge behind the rider to make your right turn. Treat bicyclists as if they were motorists.

All well and good but it doesn't describe why the lane is so far off the curb.  Where there are parking spaces, it's understandable but where there are none, like at busy intersections, it appears to me to add to the confusion for drivers.

 

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.

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!

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 (awong@burlingame.org) 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?

 

Avenue Woes

Austin Walsh at the Daily Journal has latched onto the concerns about rents and parking on "The Avenue" in this piece in today's paper.

The former homes to J. Crew, Anthropologie, Kara’s Cupcakes, Baby Couture, Aida Opera Candies and Gymboree are among the locations remaining unoccupied on the core commercial corridor.

Juan Loredo, president of the Downtown Business Improvement District, attributed the empty storefronts primarily to the inability or unwillingness of some companies to continue paying the high cost of doing business.

Juan makes the case for variety in the stores around the downtown and that certainly has been an issue as well.  The utter lack of any after-dinner entertainment is a glaring deficiency vis a vis Redwood City, Palo Alto and even San Carlos!   The ongoing parking issues also get mentioned but not analyzed (which is fine for a pure news piece) so we'll add some insight here.  Austin writes

Officials recognize parking constraints, and are planning to redevelop an existing surface lot into a garage offering 100 more spaces. On a neighboring lot, officials are seeking to construct an affordable housing development.

Business owners concerned about the loss of parking through the construction period have lobbied for the garage to be built before the housing development.

I'll bet there are more than a few business owners who also think adding a big chunk of new housing will only exacerbate the business-available parking.  They may be feeling the political-correctness pressure to not say so, but I bet they are thinking it.  With 220 California nearing completion and PAMF apparently pulling out of being the anchor tenant, we may see the impact of that under-parked monster building kick in long before any additional city parking even hits the drawing board.  We must also ask, "Where will the money come from?"

I felt that we had reached a tipping point when Anthropologie couldn't make it--and that pretty good, sizeable space is still available months later.  Keep the window paper handy.

Lime Scooter Economics

B'game hasn't been overrun by rental scooters--yet.  The Wall Street Journal has an article that gives us the economics of the scooter companies and why they are attracting as much venture capital as fast as they are.  Here are the numbers

Many scooters would generate more money if their batteries didn’t run out by midday, he said. Spin has said it had a few hundred scooters in San Francisco before the city started implementing a permit program.  Lime and Bird have told investors they aim to operate millions of scooters, hoping to replace many short trips by car and foot in cities around the world.

The companies tell investors they recoup the cost of the scooters, generally about $350 to $450, after about two months, or faster. The biggest daily costs are maintenance and charging—about $10 to $15 a day per scooter, according to investors who have seen the numbers. The companies pay a force of local residents to charge the scooters in their homes, and some company trucks pick up remaining scooters at night.

“If nothing else, we’ve learned from ride-sharing and home-sharing coming to Nashville, it’s better to be strict on the front end,” said Jeremy Elrod, a member of Nashville’s Metro Council who is pushing for a pilot program that initially limits the number of scooters to 250 for each company. “It’s hard to claw them back,” he said.

Call it a word to the wise.  And with the nuisance factor of the bikes and scooters being left on sidewalks perhaps the business license fee should go up accordingly.

Bridge Toll Increase Passes

I was originally of two minds on the Regional Measure 3 bridge toll hike that passed on Tuesday.  On the one hand increasing the tolls might drive down the traffic from the East Bay that makes 92 and 101 a mess during the daily commute, but the ballot opposition by local transit expert Pat Giorni (and others) convinced me to vote against it--to no avail as it passed.  So now that we are stuck with it, let's post for the record what we are supposed to get from the MTC with all of this new money (~$4.5 billion).  The DJ notes:

In San Mateo County, the measure was approved by about 54 percent, slightly under regional totals. The measure was most popular in San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, where it was approved by 65 and 61 percent of voters, respectively, while Contra Costa and Solano were the two counties to reject the measure with 45 and 31 percent of voter approval, respectively, according to early results.

Linda Koelling, a former Foster City mayor leading the San Mateo effort against RM3, said the measure won’t even come close to curing congestion. “It doesn’t provide a timeline or framework for any performance measures,” she said. “Most of these projects aren’t even shovel-ready and who decides whose project comes first or second? I have no confidence in whoever put this together in their ability to plan and prioritize projects.”

The projects are:

• Expansion of BART’s fleet for $500 million and extension of BART service to San Jose for $375 million
• $300 million would fund the express lanes project, which would add two additional lanes with tolls to Highway 101 from Whipple Road to Interstate 380 in San Mateo County
• Another $300 million would be dedicated to enhanced ferry service
• $325 million would extend Caltrain to downtown San Francisco
• $50 million would be allocated to work on the Highway 101/State Route 92 interchange.
• Twenty-five percent of revenue will be allocated for transit operations annually.

Based on history, Ms. Koelling would appear to have a realistic view of the MTC's project management and governance weaknesses.  But we all pay up anyway.  Let's check back in 3-5 years and see if any of this really happened or the billions just vanished into the bureaucratic maw.

Roundabout Round-up

By popular demand, here is a new post on the California Dr. roundabout that is now under construction.  We discussed it 15 months ago here, but a new post is in order since the project is "in the dirt".  Here is the link to the City website for the project description, bid documents including the winning bid from Redgwick Construction that beat out the other four bidders.  If it comes in on budget this will be a $3 million dollar investment ($3,014,305 to be exact), but alas it does not have a cannon to replace the one that sat there until it was reportedly melted down during WWII.  That would have been a nice touch around Memorial Day so if any B'gamers have an extra cannon or know where we can find one, this is the place to let us know!

Just in time for Memorial Day, here is a photo of the cannon that has been provided by the B'game Historical Society.  It was apparently used as part of a promotion for the move Treasure Island showing at the Peninsula Theatre in 1934.