Atherton VC Gary Lauder seems upset, and with good reason. He’s upset at the Willows B & B (Boondoggle & Bottleneck) at the Willow Road / 101 intersection. He has stepped up to the plate and took the time to research the issues, speaking with Caltrans, and documenting his findings. Have a look at Gary Lauder’s video showing, using the 101 Hillsdale interchange an example, why the Willow/101 interchanged won’t work.
Aerial View of Hillsdale/101
There is now a Facebook group ‘Willow Interchange.’
On a December 28th email to the MP Council Mr. Lauder says:
“…[Two of the 5 MP City Council (MPCC) members believe that this should be re-evaluated. The other 3 have not replied to my invitations to discuss this nor to join me on a field trip all the way to Hillsdale Blvd. Those 3 are: Rich Cline, Kirsten Keith and Peter Ohtaki. It’s up to the affected residents of MP to insist that the City Council commence reverting the project unless the questions are adequately answered. After meeting with CalTrans for 5 hours, I am pretty sure that the only honest answers would lead to reversion to a cloverleaf.”
On January 16th (that’s next Tuesday) the MP City Council shall discuss the this project.
The development we see today at that intersection was initiated 10-12 years ago was the proposed solution to problems at that time, using traffic counts and projects that were stale after signature. The project was presented as facilitating east-west bicycle access and use. Saying 'bicycle' is implicitly saying 'cars will off the road.' They blew it.
Someone recently mentioned stringing gondolas to carry people across the bay. There's actually a great example of this in NYC alongside the 59th Street Bridge, connecting the East Side of Manhattan with Roosevelt Island in the East River.
II. What if we build safe routes to school and they’re not used?
How do we bear the fruits of the ‘Safe Routes to Schools’ initiative. The Oak Grove striping, intended to provide a safe buffer from cars for bicyclists heading school seems to be too narrow for both curbed cars and bicyclists.
Last month while parking on Santa Cruz Avenue and 8 AM, a gaggle (okay, maybe 10), kids headed west to school on bikes - avoiding Oak Grove. In a sense they voted that Santa Cruz Avenue was safer than Oak Grove (at least early in the morning). I was really surprised to see this.