Menlo Park: Council gives nod to traffic plan Menlo Park: Council gives nod to traffic plan (November 03, 2004)

** A 51-percent approval rate would be needed for traffic-calming measures.

By Rebecca Wallace
Almanac Staff Writer

If you're trying to find out if a neighborhood truly wants new speed bumps, traffic circles, or no-turn signs, is it enough if 51 percent of the people there say yes?

Most of the Menlo Park City Council members think it is.

On a 3-2 vote, the council gave the nod October 26 to a new neighborhood traffic-management plan that establishes a formal citywide process for creating traffic-calming measures and ascertaining the demand for them.

As the proposal evolved in recent months before coming to the council, the most controversial part was and is the level of approval threshold required to study, install or remove the measures.

The Transportation Commission had recommended that 60 percent of households, businesses and property owners in an area being studied would have to approve a traffic-calming measure. For example, to make a trial installation of a no-turn sign permanent, a mailed survey would have to have at least 60 percent of the surveys returned with affirmative responses.

Non-responders would be counted as "no" votes, something that several residents criticized as undemocratic. Critics also said the 60 percent threshold is unreasonably high, while supporters said it is needed to ensure that the devices are really wanted and that residents won't protest them once they're installed.

The council's choice of 51 percent, Councilwoman Mickie Winkler said after the meeting, was a "compromise." Her colleagues Lee Duboc and Nicholas Jellins joined her in the vote.

Chuck Kinney and Paul Collacchi dissented, with Mr. Collacchi saying, "The 'no response equals a no vote' doesn't work for me."

Resident Ross Wilson, a longtime critic of the plan, later echoed Mr. Collacchi's concerns, saying the approval threshold should be based on the percent of responders, not of total surveys sent out.

He added in an e-mail, "Overall, the NTMP is obviously designed to render traffic calming and neighborhood protection virtually impossible."

The council will still need to give final approval to the new plan once staff members incorporate all the council's requested changes and return with a final version.

One vote per unit

Under the plan, each residential unit -- whether a house or an apartment -- and each business would get one vote in the survey. The council parted ways with the Transportation Commission in deciding that people who own property in the study area but live elsewhere would not be allowed to vote.

City Attorney Bill McClure gave the council this example: if there are 100 residential units and 10 businesses in a study area, 110 surveys would be sent out. At least 56 would have to be returned with affirmative responses for a project to go forward.

The 51 percent threshold applies for installing traffic-calming devices such as no-turn signs, speed humps, traffic circles, textured pavement and raised crosswalks on a trial basis. It also applies for making the devices permanent or removing them.

The council approved a higher threshold for beginning a study to evaluate the possibility of installing a traffic-calming feature. That process requires a petition with signatures from at least 60 percent of residential units and businesses in the study area.

Ms. Winkler said after the meeting that she would also have approved an overall 60 percent threshold, adding: "I'm just really interested that a majority of people express themselves on this issue. ... I want to avoid the divisiveness of putting in devices that are going to be taken out."

Transportation Commission Chair Reg Rice said he was pleased with the vote and the fact that the council eyed the plan so thoroughly during what proved to be a four-and-a-half-hour meeting.

The plan, crafted by consultant Kimley-Horn and Associates Inc., states as its primary goal "to correct demonstrably unsafe conditions, with priority to locations with higher accident incidences and higher measured speeds."

The secondary stated goal is to protect residents of residential streets from "disproportionate traffic increases."

E-mail a friend a link to this story.