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Davisite Banner. Left side the bicycle obelisk at 3rd and University. Right side the trellis at the entrance to the Arboretum.

Month: June 2023

  • Reject Caltrans So-Called Mitigations to I-80 Widening & Support Rail Transit Investment Instead

    I urge residents to attend the City Council meeting this evening to speak against the Davis City Council supporting the widening of I-80, and instead supporting investment in the parallel intercity rail corridor.  [The item comes up at 8:15 pm]

    An Open Letter to the Davis City Council

    2023-06-06

    Dear City Council Members:

    I am writing to you today as a citizen of Davis.

    You are being asked to approve three letters of intent with the State of California, regarding supposed 'mitigation' for the increased air pollution resulting from the widening of I-80.  I urge you not to sign these letters and instead send a strong message to the State of California opposing the widening of I-80, and instead to actively support a massive investment in intercity rail transit.

    Davis lies on the Capitol Corridor rail line between Roseville and San Jose.  Plans are being developed for a new rail crossing between the East Bay and San Francisco that would allow Capitol Corridor trains to access the Peninsula directly.  Plans are in the works for a new tunnel between Martinez and Richmond to allow the removal the curvy section of the rail line along the Bay to protect the corridor from sea-level rise and speed up that section by ten minutes.  Plans are in the works for hourly and half-hourly rail service within an 18-hour service window.  Plans are in the works for 110 m.p.h. trains using hydrogen, overhead electric, or battery-hybrid electric equipment.

    What these plans lack is funding and state commitment.  The State of California's stated policy is to fund alternative transportation and reduce VMT & GHG.  Yet actual State policy speaks through its funding allocations in expanding highways under the guise of adding 'managed lanes' which the State admits will add to air pollution in the case of the I-80 widening project.  Under what reasoning can Davis support this?

    The so-called mitigation to fund infrastructure for Davis developments is called 'support' in the documents.  That any given development will actually contribute to a reduction in pollutants is a theoretical exercise based on models that are not specific to Davis.  The true effect can only be known once such developments are occupied and the transportation choices of residents known.

    The so-called transit mitigation is to fill a need that may or may not exist.  The need for a micro-transit program in our small town, or the need for a vague 'increase' in public transit has not been studied, nor has the overall effect on pollutants.  Davis is being asked to support questionable, theoretical and insufficient mitigation for a project that the State admits will increase pollution.  This goes against Davis' values.

    Transportation is the #1 cause of air pollutants.  This is largely because of automobile dominance.  It can be difficult as City Councilmembers to turn down 'free' State money, but in this case you indeed must turn that money down.  To give support to the I-80 widening would be to support the continued mass funding of road widening and automobile supremacy.

    Instead, I urge the City Council to make a strong statement to the State of California against growing the auto-centric transportation status quo.  I urge rejecting the mitigation and 'partnership' in highway-widening and instead writing a letter to the State in support of massive investment in intercity rail transit. 

    Tell the State to leave I-80 over the Causeway as it is, retaining two shoulders on each side in each direction for safety.  Then ask the State of California to divert the billions of dollars in current and future highway funds intended for Interstate 80 expansion to instead fund the expansion and improvement of the parallel Capitol Corridor passenger rail service from Roseville to San Jose.

    I thank you for hearing me,

    Alan C. Miller

  • Managing the mismanagement

    Should Mayor Will Arnold recuse himself tonight from an I-80 project discussion because he's Media Affairs Manager at Caltrans?

    ArnoldArnoldImage left: Councilmember Arnold's official Facebook Page & Caltrans / Image right: City of Davis

    Tonight's City Council Agenda item on the 80 Yolo Managed Project was already covered critically and nearly exhaustively last weekend in the Davis Enterprise and yesterday here in the Davisite and in the Davis Vanguard.

    It’s no secret that Mayor Will Arnold is the Media Relations Manager for Caltrans.  Should he recuse himself from the discussion for ethical reasons?  Should he be signing a letter to support a project he would then have to (continue to) work on at Caltrans? I don’t think he can recuse himself from the communications hierarchy there. Based on the linked articles above, consider how Caltrans communicates things about the project: The spin, the lack of backstory, obfuscations to the point of dishonesty… disrespect. (At a public presentation hosted by Cool Davis a couple of months ago, Autumn Bernstein of Yolo Transportation District – who is co-presenting this evening at City Council – said that her agency had convinced Caltrans to do the managed lanes variant with VMT mitigation. The linked articles tell me Caltrans had already decided to do this some time ago, and I would not be totally surprised if they try to re-include the new bike-ped crossing of the Yolo Bypass as a carrot.) 

    Arnold’s job description at LinkedIn is:  “Caltrans Headquarters Public Affairs, Office of the Director – Duties include managing media inquiries and press relations, designing and executing effective communications strategy, and writing/editing communication plans, press releases, talking points and social media content.”

  • A Tale of Two Crossings: Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’

    * If Nishi can't be built, there's nothing to trade as a mitigation
    * Dedicated bike-ped crossing of the Yolo Bypass was quietly cancelled after years of promises.

    NishiPLcomparison1

     

    Tonight's City Council Agenda item on the 80 Yolo Managed Project was already covered critically and nearly exhaustively last weekend in the Davis Enterprise and yesterday here in the Davisite and in the Davis Vanguard.

     

    A Bridge That Can't Be Built…

    I arrived in town after Nishi 1.0 (retroactively supported a concept that would involve a complete redesign of the 80-Richards interchange inclusive of a parking structure and Park & Ride for regional buses which would have minimal impacts on Richards) and was against Nishi 2.0 because I don’t think that there should be housing (buildings with windows people open!) so close to the noisy and arguably otherwise-polluting interstate, but it’s not why I am suggesting that the proposed “multi-modal” mitigation is a fallacy. I agree with others that no VMT mitigations should happen with this project, and am trying to make clear that the plan of Caltrans and its erstwhile partners are also a mess from a technical point of view. (There's also the sheer ironic delight of trying to facilitate the construction of a project using these VMT credits – as it were – to make the Nishi space noisier and more polluted next to a widened interstate.)

    The 80-railway corridor is a wall for people on bikes, but so is the railway on its own.  See Pole Line over 80 at lower right in the illustration above. It’s incredibly long because it has to go very high over the railway tracks, more so than to get over 80 itself (to better understand this, picture the crossings over 113 which are much lower as they only need to accommodate trucks.) First of all, this – and all the over-crossings of 80 in town – are simply not comfortable and suitable for people on normal bicycles, especially carrying children, and especially if they can make the journey by private motor vehicle or e-bike.   The over-crossings have around a 6 to 7% grade, nearly twice as high as the Dutch standard: So to make it comfortable for hundreds of people to go from Nishi to campus it would have to be nearly twice as long. Look again at the view of 80 at Pole Line: There’s no space for this unless it’s very circuitous and indirect and lands behind the Shrem Museum or just by the entrance to Solano Park from Old Davis Rd. (The red line in the top of the image is only as long as Pole Line, and it needs to be much longer.) And that’s just for cycling. Imagine walking this at least twice a day. Motor vehicles including buses can obviously do this, but that's no one's definition of "multi-modal".

    I feel confident in saying that since a motor vehicle, bus, bicycle and walking connection is part of the agreement for Nishi, and as Union Pacific forbids an under-crossing, there’s no way to build Nishi unless it’s returned to the voters. There’s nothing to mitigate here as nothing can be built for mitigation.

    ***

    A Cancelled Crossing…

    For years a dedicated and new bicycle-pedestrian bridge across the ‘Bypass was promised in the project. In 2020 – when I was still on the Bicycling, Transportation and Street Safety Commission (BTSSC) – the notification that it was dropped some months earlier was only indirectly mentioned in a summary for a BTSSC meeting by the primary liaison for the City of Davis at the time, Brian Abbanat (former City of Davis Senior Planner; now he’s in a similar role for Yolo County and co-presenting Tuesday evening.) A couple of years later when this was mentioned to the other co-presenter, YCTD head Autumn Bernstein, she said it was not funded: I believe that the aggregate truth – to be precise as possible – is that Caltrans dropped it, never told any of the local interested groups about it (e.g. Bike Davis, Davis Bike Club) through their liaison Abbanat and that it wasn’t part of the initial, funded proposal to the Federal Government. Our City, County and State government representatives were silent about this betrayal in our so-called "USA cycling capitol".

  • Development Planning Priorities for Davis

    Note: As part of item 8 on Tuesday's City Council agenda, the City will consider an evaluation rubric as a possible tool for consideration of review of peripheral proposals. The following is an alternative rubric proposal.

    Proposed by Judy Corbett, Alan Hirsch, Roberta Millstein, Alan Pryor, Bob Schneider, David J. Thompson, Colin Walsh, Stephen Wheeler, James Zanetto, and Sierra Club Yolano Group

    1. Develop infill opportunities first

    • City to hire consultant or add staff to actively pursue and encourage implementation of the Downtown Plan and other infill opportunities.
    • Council action to initiate redevelopment of city-owned parcels on Fifth Street and communicate with potential nonprofit partners.
    • Council to approach school district regarding redevelopment of 5th Street properties.
    • Upzone parcels along arterial corridors and in shopping centers to a minimum height for mixed-use development so as to use land efficiently in central locations.
    • 100% affordable housing overlay zoning like the Cambridge model to create new affordable housing redevelopment opportunities in already developed areas. By focusing zoning changes only for affordable housing it gives affordable housing developers the opportunity to initiate redevelopment projects without competing against more lucrative for profit market rate developments for development sites.
    • Reduce parking requirements for these sites, including considering car-free housing on certain sites, along with low parking maximums, to encourage redevelopment & affordability; a package of policies to reduce motor vehicle use such as on-site car-shares, market pricing, good bike parking, transit improvements, etc.

    2. Initiate and complete General Plan or Specific Plans updates.  This will provide a comprehensive look at the future and ensure consideration of cumulative impacts including traffic, water, wastewater and other infrastructure. A General Plan is preferred but an option might be a Specific Plan for the Northeast and /or Northwest areas. Any new planning process should be kept short and efficient so as to avoid the lengthy and expensive experiences of many past plans.

    3. Peripheral development standards

    (more…)

  • Make transit & walkable communities a priority, not just a mitigation for freeway widening

    I-80TO Mayor Will Arnold and Members
    Davis City Council

    From: Judy Corbett, Professor Steven Wheeler, Alan Pryor, Professor Mark Huising, Professor Roberta Millstein, Jim Zanetto, Colin Walsh, Alan Hirsch, Robert Thayer

    Our group supports walkable, bikeable, compact infill development near transit, shopping, community amenities, and jobs. Building a wider freeway to increase the auto capacity is contrary to our over-arching goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

    It is well established science that wider freeways do not fix congestion but do increase driving and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), as noted in the well researched Davis Enterprise article of June 3th. The travel forecast model developed by the UC Davis Institute for Transportation Studies (and accepted by Caltrans and the Yolo County Transit District) estimates that the I-80 freeway widening will generate enough car travel (178 million miles a year !) to  equal the GHG emissions that would be generated by adding a new auto centric city the size of Winters.

    Will Davis Decide to Ignore Climate Emergency?

    On Tuesday June 6 Caltrans will ask the Davis City Council to make use of our GHG-reducing projects to justify the additional GHG that would be caused by the I-80 widening.

    (more…)

  • No deal on cuts except military. Tax the corporations and the wealthy.

    Neither happened in the debt ceiling deal that is now through the Senate.

    Screenshot-2023-05-23-at-2.By Scott Steward

    Representatives take a sober oath of office to serve the people and what we get are plutocrats. Replutocrats and Deplutocrats, choose their Parties of Grievance or Complicity, controlled by plutocrats in succession to be the Pelosis and the McConnells of their time – McCarthy and Jeffries.

    There is no good scenario where irresponsible military spending, grossly fattened tax benefits (for the already ultra-wealthy) and withholding aid to the hungry is the plan.

    The 20 year wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost us $21 trillion. Whatever we've been doing in the middle east, now Ukraine, and around the world has cost us trillions. When crying for a balanced budget, why aren't we ending sixty years of US led forever war policy?

    Corporate profits have increased 14 times since 1980 to $2.8 trillion a quarter. In the same years, most wages have just kept up. Tax law has increased owner, executive, and trust babies purchasing power a 100 times. They can afford the cost cost of health care, housing and education.  For these essentials, the rest of us have less purchasing power than we did 60 years ago. That is what our budget policy should fix.

    (more…)

  • Letter: Hibbert’s 224 Apartment Proposal Will Have NO Parking and NO Poor

    This Loophole Must Be Removed

    Hibbert’s SB 330 development avoids the Builder’s Remedy which at least requires 20% of the units for Low Income (LI) so on the face of it for 224 units projected there should be 44 units for low income households.

    So by adding a measly 8,000 sq. ft. retail to a four story project, Hibbert’s avoids providing 33 low income units. Under SB 330 only 11 low income units are proposed which is 5%. None of units will serve very low income (VLI) households which is the city’ biggest gap in meeting the RHNA numbers of 580 VLI.

    The project is exclusionary by design.

    For the Hibbert’s site proposal under SB330 there will be no parking requirements. Think of the impact on G street neighbors and the Co-op in particular. Where will 250-300 vehicles park in the neighborhood?

    David J Thompson

  • Welcome to Al’s Corner – “Pouring Gasoline on the Dumpster Fire of Davis Politics” – June 2023

    image from www.sparkysonestop.com

    There MAY not have been a May version of Al's Corner.  People got by.  They posted May stuff in April.  We all lived.

    June's Al's Corner will feature ketchup and mustard on top.  Peace.  Over & Out.