10 November 2017 Upper Woodland Avenue Dear City Council, As you know, the Willows traffic situation isbecoming unbearable. Please do something immediately to reduce the volume andspeed of cut-through traffic in our neighborhood as a whole. Soundlevels are very high, safety is impaired, and quality of life and propertyvalues are degraded. In the attached document is a photo of traffic on Woodland andMiddlefield taken at ~9 AM on 3 November. Similar congestion often exists onother days. Speed bumps are NOT the answer, nor are theplatitudes of ‘increased enforcement’. What is urgently required is to maketransit through the Willows more time-costly than use of the main arterials,and to block the high volume of trucks short-cutting through the area. I’ve ontwo occasions seen large 10? vehicle commercial transporters using WoodlandAvenue. Please … don’t beg off the problems with statements like ‘when the101 intersection is finished, things will be better’. Development in the workson El Camino and at Stanford and Facebook will greatly increase traffic,countering any temporary lessening occurring at intersection completion. You also need to attend to the dangerous intersectionat Woodland / Middlefield. Besides often being blocked by cars, automobilesround the low-sight-lined-corner from Palo Alto at high speed and are a hazard.On several occasions, we have nearly been hit. The underlying cause of the traffic woes is Council’s(and neighboring cities’) approval of massive building projects grossly incompatiblewith existing roadway capacity; and the gridded street layout of Menlo Park’solder neighborhoods. Why has not this council / city manager beenforthright with residents about the traffic consequences of out-scaledevelopment so that elective decisions can be made? Clearly, some traffic figures are buried inEIRs, but these developer-sponsored documents never convey the full impact oftheir projects (or else they are approved with ‘mitigating circumstances’). Betweenwork and family obligations, who has time to wade through them? What is needed is a simplified accounting toall residents, of the consequences of any major development project, perhapsthrough easily-digestible mailers. I realize that Council does not bear soleresponsibility for these problems: the City management is equally culpable; andin my opinion performance reviews and tenure should reflect the mess this teamhas visited upon our residents. Besides being pro-active and not shifting theburden of mitigation onto residents, you also need to show your commitment toresidential quality of life by reforming the NTMP structure: how can you ingood faith claim to be concerned about traffic problems and retain the No-Returned-Ballot== No-traffic-mitigation rule in NTMP surveys? In its current form, NTMP potentially setsstreet against street, effectively paralyzing mitigation. Of course, that wasits goal. Have you even considered or planned in advancefor traffic impact of the likely ‘redevelopment’ of the apartments on theeastern side of the Willows, and factored this into your future plans ? Sincerely Ross Wilson application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document attachment: WillowsTraffic.docx
