This is not another April Fool’s prank post. On April Fool’s Day, SamTrans figured out they should do something to avoid delays on El Camino during the Little Big Dig. Per the DJ
In response, during an April 1 SamTrans board meeting, staff recommended a detour along California Drive for the project’s duration, as well as splitting the ECR line at Millbrae into a northern segment running to the Daly City BART station and a southern segment running down to Palo Alto, according to the presentation.
One has to wonder exactly where the SamTrans board and operations managers have been for the last year or two? There has been a steadily increasing drumbeat of alerts, reroute maps, Caltrans emails and news reports, but these people don’t figure out they need to do something different until three and a half months after the ground-breaking ceremony?
Maybe they should get out and actually take the bus once in a while or ask a driver or two. Drivers would have told them about scenes like this that I took three weeks ago.
Many B’gamers are just waking up to the removal of so many of our tall eucalyptus trees on El Camino. It’s shocking. More than 90% of them are getting cut down, but the project calls for many more trees to be replanted. Unfortunately, the replacements will be much younger and smaller. Or so we thought! The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (commonly known as CalFire) also took notice of the much-reduced canopy and has found some grant money to allow Caltrans to upgrade the replacements to be more mature eucs.
According to CalFire spokesman Justin Thyme, a $3.5 million dollar grant will allow for some 30-to-40-foot tall “juvenile” eucs to be transferred from source properties like Golden Gate Park and the Crystal Springs reservoir watershed to El Camino. In the announcement Thyme noted “In addition to fire protection, CalFire is committed to enhancing landmark groves like the Burlingame eucalyptus grove wherever feasible. This grant will accelerate the return of historic look and feel of the much-loved section of the state highway.” Caltrans noted that the larger replacements would not significantly delay completion of the project now targeted as late 2028 or early 2029.
This will come as good news to B’gamers mourning the loss of the majestic eucs. Hillsborough might also be a “donor” city as they chop eucs on Chateau Dr. that could be replanted on ECR. Here is one local’s memorial to our fallen friends spotted on a Bernal Ave front yard.
The Reason Foundation dug into national road conditions and most of us aren’t surprised to see how poorly California rates. When I first travelled the highways and byways of California in 1981, they were beautifully smooth. Now, not so much.
Alaska, California, Washington, New York, and Louisiana have the worst-performing and least cost-effective highway systems, the study finds. Alaska ranked last overall for the second consecutive report, posting the worst rural fatality rate in the nation. California ranked 49th, with the worst urban arterial pavement condition.
California found a bright spot in the condition of its bridges, with its highest ranking of 25th in the nation in “structurally deficient bridges.” But the state ranked in the bottom-half or third in every other category including urban congestion, rural fatality rate, rural pavement conditions, and capital and bridge disbursements ratio.
Californians pay for the most expensive gas in the country, mostly due to gas taxes. (Study author Baruch) Feigenbaum says California “should have a better road and highway system” given the billions in funds the state generates for transportation. California also ranked 49th in last year’s highway report.
You have to wonder if this is another instance of California fraud somewhere in the river of money collected from gas taxes (61 or 71 cents per gallon depending on who you ask plus other costs that put us $1.70 above the national average), vehicle license fees, etc. And now there is a movement afoot in Sacramento to charge additional fees per mile driven. Tell me more about how much they care about “affordability”.
I was meaning to write this post even before I saw the article in today’s SF Comicle about Ayden Fang’s parents filing suit over his tragic passing on Donnelly Ave. We covered it here back in August of last year.
Yesterday I was nearly hit while crossing in a crosswalk–twice. Twice in one day! A twofer. And neither incident happened at the most dangerous intersection in my neighborhood, but rather at other, less busy spots. One driver had her right turn signal on as I was crossing at the opposite corner and magically decided to go straight–straight at me. After I stopped mid-street and waved my arms and yelled, I got the hands-clasped-in-prayer move. It was in front of St. Catherine’s after all.
The second incident happened in front of Ike’s while it was still light out thanks to Daylight Savings Time. I have no idea what this driver was looking at, but it wasn’t me. Again, with the waving arms and yelling, but not even a clasped-hand motion this time. We really, really need more cops on the street beat writing tickets. Moments later another driver pulls a three-point turn in the middle of Primrose in front of a BPD cruiser–and the cop just kept on going. Now maybe they had something more urgent to deal with right then. I hope so.
The Fang lawsuit notes “The lawsuit argued that the city has a history of ignoring pedestrian safety, noting that the pedestrian fatality rate is three to four times higher than the per-capita national annual average.” I’ll be curious to examine that statistic and whether it includes incidents like the malicious plowing down of some local kids, but either way we have a problem. And it is likely to be an expensive problem.
If it were not so sad, it would be humorous to follow the discussion at the SF Comicle about the forthcoming transit taxes for BART, et al and the SMART train up in Marin. The catalyst was a letter to the editor titled “If we’re willing to pay billions to maintain highways, why not fund BART?” I’m betting the author knows a half-dozen reasons why, but is playing the faux equity game to push the new taxes. Y’all come to this blog to see the onion get peeled, so let’s assess the “community value” of our “highways” and our city streets, such as they are, compared to BART, VTA, SMART, Caltrain, etc.
Which bits of infrastructure enable police response? Fire response? Ambulance response? Utility (electric, gas, phone, internet) response? I am always impressed when the Safeway 18-wheeler makes the sweeping right turn at Howard, maneuvers the extra-long trailer into the parking lot and manages to back the thing into the loading dock. If you have never seen it, you’re missing out. And if we don’t see it every couple of days we will be missing out. Let’s not forget the Walgreen’s semi that got shoo’ed away from the big El Camino Project groundbreaking because it was noisy and inconvenient to the proceedings. You want your antibiotic? It ain’t coming on Caltrain or BART.
Is a commuter rail line a good thing? Sure. Should it cover its costs at the fare box? No. But let’s dispense with the faux argument that transit can hold a candle to the streets and freeways that keep this whole show on the road. I’m not saying vote “no” on the tax–yet, but San Mateo County appears to be the tail that isn’t wagging the dog once again as the monies flow elsewhere.
I was pretty sure a lawsuit would be filed over the extended closure of businesses on and around B’way. I didn’t see the merchants being represented by one of the top 25 plaintiff law firms in the country, but offering local merchants support is meritorious. From the DJ piece
A class action lawsuit on behalf of merchants in Burlingame’s Broadway area has been filed against the owner and operator of A&A Gas & Mart, who were previously named as responsible parties in a gasoline leak that caused days of power outages and road closures in the business district.
Burlingame law firm Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy chose to move forward with the suit, filed Feb. 23, to seek an undetermined amount of damages for businesses that lost customers, revenue and inventory as a result of those outages and closures, attorney Nanci Nishimura, who is representing the plaintiffs, said.
The merchants mentioned range from Maverick Jack’s at the old train station to Bonne Sante at the other end of B’way. The total number is more than 100.
In a real twist of fate, the A&A Gas website’s “About us” page shows the B’way station! They appear to have four of their six locations on the Peninsula. We’re not talking Shell or Chevron here so expect some sort of settlement as they realize what they are up against. In the meantime, Broadway is lovely shopping and dining district and there has been a lot of free parking as the city deinstalls the old parking meters and waits to install the fancy new ones.
I wanted to dig a little deeper into the DJ story about $200M going for road upgrades this past week. Whenever I see this sort of number being trumpeted as a standalone factoid, I get curious about the entirety of the picture. On the surface it sounds like a lot of money, but there are about 750,000 people on the county. The DMV doesn’t make it easy to figure out how many licensed drivers there are in the county, but 70% isn’t a bad guess. Call it 525K. The actual budget number from the TA press release last June was $187.1M for a per driver capita expenditure of $356 per fiscal year. Given the cost of any noticeable road improvement, $187.1M won’t go far.
Not that I want more taxes like Measures A and W that fill this fund or higher gas taxes, but just the Broadway grade separation is $500-600M and climbing by the year. And the TA’s funding included bicycle and pedestrian improvements as well. As a state, we don’t fare well on national rankings:
California’s road condition rankings vary by study but generally place it poorly, often in the bottom 10 to 15 states, with reports citing significant percentages of roads in poor condition, ranking low in pavement quality for urban/rural interstates and arterials
It didn’t used to be this way. When I got here in 1981, the roads were awesome compared to New England roads. As they should be. What went wrong? The state is certainly spending a ton of money on something–the tale of the tape is
California’s state budget has significantly increased under Governor Newsom, growing from around $200 billion in 2019 to proposed levels near $350 billion for 2026-27.
Bringing some salaries at places like the TA back to earth and making the EV drivers to pay their “fair share” would be a good start. Let’s hope the next governor can rein in the top line spending while reallocating more to infrastructure like roads, reservoirs otherwise things will only get worse out on the asphalt.
It’s been a rough start to the New Year for PG&E customers from EssEff to B’game and now to San Mateo. Fire in the city caused major problems including for the huge Waymo fleet. Here in B’game the multi-day outage on and around Broadway and California was especially tough for businesses and even more so if they happened to have perishable inventory. The news, like this report from ABC7, keep calling the leak into the utility vault a “petroleum product”. I suppose it could be diesel (does A&A sell diesel), but most likely it’s gas. ABC7 reported:
Even though PG&E provided generators for those impacted, businesses were told they had to hire a private electrician to do checks before the utility company would hook them up. “To be able to certify that it’s okay to turn on the power and use the generators so we don’t have explosions,” said John Kevranian of the Broadway Burlingame Business Improvement District.
That sounds odd and not very customer centric. If that is different skill set than PG&E electricians, then shouldn’t PG&E have hired a commercial electrician on the customers’ behalf? (kudos to John for stepping back in after his BID term ended to keep everyone up to date with many texts, etc).
And of course, all of this happened right as the Little Big Dig started halving the capacity on El Camino and thinking vehicles could reroute to California. As one of our regular, shrewd commenters pointed out on the Drop the Green Flag post, post-holiday rainy season wasn’t the best time to start taking down massive trees and figuring out power line routes.
ABC7 noted “PG&E is still working to extract all of the petroleum product from the vaults and identify where it’s coming from. They say it’s not something they use with their equipment.” Transformers use heavy oil as an insulator, but this isn’t that. Eventually we will find out if A&A gas was up to date and up to code on the tanks. Note that the station at the other end of B’way did theirs a couple years ago. And both the Chevron (finished) and the Shell stations on Peninsula are doing the same. The Google machine spit out this timely tidbit:
Older, single-walled tanks face strict deadlines for upgrades or permanent closure (e.g., by Dec 31, 2025, for many systems) due to corrosion risks.
Here’s a pic of the big generators that got people back online. Reports are they are just as noisy as the folks in the Richmond district reported. Caterpillar stock is up 75% in the last 12 months……
After a dramatic Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with gusts to 70 mph and intermittent downpours with SFO in “reverse operations” so takeoff go right over B’game, here is the 2pm view of my favorite flooding spot on ECR.
The SamTrans driver knows to change lanes as do most of the other drivers–until it gets dark in a couple of hours. Be safe out there everyone. Only three more years to go until this is fixed……
Social media is brimming with photos, videos and commentary about the on-going power outage in EssEff from a sub-station fire. It peaked at about 130,000 customers and the last 20,000 or so might get power back tomorrow morning (that would be two days of no power). Aside from all the other inconveniences and possible dangerous situations, we can now add confused and disabled Waymo’s to the list. Per the Comicle:
Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing service remained suspended Sunday morning after a sweeping power outage knocked out traffic signals across large swaths of San Francisco.
On Saturday, videos shared widely on social media showed Waymo vehicles stopped mid-intersection with hazard lights flashing, forcing other cars to maneuver around them. Waymo halted service citywide around 8 p.m. Saturday.
The outage started “late Saturday morning” but Alphabet didn’t take the robotaxis fully out of service until 8 p.m. even though the software can’t treat a missing traffic light as a four-way stop. And some cellular internet service was affected which Waymo needs to work. Go figure.
I took my first Waymo ride three months ago with a couple non-dangerous wrinkles as noted here. But we have very erratic PG&E power in town. Just this morning I got a Citizen app notice of two outages in the B’game-H’borough area. There was a major outage about a week ago as well and we don’t particularly handle failed traffic lights well in town either. Putting a sawhorse in the middle of ECR with no lights or a flare that went out an hour ago is standard protocol.
You may have read about a woman who gave birth in a Waymo on the way to the hospital a couple of weeks ago. Better to stick with Uber or Lyft if it’s urgent.
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