Switching Gears - End of an Era

The end of the year is a time to reflect on one's life and legacy.  It is a particularly compelling time, in view of climate change realities becoming more apparent every day, that what we say and do is shaping our immediate future, not just the distant future for grandchildren.

For this reason the end of Stocks & Bond majority reign over Encinitas city government make future plans and our legacy feel more urgent than past election years. This deserves thinking that rises above facile political maneuvering or infotainment or cheap shots borne out of a social culture of marketing. It's governing time, not campaigning time.

Having an arch nemesis like Jerome Stocks turned out to be a rallying point and organizing platform for many in the last election. Even though the new council members Lisa Shaffer and Tony Kranz did not campaign as anti-Stocks candidates, thousands of Encinitas voters were interested in removing Jerome Stocks above all other concerns. Our Mayor blog was created to acknowledge legitimate disgust with Jerome Stocks' behavior as a so-called public servant. The years of city council meetings contained enough clips of this behavior as evidence for the electorate. The idea was that more people needed to be able to witness first hand – via these clips and linked stories, commentaries and some background information – what critics of Stocks had been saying for years.

Whatever factors were involved it is a fait accompli now and time to switch gears. Is it possible we can still capture the motivation the anti-Stocks group had with a formidable problem we all can identify with versus a person or group of people? Can we cultivate an educated electorate unafraid to voice public opinions for fear of seeming stupid or simply wrong? Is it possible to encourage awareness and still identify as a savvy, social being?

It is easy to see from some of the current community voices reacting to the We Love Encinitas organization (and ethically dubious campaign fliers) in the online news posts and one blog's comments sections, Kristin Gaspar is a likely target to transfer anti-Stocks energy. We get it. Our Mayor blog has 3 or 4 dozen examples of Gaspar's behavior along with Stocks or solo that deserve condemnation. No doubt the new year will bring more.

But, this personality focus is really toxic stuff. It too easily morphs into character assassination, body policing, misogyny and other community-killing divisive words. This invites lazy thinking and other vitality sucking habits. Besides all that it brings out our worst rather than our best natures. Critical thinking asks more.

What if we instead switched gears to the three things that repeatedly come up in Encinitas politics as problems or omissions;
1. finance (economy, budget, pensions, etc.),
2. open government (sunshine ordinance, transparency, civility, accessibility, etc.)
3. environment (land use, community character, resources, climate change)
4 traffic (could fit in environment, but some very big issues ahead need deliberation)

Let's demand of this new council – so they in turn will demand it of city manager and city attorney and city staff – a clear direction of where we are going in any of these areas. Not only must we insist on this, we should demand comprehensive research, comparisons to other cities and emerging trends from our well paid staff. Let's demand that deliberations by the council be more than unsupported platitudes, rambling monologues, throwing out a bunch of buzz words, personal memories, rehearsed staff exchanges and other time-wasting talk.

They will make mistakes, council and staff alike. We will find some council members and city employees lacking at any given time. Hell, we'll continue to have community members who annoy us. We will disagree. This editor will try to catch the kinds of things that illustrate dissent and controversy. This isn't a good news, community events calendar, party line place. Our city government's corruption and incompetence demands vigilance. We don't have to make things up. Video clips, quotes, news coverage and the whole works will apply. The former super majority clearly served the few of their overlords. There is a new game in town. The mandate is genuinely from the majority of our community so there are more eyes watching.

And, if a blogger can be allowed to dream. Just imagine a city council becoming relevant to the disengaged, the young, the non-white people, the renters, the low income residents of Encinitas. It is a myth that when all people enjoy a higher quality of life and feel security and engagemed it means something is diminished from another's quality of life. If this new city council wants continuous improvement, they should think big.

Myths Encinitas

Update at end
Jerome Stocks has recently claimed he wants to be a leader in transportation as part of the evolution of transit in Encinitas and throughout the nation. Transportation is clearly a fiefdom for Stocks and his regional seats with SANDAG and NCTD take him away from his council duties on a regular basis.

Despite what his campaign messaging is, Stocks has demonstrated in the Encinitas City Council that his "leadership" is not interested in what the citizens of Encinitas have to say about how transportation should evolve for our community. And he is wont to share anything of the work with these regional boards beyond the most perfunctory announcements. As stated before, Leadership is mythical when nobody is allowed to know where things are headed. If the public is treated as followers alone, this is dictatorship.

When the widening of Interstate 5's EIR was being unveiled by Caltrans for public comment period in August of 2010, city council chambers were filled with speakers asking for this subject to be put on the agenda for discussion as our neighboring coastal communities were had already done. The majority, with Stocks articulating the facile opposition led the refusal.

Follow-up to this? A couple of months later, during the thick of the last election which uncovered Dallager's unethical behavior (with conflict of interest in a bank loan and in a council vote in favor of a guy who gave him a free kitchen), Judy Berlfein returned to the council to summarize the failures of the majority members despite more than a thousand public participants in the workshop process these council members refused to allow for public dialog.

Dalager is gone, but the pattern hasn't changed in the least. Public service, for Jerome Stocks, is a myth and evolving transit Stocks has promoted so far sounds a whole lot like the car-centric faux-public transit we've seen for half a century.

Update Monday 6 pm: Big oversight in forgetting to call out one of the primary reasons for posting this today. Caltrans plans to hold a public meeting on the supplemental report at 6 p.m. Sept. 19, this Wednesday, at the Encinitas Community Center. The report can be found here.

It is too bad that Jerome Stocks couldn't have directed California Department of Transportation to schedule a public meeting of this importance on a night other than a city council meeting.  How influential is Stocks as a leader in transportation to direct transit evolution, or whatever?

Myths Encinitas

Tree City USA, Urban Forest Policy and other designations claimed by the Encinitas City is largely mythical. It just doesn't seem like Engineering got the memo from Public Works (and clearly unfamiliar with the Environmental Commission).  Public Works was in charge of writing the manual on Encinitas Urban Forest, including heritage trees.  Engineering is pretty much robotically wired to road code dimensions and are rarely swayed by real life or logic.

This particular week we have the perfect storm of empty rhetoric regarding city council policies actually effectively connecting and engaging various departments' supposed commitment to Encinitas community character, Encinitas trees and Encinitas Urban Forest.

Why? The agenda for Wednesday's meeting agenda includes the merging of two department director positions into one. Consolidation of the positions of Director of Engineering and Director of Public Works into Director of Engineering and Public Works. We question the success of that merger in the current culture at city hall that does not celebrate connectivity, collaboration or cooperation.

Meanwhile, another agenda item:
Public Hearing of the appeal of Engineering conditions for public improvements adjacent to 1794 Crest Drive. Reading through the appeal makes the many layers of trees, street standards, infrastructure, community character and financial hardship a complex web of assumptions, justification and a fair dose of misinterpretation.  Behind it all is money (see Growth: Ponzi Scheme series) and an authoritarian adherence to codes as power.  It's how it sounds to this reader. The appellant's challenges the reality of the city plan for a trail throughout the Crest Drive built out area will ever happen, yet alone that harms no trees. Another mythical notion of shared goals amongst departments with a council majority uninterested in making these connections.

It is very difficult to ascribe "good faith" to our city departments dealings with single family residents, given a long history of inconsistent treatment of resident requests. Indeed, there is a very real reluctance of homeowners, architects and contractors to come forward with individual stories because of fear of retaliation in their properties and businesses.

It's vital we all keep hearing, learning and sharing our preferred city government ideals.  Planting trees should be more than a political photo op. There are  fantastic examples all around us, and some close by, of a better way to deal with sincere connections to our public spaces, our trees and our private property and business owners.  These magnificent pines on Crest Drive and all the other vegetation is of upmost importance in this time of drought, climate change, erosion, need for sustainability and economic depression.

Andy Lipkis, well known TreePeople founder, known to many in Encinitas speaks here about  our need for functioning community forests as acupuncture used strategically to heal; for our watersheds, to create oxygen and filters for our air and coolants and . . . well start at 6:00 to dive right into it. Enabling community is at the heart and soul of this for success.  We could have this kind of thinking on our city council.

Love the part about we Americans just hate to be told what to do, but when informed we want to help.

Crest Drive is yet another opportunity for our city council to seek policy for connections and restoration rather than piecemeal acquisition of scattered contract work for favored vendors. After Wednesday there will only be about a half dozen council meetings until the election. Time to envision change and campaign for it too. 

Crest Drive

On Aug. 15, the Encinitas City Council will hear arguments against City Engineering Department mandates for curb, gutter and pedestrian walkway on Crest Drive, a rural residential subdivision of one-acre lots within old Encinitas.In the proposed single family home, the city originally asked for 8 feet of concrete pavers with curbs 450 feet long and a 5 foot walkway, eliminating 13 feet of natural landscaping and threatening old growth trees and vegetation along Crest Drive. 

All the land adjacent to the pavement would also need to be removed and graded down to the level of the street, thereby widening the street by over 26 feet when both sides are complete. 

The City Engineering Department stated, “ Our goal is to have curb, gutter and sidewalk on every home in Encinitas.”

Excerpt from Coast News article by Kevin Farrell, we recommend reading the whole piece. It ends with this call to action.

"We don’t understand the benefit the city would get from this. With so many people opposed throughout Encinitas, it would be a win, win, for the City to re-evaluate and leave our neighborhoods the way we want, not some Engineers personal preference. We have appealed the engineers finding to our City Council members for a final determination. We are optimistic the Council will assist in helping preserve our trees and vegetation thus maintaining the Community Character we love. 

Please join me at the City Council meeting next Wednesday at 6 p.m. and help support this worthy cause in keeping Encinitas, the way it was. A presence in numbers will help to get our point across." 

This council agenda item triggered the memory of Joni Mitchell's song we posted on Thursday, singing "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."  The lyrics are perfectly apt for Mayor Stocks bragging at his state of the city address last April 18th.  The following clip was first posted after the last council meeting before this break with this introduction.

"Jerome Stocks' perspective on parking lots, traffic, commerce, pot holes, walkable streets, safe routes, etc. at last April's state of the city speech. This speech was directed at a car-centric approach to city planning. Wrong decade, false assumptions and giant omissions."

It's probably no coincidence that Stocks is called out for including tree-lined Crest Drive in his bragging, while city engineers are ginning up rationale to fell these same trees.  The man either has no ethics or no clue what the words coming from his mouth mean.

Photo at Opening from April 21, 2012 article, North County Times, about Crest Drive Petition. 

Related Posts:

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer
• Redefining Normal
• Tuesday is Dues-day: Tail Wags Dog Planning

Road Trip!

Citizens elected a council of bicyclists, said the mobility coordinator in the video below. Let's take a virtual road trip to a neighboring city to see what a bike friendly approach to circulation looks like.

Speaking of bicyclist on the council, I would have loved to have seen our Mayor Stocks' face when Teresa Barth wheeled into the electric car charging event on her trusty bike - so often photographed around town and at city hall.  Councilwoman Barth is pictured here with Dave Roberts (another bike rider running for County Supervisor seat being vacated by Pam Slater-Price). Encinitas having an electric car charging station is a boon for a few (most self-promoted being Stocks), a 21st century version of car travel and a wonderful headline.

This week the subject turns more low tech and with wider implications. Wednesday council meeting is a chance to make a bigger impact at a fraction of the cost per capita with "sharrows".  The spacial ramifications of increased bike ridership dramatically reducing road congestion, parking congestion is a concept not yet grasped by the car-centric who merely feel threatened.  It is as though they fear (and some of the most vocal do) that their cars will be taken from them.  Maybe this insight can assuage some fears.



Compare and contrast Jerome Stocks' perspective on parking lots, traffic, commerce, pot holes, walkable streets, safe routes, etc. at last April's state of the city speech. This speech was directed at a car-centric approach to city planning. Wrong decade, false assumptions and giant omissions . . .

 

At the Wednesday, July 18 council meeting members are being asked to consider shared lane markings "sharrows" and "Bicycles May Use Full Lane" signs on portions of Coast Highway 101. The volunteer group, Encinitas Bicycle and Pedestrian Committee was consulted on biking issues by the city staff. This is an infinitesimally small step, but huge for our community.  For the full agenda with agenda packets.

Let's suggest a real road trip to our engineers and council members too.

Place Making and Attracting Value - Rethinking Encinitas

Let's put a face to the engineer who gave us his confession in yesterday's post, Charles Marhon of Strong Towns. 

Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

Pay Attention Rob Blough! and all the Encinitas Engineering Department.  This is also dedicated to the council majority and the people who refuse to question the status quo for any reason . . . just because.

This reprint from Strong Towns blog by Charles Marohn (in its entirety) is for you.

It is also in vindication of the hundreds of citizens who have attempted to be heard by engineers at city hall.

After graduating from college with a civil engineering degree, I found myself working in my home town for a local engineering firm doing mostly municipal engineering (roads, sewer pipe, water pipe, stormwater). A fair percentage of my time was spent convincing people that, when it came to their road, I knew more than they did. 

And of course I should know more. First, I had a technical degree from a top university. Second, I was in a path towards getting a state license (at the time I was an Engineer in Training, the four-year "apprenticeship" required to become a fully licensed Professional Engineer), which required me to pass a pretty tough test just to get started and another, more difficult, exam to conclude. Third, I was in a profession that is one of the oldest and most respected in human history, responsible for some of the greatest achievements of mankind. Fourth - and most important - I had books and books of standards to follow. 

A book of standards to an engineer is better than a bible to a priest. All you have to do is to rely on the standards. Back in college I was told a story about how, in WW II, some Jewish engineers in hiding had run thousands of tedious tests on asphalt, just to produce these graphs that we still use today. Some of our craft descends from Roman engineers who did all of this a couple of millennia ago. How could I be wrong with literally thousands of years of professional practice on my side? 

And, more to the point, what business would I -- let alone a property owner on a project I was working on - have in questioning the way things were done? Of course the people who wrote the standards knew better than we did. That is why they wrote the standard. 

When people would tell me that they did not want a wider street, I would tell them that they had to have it for safety reasons. 

When they answered that a wider street would make people drive faster and that would be seem to be less safe, especially in front of their house where their kids were playing, I would confidently tell them that the wider road was more safe, especially when combined with the other safety enhancements the standards called for. 

When people objected to those other "enhancements", like removing all of the trees near the road, I told them that for safety reasons we needed to improve the sight distances and ensure that the recovery zone was free of obstacles.
When they pointed out that the "recovery zone" was also their "yard" and that their kids played kickball and hopscotch there, I recommended that they put up a fence, so long as the fence was outside of the right-of-way. 

When they objected to the cost of the wider, faster, treeless road that would turn their peaceful, front yard into the viewing area for a drag strip unless they built a concrete barricade along their front property line, I informed them that progress was sometimes expensive, but these standards have been shown to work across the state, the country and the world and I could not compromise with their safety. 

In retrospect I understand that this was utter insanity. Wider, faster, treeless roads not only ruin our public places, they kill people. Taking highway standards and applying them to urban and suburban streets, and even county roads, costs us thousands of lives every year. There is no earthly reason why an engineer would ever design a fourteen foot lane for a city block, yet we do it continuously. Why? 

The answer is utterly shameful: Because that is the standard. 

In the engineering profession's version of defensive medicine, we can't recommend standards that are not in the manual. We can't use logic to vary from a standard that gives us 60 mph design speeds on roads with intersections every 200 feet. We can't question why two cars would need to travel at high speed in opposite directions on a city block, let alone why we would want them to. We can yield to public pressure and post a speed limit -- itself a hazard -- but we can't recommend a road section that is not in the highway manual.  

When the public and politicians tell engineers that their top priorities are safety and then cost, the engineer's brain hears something completely different. The engineer hears, "Once you set a design speed and handle the projected volume of traffic, safety is the top priority. Do what it takes to make the road safe, but do it as cheaply as you can." This is why engineers return projects with asinine "safety" features, like pedestrian bridges and tunnels that nobody will ever use, and costs that are astronomical.  

An engineer designing a street or road prioritizes the world in this way, no matter how they are instructed:

• Traffic speed
• Traffic volume
• Safety
• Cost

The rest of the world generally would prioritize things differently, as follows:
Safety

• Cost
• Traffic volume
• Traffic speed

In other words, the engineer first assumes that all traffic must travel at speed. Given that speed, all roads and streets are then designed to handle a projected volume. Once those parameters are set, only then does an engineer look at mitigating for safety and, finally, how to reduce the overall cost (which at that point is nearly always ridiculously expensive). 

In America, it is this thinking that has designed most of our built environment, and it is nonsensical. In many ways, it is professional malpractice. If we delivered what society asked us for, we would build our local roads and streets to be safe above all else. Only then would we consider what could be done, given our budget, to handle a higher volume of cars at greater speeds. 

We go to enormous expense to save ourselves small increments of driving time. This would be delusional in and of itself if it were not also making our roads and streets much less safe. I'll again reference a 2005 article from the APA Journal showing how narrower, slower streets dramatically reduce accidents, especially fatalities. 

And it is that simple observation that all of those supposedly "ignorant" property owners were trying to explain to me, the engineer with all the standards, so many years ago. When you can't let your kids play in the yard, let alone ride their bike to the store, because you know the street is dangerous, then the engineering profession is not providing society any real value. It's time to stand up and demand a change. 

It's time we demand that engineers build us Strong Towns.

 Strong Towns blog and website have dozens of good posts and resources. And BTW, engineers, you can console yourselves that you don't suck as bad as the economists.

Walking

Frankly, 5" heels aren't a real  issue of sacrifice for most in Encinitas. But, sacrifices are an understatement when it comes to walking in and feeling safe in Leucadia, New Encinitas, Cardiff, etc. Perception alone of a street being unsafe can discourage walking.

Today at City Council there is an agenda item: 

Approve the Transit Feasibility Study Interview Panel’s recommended consultant, and authorize the City Manager to negotiate an agreement with Parsons Brinckerhoff in the amount not to exceed $100,000 to assist the City in developing the Transit Feasibility Study.

Before saying more, this blog is against the city recommendation primarily because Parson's Brinckerhoff sounds like a character on Gilligan's Island, or one of Mitt's friends.

Seriously . . .

The real reason for rejection of this recommendation is NOT disappoval of a study. Criticism centers on the SANDAG and NCTD connections to this firm appear hard wired in the agenda packet information  We in the public know that neither power base, SANDAG or NCTD, or their Encinitas vassal, Mayor Jerome Stocks, is receptive to public sentiment or any dissenting council voices and have never been.  We don't need to pay money for we Encinitas serfs to be targeted for the continued assault of these unelected overlords.

That said, the concept of 21st century revised way of thinking about circulation in a multitude of forms is not in and of itself bad or wrong headed.  Not just shuttle buses, not just bike lanes or traffic calming - but a serious pedestrian commitment are all needed.  Examples extend back thousands of years and even in just the last century there have always been exemplars of allowing for all forms of travel in cities around the world.  If you have lived or traveled in the cities described below, you know this to be true.

Look at cities such as New York, Boston, San Francisco, London, Paris and Barcelona. These cities have beautiful streets that encourage walking. Commuters in these cities happily walk 15 or 20 minutes from a subway or rail station, or from a parking garage, to their home, workplace or school. They don't hesitate to walk a half-mile to visit their favorite shop, cafe or friend.

In addition to changing terminology, we need to modify a pervasive American planning standard: the dogma of the one-quarter-mile walking radius. If you look at development plans, you'll see circles drawn around transportation nodes to show the presumed limits of how far Americans are willing to walk. [ . . .] A quarter-mile is 1,320 feet, walkable in about five to six minutes.

Walking infrastructure is a lot cheaper than subways and buses. It is good for your health. It makes our cities lively and supports the businesses along the way. He is right; it is time to change our mindsets.

More in the Washington Post

We know that our traffic engineers are riddled with dogma from another era, so vigilance is appropriate.  A fully integrated system of shuttle buses, commuter buses are a necessity for a city committed to reducing fossil fuel use, carbon emissions, air quality, valued time and money; but, who is designing this master plan is vital.

Myths Encinitas

Encinitas traffic engineers, traffic consultants like Austin-Foust, traffic commissioners, Mayor Stocks (especially in his role as SANDAG chairman), Jim Bond, crony friends and many in the community of Encinitas keep perpetuating the myths about automobile-centric supremacy as the only transportation approach for a robust economy.

This is a myth.  Today's post will feature a  Streetfilms video sharing information from over 100's of studies done around the world about livable cities.

Despite the automobile's 100 year reign and all the great things each and every one of us may have enjoyed with our drivers licensed entree into the US auto-centric 20th century, it will ultimately be viewed by history as a mistake for two reasons (discussed within this film):

1. Traffic undermines the livability of the city. 
2. The auto does a poor job of moving people in a dense urban environment.

This isn't to say there is no place, no function for the automobile.  That would be silly.  It is simply not the sacred gift to humanity that it is touted to be, especially in the Western US in the decades that lie ahead of us.  The time of rethinking has begun and decades overdue.

But, someone who has studied this in depth will take over here in a  Streetfilms video. Even though Encinitas is a tiny dot compared to New York City.  This living laboratory of all that traffic can be is worthy of our attention.

"For more than 100 years New York City government policy has prioritized the needs of the automobile over the needs of any other mode of transport. Working under the faulty assumption that more car traffic would improve business, planners and engineers have systematically made our streets more dangerous and less livable. As a result, even the idea that a street could truly be a “place” – a shared space for human interaction and play – has been almost completely destroyed."

This website is on our Encinitas traffic engineers should be forced to use as a tutorial until they lose the 1950's traffic myths.   Streetfilms has . . .

"done over 450 Streetfilms in nearly 6 years!  We've been a lot of places. We've explored a lot of ideas. We've interviewed the top world experts in the transportation & livable streets realm."

Update: 3:20 pm The correct video has been embedded.  Apologies for the oversight.