ECR speed, priority, and public safety

ECR- El Camino Real is this biggest arterial that runs north south through San Mateo County. It has most of the pedestrian, bike, and auto collisions. The state Office of Traffic Safety says speed is the major problem in the corridor. ECR is posted at 35 mph. If you drive 35 the lights are not quite synced- so you tend to get caught by almost all the lights. However is you speed about 20% over the limit you tend to make most of the lights. The incentive is to speed. Sharing a public right of way so that its safe, healthy, accessible, and pleasant is just not convenient or efficient- at least how our economy and the life style we have come to accept defines these terms. Because for peds and bikes the opposite is the case- all the treatments to accommodate them with the speeding cars such as count down timers and lit crosswalks along with the near 40 mph synced corridor lights result in danger, inconvenience, and inefficiency. These are the problems identified by Brian Appleyard in getting to livable streets.

Pedestrians and cars are not compatible

The physics is all wrong for pedestrians and cars to interface. Pedestrians travel at two miles per hour. Cars have evolved to be unable to travel under 25 miles per hour. In California it's not legal to post a lower speed limit. The average car easily gets up to 30 mph. Police in turn have given up monitoring and enforcing signage such as "25mph limit when children present".

Policy makers in turn have followed the police to Starbucks. Planning for example has expanded the city to its most remote environs... despite bankrupting the city to supply services. Transit service has collapsed and gone to the County; which today can't provde transit in even its most heavily used corridor. Cars don't need transit; so it makes sense that this particular service would suffer long term declines in revenue.

But Police and Fire today are also moving to the county despite the larger budget deficits at the county level. The idea is that the economics of scale can be supplied to the management. However the size of the car-accessed-city-operations-base increases the cost to the general fund by the square of the radius.

Such issues are not staples of pedestrian cities. For example the walking postman both exemplifies the city limit and maintains a sustainable service budget. Minor changes like electric trucks which we had in the eighties and nineties and todays little gasoline post trucks continue to bankrupt the service to the detriment of public health.