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Town should listen to the neighbors
By Mark Brodsky
In win-win negotiations, success is not achieved when your partner has to beg for relief. Perhaps the town of Los Gatos would rather exercise its power than respond to the needs of its partner.
The Monte Sereno City Council is a partner to Los Gatos for the Winchester-Daves intersection construction, but Monte Sereno has no real say in getting the intersection it and its citizens unanimously desire.
As has been reported in this paper, the Monte Sereno council had to first agree to fund whatever light Los Gatos chooses to build before pleading that the Los Gatos traffic engineers consider design improvements developed by Monte Sereno's traffic consultant.
So it is very possible that Los Gatos will again ignore the expressly detailed wishes of the Monte Sereno council for a compromise boulevard design to support the light. What was not reported is that the consultant and engineers have never even seen the two neighborhood-generated designs, which were even more safe and effective and at a lower cost. What the citizens really wanted was not and perhaps never will even be examined!
How did this happen when the process of public review has gone on for a year?
The reason is, I believe, that the public review process is structurally flawed. This is because the public is only invited to comment on pre-made presentations, and not invited to help with the design of the solution. The result is that people are forced to talk at each other instead of sharing resources to jointly solve a problem.
Just review what has happened. Last year the public was invited to hear from a consultant displaying his design choices. Citizens were given the chance to show some alternatives, but those were never evaluated because, in the words of the consultant, "the boulevard design is outside the scope of my task to signalize the intersection." Thus, the issue of using road design to reduce speed (the true cause of the problem) was ignored, even though it was the consensus of all attending both public meetings.
This led to outraged citizens complaining loudly at both Los Gatos and Monte Sereno council meetings that their concerns were not even being considered.
The Monte Sereno council responded by asking another consultant to evaluate a modern roundabout design. The "free" consultant used no citizen input to consider the removal of the extra north lane suggested by the neighbors. As a result, he wrote that there was not enough room for a (double lane) roundabout. Again, the neighborhood group's design for a single-lane, modern circle or the extended wide median was not even considered or reviewed.
So again the Monte Sereno council responded. This time council members hired the RKH consultant to look at the environment surrounding the intersection. The RKH report was the first comprehensive look at the problem of speed, and it provided the engineering analysis to prove that the removal of the number 2 northbound lane is necessary for any safe signalization of the road.
Monte Sereno has twice asked Los Gatos to consider these RKH findings and now it is basically reduced to begging for this compromise design that the Los Gatos Weekly-Times has already discovered will still leave kids in jeopardy.
The problem seems to be that in each and every stage of this saga, the public only got to comment about plans a consultant or engineer had already completed.
What was needed was a joint forum in which public-generated ideas could be reviewed openly by traffic professionals and then, most importantly, rated by the public.
At such forums the traffic professionals would be expected to show why a citizen's designs might not work, and perhaps provide suggestions to make it work. Ideas would be developed into workable plans. Then the best designs could be compared and evaluated in terms of pedestrian safety, traffic flow, safe righthand turns, light delays, backups, pedestrian visibility, noise, and so on.
The current process ignores the talent in this community and only allows public comment without professional review. This is a waste of tremendous engineering, analysis and design expertise that was, in this project, better able to address the problems of Winchester-Daves than our civic institutions were.
I do not know what Los Gatos will ultimately put at the intersection, except that it is guaranteed to be more expensive and less useful than the designs suggested by the neighbors.
Years ago it took an accident to spur the councils to remove one southbound lane and create a turn lane for the safety of cars. What disaster will it take to create a boulevard with a sane speed, safe walkways, short crosswalks, and effective medians for its citizens? Is the exercise of political power more important than the will of the people?
Mark Brodsky is a Monte Sereno resident who lives in the area of the Winchester-Daves intersection.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
