League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
Santa Clara County, CA November 4, 2014 Election
	Lydia Kou Answers Questions Candidate for Council Member; City of Palo Alto

The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of Palo Alto and asked of all candidates for this office.
Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

Questions & Answers

1. How would you balance neighborhood and city-wide concerns?

I reject the premise that neighborhood and city-wide concerns are in conflict. The neighborhoods are the key part of the city. When the neighborhoods resist having unfair burdens on them and their quality of life diminished, special interest groups demonize the residents as NIMBYs (Not In My BackYard). Is it NIMBYism to resist calls to sacrifice so that others may reap excessive profits? Is it NIMBYism to protect the community that you sacrificed to become part of and have invested in, both financially and emotionally? Is it NIMBYism to resist frequent assertions that Palo Alto needs to become more like Manhattan?

Too often "city-wide concerns" is code for the agendas of City Hall, the regional bureaucracies and the politically well-connected. Is it a city-wide interest to have even more office workers at a cost of increasing cut-through traffic and overflow parking in the neighborhoods?

"City-wide concerns" is also code for ignoring the impacts of projects on nearby neighborhoods. There is a "city-wide concern" to provide more housing, but that shouldn't trump supporting neighborhood-serving retail. Is the benefit of a few more housing units worth the cost of a whole neighborhood now having to drive further for basic retail? Especially since statistics predict that less than a third of the employees in that housing will work in Palo Alto? And somehow concerns that affect many neighborhoods across the city are treated in isolation, rather than as a city-wide concern. For example, overflow parking into the neighborhoods. College Terrace worked long and hard for a Residential Parking Permit (RPP) program. It was supposed to serve as a template for Evergreen Park and then the neighborhoods around University Avenue. Instead, City Hall delayed and delayed and is reinventing an RPP for downtown.

City Hall sees having a "vibrant downtown"--a regional entertainment and dining destination--as a city-wide issue. But has downtown ceased to be useful for many residents? Those in neighborhoods not close to downtown tell me that they rarely go there, a combination of "too much trouble" and "nothing I want".

As a residential Realtor of 17 years, I am constantly reminded of why people want to buy in Palo Alto. They come here for the schools, for a yard so that the kids can play, for the sense of community ... Palo Alto's neighborhoods are the community, not just where people park themselves when not at work.

2. Palo Alto and surrounding communities are under economic pressure to grow and environmental pressures to live and work closer together. How do you envision Palo Alto responding to these pressures?

The pressure to grow in Palo Alto is not economic, it is political. Does Palo Alto have a shortage of jobs for its residents? No. Does Palo Alto need to grow to get more income to support its services? To the contrary. For the types of growth being promoted, analysis indicates that the costs are greater than the revenue produced. We must not confuse the economic interests of the broader community with the profit motives of some individuals and corporations. Excessive development is overwhelming our infrastructure: our streets, parking, schools, parks and other civic facilities. As a built-out city, it is increasingly difficult and expensive to expand that infrastructure. City Hall has encouraged excessive growth by not having projects pay their fair share of realistic assessments of their impacts on the community.

Similarly, the claim that there are pressures to live and work closer together is based on the assumption that we need to have a much larger population here and uncritical assumptions about its benefits. For example, the advocates of this are hostile to homes with yards, disregarding the huge benefits of being able to let children play there while the parent is inside working.

The advocates of putting high-density housing near transit resist thinking through the details. The elementary schools serving the CalAve Caltrain station area are well over a mile away. Are parents really going to have their children walking or biking along busy commercial streets and then cross El Camino, during rush hour? I was reminded of this on a recent trip down El Camino: A father and two sons of elementary age were trying to cross. One fell and got tangled up in his bike and the other couldn't decide whether to proceed or go back to the sidewalk.

The intersections on Page Mill at both El Camino and Foothill Expressway have long been close to failing (2 decades?). A recent City report says that the one at Foothill is failing and the best remedy is a huge construction project (grade-separation), but that the problem could be reduced by improving traffic flow at El Camino. Yet City Hall's policy is to encourage development whose consequence will be to inject even more traffic into that intersection.

As a Council member, I will focus on getting realistic assessments of these impacts, tracking cumulative impacts and keeping a skeptical eye out for side-effects and unintended consequences.

3. What proposals do you have to alleviate the traffic and parking situation in Palo Alto?

The first priority is to not make these situations worse!

The first part of this is obvious: Avoid creating more traffic and parking demands. The second part is easily forgotten because there is so much pressure to be perceived as "doing something": Carefully analyze potential solutions to avoid shifting the problem elsewhere and potentially making it worse.

For example, the VTA proposal for El Camino to dedicate a traffic lane in each direction to buses. While their presentation now acknowledges that significant vehicle traffic will be displaced to nearby streets, there is no assessment of those impacts. Adding traffic to already congested streets has disproportionate impacts. The GreenHouse Gas (GHG) savings from people switching to buses could easily be overwhelmed by the increased GHG from vehicles stuck longer on congested streets. That doesn't factor in the value of the time of people stuck in the congestion.

Some of that displaced traffic will wind up cutting through neighborhood streets, making them less safe for residents. How do you value that tradeoff?

The VTA proposal is based on the assumption that travel time along El Camino is the biggest barrier to increased bus usage. What I hear from people is that the key problem is poor connections at one or both ends.

Similarly, I am highly skeptical of the amount of resources City Hall wants to expend on cyclists wanting to ride along the major arterial streets. The vast majority of people I talk to don't want to ride on those streets. If changes to the arterials push more cars onto the bike boulevards and residential streets, isn't this going to be counterproductive?

In considering what is possible, City Hall needs to consider not just the technical aspects, but the political and financial impacts. For example, the primary benefit of Caltrain electrification is that it will increase capacity by allowing trains to run more frequently. The problem is that during peak hours Caltrain is already running near the maximum that doesn't create crippling congestion on the cross streets that would then spread to the parallel streets (Alma and El Camino). Grade-separation is needed to avoid this ("de-synchronization"), but while electrification has been budgeted, its prerequisite of grade-separation has not. Complicating matters is that the transportation needs of the Peninsula have been a poor stepchild to those of San Jose, both internally and moving workers from the East Bay to SJ.

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Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League.  Candidates' statements are presented as submitted. The answer to each question should be limited to 400 words. Direct references to opponents are not permitted.

Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: October 10, 2014 13:41
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