News digest News digest (January 21, 2004)

Six injured in bus accident

Six people suffered minor injuries when a Marguerite shuttle bus ran into a construction crane last Thursday.

The 6:45 a.m. accident occurred on Welch Road near Stanford Hospital, according to Stanford News Service spokesman Jack Hubbard.

Six people were treated at Stanford Hospital for minor bumps and bruises, Hubbard said. Twenty people were on the bus at the time --Bay City News Service
POST acquires coast ridge

Menlo Park-based Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) has acquired the 151-acre Seaside School Ridge property on the San Mateo Coast.

The property is located about a mile from the intersection of highways 1 and 84.

"Seaside School Ridge has a billion dollar, 360-degree view," said Audrey Rust, POST president. "It's just breathtaking. Once we have raised the funds to complete this acquisition, it will be protected forever."

POST typically buys open space properties to prevent their development, and later sells them to public agencies for public use.

POST's purchase price will be $1.3 million. When the property went on the market in 2001, the listed price was $3.5 million. --Don Kazak
Stanford faculty helps direct earthquake study

An ambitious program to install 800 earthquake sensors in the Western United States and Alaska over the next five years is being guided in part by Stanford geophysicist Paul Segall.

"This kind of thing happens once in a career," said Segall, who chairs a group determining where to place the sensor stations.

The $100 million project, known as the Plate Boundary Observatory, is an attempt to record seismic activity in greater detail at the boundary between Pacific and North American plates of the earth's crust. The conflict between the moving plates produce seismic faults, like the San Andreas Fault. --Don Kazak Transportation division does about-face on Downtown North survey

The Palo Alto Transportation Division staff will skip polling residents on the Downtown North road closures, despite making claims in December that they were merely postponing the survey.

The recommendation, made to the Planning and Transportation Commission, instead asks the commission to advise the City Council to go ahead and continue the traffic-management plan already in place for the past seven months.

In a report to the commission, transportation staff noted, "One of the important measures (of the project's success) remains unevaluated formally -- neighborhood acceptance by means of an opinion survey."

Nonetheless, the report does not call for a formal poll but instead provides commissioners with a summary of approximately 200 e-mails, letters and phone calls from residents over the past seven months, along with a packet of 80 letters sent recently.

Transportation staff ran into a procedural roadblock with the survey in December, when two factions within the neighborhood could not agree on the fairest way to assess residents' opinions. At the time, staff said they would seek advice from the commission this month on how best to survey residents.

The Planning and Transportation Commission is meeting tonight at 6 p.m. in City Council chambers to consider the issue. --Jocelyn Dong

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