Publication Date: Friday, December 10, 2004
ReaderWire
ReaderWire
(December 10, 2004)
Martin's motives
I can understand a request for the number of seniors who opted out of the school parcel tax, but why a request for their names?
Such a list can be used for many purposes, so when my name is on Wayne Martin's list, I want to know how he intends to use the information.
Mr. Martin says that he has no plans to use the information, but contacting him about his motive is impossible since he is not in the phone book. I thank the school district for informing me about this revealing of my personal information.
I would appreciate Mr. Martin's explanation of his motive in requesting my name.
Isabel Peterson
Harker Avenue, Palo Alto
'Road diet' needed
Some recent letters and columns have misrepresented the goals of the Midtown traffic-calming project. Traffic calming does not seek to delay drivers, but to have them travel steadily at safe speeds.
Traffic lights do not help in this regard. Repeated fast acceleration and braking are dangerous and inefficient, resulting in noise and pollution. Under these conditions it is possible for "slower" traffic (i.e. traffic with a lower peak speed but which moves steadily) to traverse a section of road in the same time as the jackrabbits.
Traveling slower does not mean you will be delayed in getting to your destination, only that you will spend less time waiting at lights. Reducing the number of lanes to three need not introduce backups, either.
Today on Middlefield Road a single left-turning car plugs up the left lane. This results in last-minute lane changes, fast traffic in the right lane and the ensuing safety problems. Moving the turning vehicles into their own lane would allow traffic in the remaining lane to flow more smoothly.
"Road diets" like this have been successful in many communities, increasing safety without introducing traffic jams. Palo Alto's traffic engineers have run computer simulations that indicate that a three-lane configuration would work here, too. To their credit, they want to perform field measurements to validate the simulations.
Let's let the engineers do their job and make measurements with the proposed configuration. Then we can make a decision based on data and facts instead of superstition and emotion.
Richard Swent
Clara Drive, Palo Alto
Dorm disaster
About the Weekly's balanced article on Stanford's new dorm project (Dec. 3): Now that a "revised" graduate-housing plan has been announced, it's clearer than ever that the acute concerns held by growing numbers of the Stanford community are just not being heard.
The Munger Graduate Residences were originally conceived as a four-story, five-story and five-and-a-half story cluster. In the revised plan, we now see not three but five buildings, of three, four, five, five and five-and-a-half stories.
What's more, the footprint has grown, not diminished, and requires displacing two more venerable, decent-sized houses: Serra House (Institute for Research on Women and Gender) and Mariposa House are now also marked for removal along with Rogers, Owen, the Bike Shop and the 1892 Griffin-Drell house, the oldest residence on campus and still miraculously standing where it was built.
Getting rid of those houses so as to set five-story buildings looming on both sides of Salvatierra Walk seems to bring grosser disproportion and disfigurement of the local environment. "Mitigation" is no solution. What we're seeing, at bottom, is a disregard, a recklessness of place.
This considerable gift is a boon to the University. Yet other locations do exist, on campus but in far less sensitive spots, for law as well as general graduate dorms. New housing need not destroy one of the few remaining quiet and humane places close in to center campus. So many such places have been lost to expansion in recent years -- we need not lose yet another.
The University administration should relocate this development, urging and trusting that the current funding will remain for a more sensible plan.
John Felstiner and Dennis Bark
English Department and Hoover Institution, Stanford
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