Public Comment

Not everybody has a computer. I know, half of you think that that's just no longer the case. And I bet you don't live on or near San Pablo Avenue. I tried to take the computer online survey being passed around regarding transit on San Pablo Avenue since I live on San Pablo Avenue. I found myself forced to choose between untenable options and finally realized the whole survey would be used against my neighborhood's best qualities in a wholesale sacrifice to people who want to skip the freeway. We're not just an end-run for drivers; we're an enviable mix of residential and commercial neighborhoods with the most historic roots in Berkeley besides the shellmounds. I left a lot of questions blank not knowing what else to do.

There's an option for stripping all the parking to create protected bike lanes on San Pablo Avenue. I love protected bike lanes. But if there's one thing left the authorities can do to us after allowing rents, commercial and otherwise, to skyrocket so far that local businesses can't function without prices we can't pay, it's to remove the last little bits of parking we compete for as residents, workers, and shoppers. Here it comes. There's only so many of us who can walk ten blocks to the grocery store and carry the produce home. Our bike lanes are currently just off San Pablo Avenue on side roads with lower speeds where a protected lane wouldn't require stripping out our lovely, winding medians of historic trees, trees which in this plan get no discussion. 

It certainly saves time and trouble to avoid more traditional democratic fora, especially if for some reason you're trying to avoid meeting your neighbors. But the allegiance to online surveys here in Berkeley and in this transit county study is silly; Berkeley's multi-unit housing smoking regulation survey, for instance, included a solid quarter of respondents who had no idea what the law was but merrily participated anyway. People in single family homes participated. And as Daily Planet Editor Becky O'Malley deftly demonstrated, those motivated to skew the results can sign up and complete the survey over and over again. 

Developer-driven surveys only offer limited, pre-chosen, non-grassroots options-- and none of our historic trees, in the case of San Pablo Avenue's transit survey. Right now on San Pablo Avenue we're a mix of buses, bikes, and local traffic. The slower we travel the safer we are sharing our shady, historic road. Our oldest trees are somehow absent in every single survey option, trees rhapsodized about in the earliest remembrances of this area. And trees are remarkably unwilling to fill out online surveys.