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In the interests of understanding, if not influencing, an odd set of proposals for our neighborhood emanating from the “Office of Transportation,” my neighbors and I attended the South Oceanview neighborhood traffic management meeting held Tuesday, May 27, and enjoyed a most entertaining presentation. 

My theory would be that the little maps and models are far too fun to noodle with, and that’s how arguably educated city officials end up presenting a little neighborhood meeting with obvious nonsense having no sense of the predictable response.  

It took only about a polite half-hour for one of my neighbors to point out that the traffic circle “furniture” being promoted to us was, well, ugly. Unsightly, I think the planners call it. If the premise afloat was to “enhance” and “upgrade” the neighborhood’s sense of identity, well, shouldn’t these things just be thrown in the bay? We have plenty of indigenous blight without having to host the depressing rubberized traffic-flow dreamscape of some planner who probably hails from out of town.  

I kept trying to visualize the circle-things covered with our neighborhood’s particular style of graffiti, just for accuracy’s sake, and since less graffiti fits on a stop sign, I asked if simple stop signs weren’t a more sensible alternative.  

“People don’t stop at stop signs,” he explained patiently. That was my favorite, since I missed the memo and I’ve been stopping at stop signs all over town. People who don’t get enough gossip about me can add that one to the mix. He added that stop-sign stopping (which nobody does) creates pollution for the homeowners nearby, an enlightened moment for the planner whose original suggestion was to strip all the parking from commercial streets to “enhance traffic flow,” carefully crafting six, rather than four, lanes of heaving, sweating, polluting vehicles-worth of toxicity for those of us who live there.  

Don’t get me wrong, I love these meetings. I love watching the impassive officials’ faces when they’re forced to listen to the guy with a five-year-old, a six-year-old and a two-year-old talk about how his driveway is right next to the raceway created the last time the planners felt it was time to get out their models and maps.  

My neighbors are the best antidote to the visionary trance that must settle over city hall from time to time, and they do a lot of laughing, which is probably the best, most enlightened response to its inherent comedy. Where else can you keep a straight face while you ask if there’s a technical difference between a vehicle that does “cookies” versus “doughnuts”? The planners perhaps can make an educated guess, but it’s your neighbors who really know.  

Carol Denney is a Berkeley resident and a frequent contributor to the Planet’s Editorial Pages.