College Terrace Residents’ Association Quarterly                                                         November 2003

Views From the Terrace

 

TRAFFIC ENGINEERS TO THE RESCUE

Help the city and College Terrace develop a new traffic management plan

 

The nationally renowned transportation planning and engineering firm Kimley-Horn is coming to College Terrace. The City of Palo Alto has asked them to tackle our neighborhood’s traffic problems. And to kick off the effort, the engineers want—and need—to hear from residents of the Terrace.

This Tuesday evening, November 18, at 7 p.m., at the Escondido Elementary School’s library, Project Manager Jim West will present Kimley-Horn’s initial report outlining the traffic situation in College Terrace. This is a critical juncture in the neighborhood effort that began with our petition in 1999 calling attention to a growing problem with car traffic in and around College Terrace. Tuesday night’s meeting offers you the chance to provide input, as well as learn about the various options for addressing the widespread disregard of speed limits on our streets and the increase in cut-through traffic.

Kimley-Horn’s analysis of our neighborhood’s traffic essentially confirms what many of us know: that many drivers are using the residential streets of College Terrace as a way around peak hour congestion on El Camino Real and Page Mill Road. “Conclusions on the exact number of cut-through vehicles and related percentages vary depending on the interpretation of the data,” the firm’s report says. “However, the results clearly show that a large proportion of traffic using interior and exterior streets is cutting through the neighborhood.”

The report goes on to say that average speeds on neighborhood streets are routinely above the posted speed limit, with the most significant violations on Stanford and California Avenues.

The firm’s team of traffic management experts has not yet started to devise a plan, but they can tell you what has worked and what hasn’t worked in dozens of other towns and cities that they have helped since the firm’s founding in 1967. The report lists a range of traffic management improvements, including raised crosswalks, speed bumps, curb extensions, circles, and other possibilities.

Over the next few months the Kimley-Horn team will determine various possibilities that could be tried in the Terrace. The report acknowledges, however, that whatever is attempted must have broad support in the neighborhood. “Solutions should focus on managing traffic to reduce speeds and volume without extreme improvements that may create public opposition,” the report concludes.

Indeed, before any trial commences, additional public meetings will be held and city officials will need to give a green light. Staff from the city’s Transportation Division will attend Tuesday’s meeting and can explain the process that must occur before a final plan is adopted.

For those who wish to study up on the traffic issues before the meeting, background can be found on the College Terrace Traffic Committee website (www.cttc.info) or at the College Terrace Library.

 

All You Need To Do Is Call (In)—Support Your Local Library

By Simon Firth, TERRACE RESIDENT

 

“If we don’t have what you want, just ask,” says Sue Chang, librarian in charge of the College Terrace Library.  

Chang and her five associates are familiar faces to many College Terrace residents, but they’d like to be known to a lot more of us.  

It may be that you visited the library recently and didn’t find what you were looking for among its wide range of fiction and non-fiction books, magazines, newspapers, and recorded media. If that was the case, Chang and her colleagues want to know.  

They try hard to reflect the needs and interests of the people in the area, says Chang, but to do that “we need residents’ input on what they want us to stock.” 

 

DVDs now. WiFi next? 

A case in point is DVDs. Many residents asked that the library carry them and, as a result, the branch now has a generous assortment in stock. “They are proving very, very popular,” reports Chang. “Both the children’s and the adult titles.” 

Anyone with a City of Palo Alto library card can search the library’s entire collection of DVDs online from home. It’s easy to then reserve a DVD (or a book for that matter) online and, when it is available at another branch, it can be sent to the College Terrace branch for pick up.  

Of course, there is no cost to borrow a title, and you are allowed out at least three DVDs at a time. You even get an email telling you it is waiting. If you return it late, the fines are only 25 cents. Beat that, Blockbuster! 

Another recent innovation in some other Palo Alto library branches has been the provision of high speed wireless internet (or WiFi) access. Will that be coming to College Terrace?  

Again, says Chang, it’s first a question of enough people saying they want it so she can make a case to the powers that be. “If you come down to the library, you can write a note that we will give directly to the people who decide these things,” she says.  

 

Always Something New 

If you’ve not been to the College Terrace library in a while, it’s worth remembering that new books, videos and DVDs are constantly coming in.  

As well as the current issues of many magazines and that day’s newspapers, you’ll find everything from a generous selection of the latest mysteries to up-to-date travel guides, to reference books that can help answer your legal, medical, or financial questions. 

A new reference item is the Nutrition Action Healthletter, provided free by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit organization which does not take advertising. Their reports are lively reading but backed by scientific research. They name specific brands and products and rate processed foods so it is easy to pick out the best food, as well as the junk foods you may most want to avoid. 

 

Use it or lose it. 

Events are also held at the library periodically. Every Wednesday at 11:00 am, for example, there is a Children’s Story Time. 

But whether such events will continue to be offered again entirely depends on one key thing: the level of support they attract. One recent story time attracted only five children. That’s far fewer than attend similar events at other branches.  

If more kids don’t come to story time, it might be eliminated. And with the city looking for any excuse to cut library opening hours and possibly eliminate branches altogether, the same goes for all the other services the budget-strapped city library system offers.  

The best way to keep our local library, say its librarians, is for us is to show we need it. The best way for us to do that is to go and use it. See you there! 

 

College Terrace Mourns the Death of a Long Time Resident

By Erika Enos ctra board member

 

Carrol “Frank” Frankfurt, whose healthy family-oriented lifestyle and neighborly manner were widely admired in College Terrace, peacefully passed away at on Thursday Nov. 6 at the VA Hospital after a short illness.

Frank and his wife Betty moved to Columbia Street in the mid-1950s to raise their three

children and be closer to Frank’s work as an electrical engineer at Stanford University. They raised sons Jim and John and daughter Mary in the house where John and his wife Maritza, a former CTRA board member, now are raising their three children.

For decades, Frank could be seen almost every morning bicycling to work, and he balked at driving such a short distance long before many recognized the merits of such commuting habits. Even after his retirement, he continued to bike to the pool at Stanford to swim every day (he made sure that part of his retirement benefit package included access to the pool). Always in great physical shape, he was known for the rope tied to a tall oak tree in his front yard that he climbed almost daily. I will always remember Frank shimmying down that rope, startling people walking by who had no idea that a middle-aged man was about to descend from a tree! He had a quick wit and a wry sense of humor. Being an electrical engineer, Frank was a great fix-it guy. His neighbors frequently asked his help and counsel on home repair and maintenance. He always came through with good advice and willing help.

Frank Frankfurt helped to make our neighborhood a wonderful place to live. He will truly be missed by his family, his neighbors on Columbia Street, and friends all over College Terrace.

 

 

Now, a Word from Our President

 

One comment I keep hearing from leaders of other Palo Alto neighborhoods is “Why does College Terrace need another traffic study anyway? You’ve got all those barriers!”

       It’s true that our neighborhood would be a much less pleasant place without the efforts of the late Jim Culpepper and many other Terrace residents. It was their many trips to the City Council and hours negotiating with city staff that led to several trials of different barrier plans in 1974, and finally to the arrangement that is so envied by other neighborhoods.

       From all I’ve heard, the major discussion back then centered on where to put in the barriers, not whether they should be used. There was simply no other way to deter the onslaught of cars using our interior streets to go between the campus and the recently built Page Mill/Oregon Expressway, en route to Bayshore Freeway and the newly opened I-280.

       Now, nearly 30 years later, we are once again faced with undeniable traffic problems, but this time the menu of available solutions is much broader than the traditional stop signs and barriers used in 1974. And we have a unique opportunity to find solutions because of the generous funding from Stanford University for a neighborhood traffic study and from Stanford Management Company for implementation. The city transportation staff has also made this project a priority despite a work overload and serious budget crunch. As a result, we have data that, in a nutshell, shows this: Both Stanford and California Avenues carry too many cars going too fast, with many of them having neither a local origin nor destination. And too many of these cars end up filtering through our interior streets like rats running a maze.

       The successors to Culpepper and the 1970s neighborhood activists are today’s volunteers serving on the College Terrace Traffic Committee. They have put in untold hours collecting the concerns of residents from all over the Terrace, posting information on the www.cttc.info website, and working with the city transportation staff to move this project forward.

       Join us on Tuesday to hear what the experts see as the critical problems to be solved and to get involved in finding new solutions that could make our streets safer, more people-friendly, and less tempting to through drivers.

—Kathy Durham

Curbs Cuts Planned for College Avenue

 

Thanks in part to the assistance of Mayor Dena Mossar, the city is planning to install curb cuts missing on the north side of College Avenue,

College Terrace resident Simon Firth wrote to the Mayor about the problem, and she forwarded the request to Fred Herman, the City's coordinator for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. After he and Firth exchanged a few rounds of e-mail about the matter, Herman wrote: “In the near future we will be doing two at Yale and College, one at Wellesley and College, and one at Williams and College.” That still leaves curbs on the south side of the street to fix, as well as some curbs on Cambridge and California.

Why just the partial fix?

Says Herman: “It's simply a matter of the need outweighed by the resources available. It's not a matter of us not wanting to upgrade College Terrace ASAP. It's just going to take time to have a barrier free community.”

Herman has a total budget of $20,000 a year for ADA compliance. Each individual ramp costs around $2,500.

 

Support Your Neighborhood Association

Have you been waiting for a handy form to send in your voluntary contribution to your friendly neighborhood association? Anyone 18 or older who lives in College Terrace is automatically a CTRA member. But becoming a dues-paying member helps us to throw neighborhood parties, to publish this newsletter, and to track issues of importance to our community. Thank you to everyone who has contributed already.

 

Name _______________________________________

Address______________________________________

Phone_______________________________________

E-mail ______________________________________

Make checks payable to College Terrace Residents’ Association and send to the following address: CTRA, c/o Grace Liu, Treasurer, 2120 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA. Please either attach the above form or include your name, address, email, and phone. Thanks!

Parking Update: Talks Continue

 

Work continues on developing potential options for managing non-resident parking on impacted neighborhood streets. The Police Department, city staff, Stanford University, and Alexandra McFarland (CTRA’s tireless Stanford Liaison) are continuing to discuss feasible alternatives intended to alleviate parking congestion within the neighborhood. Contact Alexandra at 493-6190 to learn more about this saga and get involved in finding solutions that work both for the city and for Terrace residents.

 

Need a Holiday Housesitter?

 

Peg Cameron, the newsletter’s sometime copy editor (don’t blame her for any mistakes in this issue!) and a resident of Williams Street, is thrilled that her granddaughter Jane and husband Martin plan to visit her from December 26 -January 2nd. But Peg’s place is tiny. Does anyone need some adaptable, reliable, experienced caretakers who can housesit, feed pets, and do other chores? Phone Peg at 852-0180.

spotlight: extraordinary people

A Witness in Iraq

 

Only a few months ago, College Terrace resident Kathleen Namphy, a 68-year-old grandmother, was described in the Mercury News as a “real action hero.” She had just climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for breast cancer, despite being a cancer survivor herself. Add that climb to a list of accomplishments that includes being a champion high jumper, driving a Volkswagen beetle from Germany to Burma, and trapping wild animals in Iran for American zoos.

And now, she is in Iraq, serving on a Christian Peacemaker Team, and trying to get the word out about conditions over there. She has been sending back letters regularly that describe in vivid detail the suffering that is occurring and the efforts to make things better. To receive copies of her correspondence, please contact Paul Lomio at plomio@stanford.edu.