4 years ago, the incumbent promised to consider serious
approaches to solving the traffic problems in our neighborhood.
Yet every day when I walk outside my home on Warring
Street, I see the cars lined up for blocks.
Why hasn’t our councilmember pushed the city to
conduct the traffic counts and origin-destination studies
of traffic on the Derby-Belrose-Warring corridor?
If I’m elected, pushing for this would be one of
my first priorities.
And while we’re envisioning the endless line of
cars running through our neighborhoods on a daily basis,
we must ask ourselves if 911 spaces of new parking really
belong atop a fault line. By locating this parking closer
to our local businesses, we’ll allow more people
to go to Cal football games and stimulate our economy,
while moving traffic out of our neighborhoods and into
commercial centers and major thoroughfares that can handle
it.
And speaking of these thoroughfares, why has the incumbent
not placed an item on the city council agenda to reclaim
Ashby Avenue from Caltrans? This is all it would take
to turn Ashby from a state highway into a city-controlled
road, giving us the power to deal with congestion problems
without dealing with the Caltrans bureaucracy.
And speaking of Caltrans, adding another section to the
Caldecott Tunnel is a horrible idea that will have significant
impacts on traffic going into Berkeley and Oakland. Congestion
is going to occur somewhere—and expanding the tunnel
would only encourage more people to drive to work, and
speed up their trip into our neighborhoods. If people
are going to sit in traffic, it should be on freeways,
not in our neighborhoods.
If the tunnel is built despite our wishes, I will fight
for mitigations that will soften the blow to our already-horrible
congestion problems. And I’ll fight to ensure that
you don’t have to pay for it.
In his campaign four years ago, my opponent expressed
support for a free ecopass for UC faculty and staff—yet
he hasn’t lifted a finger. If you elect me, I will
fight to get cars off city streets by actively working
to pressure UC and major employers to provide their employees
with a free ecopass—starting with free bus service,
and gradually expanding to BART.
We must also pressure university officials to roll back
their recent fivefold increase in carpool permits—we
should be offering financial incentives for people to
carpool, not discouraging them from doing so.
PUBLIC SAFETY | AFFORDABLE
HOUSING | TRAFFIC | TAXES
| HEALTH CARE |
GOVERNMENTAL REFORM | UNIVERSITY-CITY
RELATIONS
