Honorable Councilmembers,

Neighborhoods in The Willows, and indeed throughout Menlo Park, are
beset with hazardous and noisy traffic stemming from irresponsible
overdevelopment in neighboring cities.

In particular, Woodland Avenue has become a conduit for 36% cut-through
traffic, much of which is in form of noisy SUVs, small trucks, and loud
ill-maintained cars. Traffic signs are routinely ignored.

The council majority has done little to stem the resulting erosion of
neighborhood quality-of-life and safety.

Firstly,

It has suppressed results of a joint City/citizen Willows cut-through
survey conducted on 7 May 2003. The survey was an action item from a
highly attended Willows neighborhood meeting earlier in 2003, and
promises were made of neighborhood followup. Instead, results were
presented as a Staff Report at a little-publicized councilmeeting.
Courtesy alone would dictate that the work of over 60 volunteers not be
swept under the rug simply because the findings are inconsistent with
the no-traffic-limitation outcome desired by the Council majority.

Eric Doyle, the majority's surrogate on the Transportation Commission,
has claimed that survey results are invalid because the study honors the
municipal boundaries of our City. In so doing, he harps on a 'good
neighbor' argument which if continued to extreme would define away the
notion of cut-through traffic throughout the Peninsula and fail to
recognize our Council's specific domain of influence and obligation to
protect Menlo Park's quality of life. Good-neighborliness is reciprocal,
and requires adjacent cities not to inject cut-through traffic into
Menlo Park's residential areas.

The Council should sponsor an all-Willows meeting in which survey
results and assumptions are presented to the residents of our
increasingly beleaguered neighborhood.

Secondly,

In a move reminiscent of the PZO 926 debacle, the Council majority
adopted in October 2004 a sham NTMP written essentially by one person,
again Eric Doyle. Mr. Doyle consistently overrode his two loudly
dissenting colleagues on the NTMP Transportation Commission
subcommittee, to produce a document making traffic limitation nearly
impossible. Several (but not all) of the NTMP's many defects are
summarized below:

- No-returns to City-mailed ballots for calming measures are
counted as against, rather than as don't cares. It is a maxim of our
democracy that qui tacit, consentit - who is quiet, consents.

- A 60% resident approval is required even to study traffic
conditions. This undermines Section II.A.9 of the General Plan, which
requires the City to monitor and to reduce cut-through traffic.

- Much ado is made of traffic shifting between streets, yet no
mention is made of

remedies to traffic dumped onto our residential streets by neighboring
cities.

- The City sponsored moot public hearings in which many of
these issues were raised, yet ignored. A memorable response from one
pro-council-majority Transportation Commissioner to dissent was that
'sometimes the few have the best ideas'.

                  - The philosophical underpinnings of the NTMP were
taken verbatim, and without

widespread discussion, from a letter to Council by Eric Doyle's
anti-traffic calming faction, SOS.

The present NTMP should be discarded as a result of a gravely flawed,
disingenuous, and partisan process inimical to the high quality-of-life
we have come to expect as Menlo Park residents. A new policy should be
crafted in a forum balancing all sides of the traffic issue.

Thank you,

Ross Wilson

695 Woodland Avenue
Received on Thu Jan 6 23:11:24 2005