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MarinAgainstDensity

"Community Meeting," on traffic on Sir Francis Drake; 3/15 at 7 pm, at Kent Middle School

Kent Middle School, in the Multipurpose Room
800 College Avenue
Kentfield, California 94904
March 15, 2016
7:00 PM PT


Some proposed changes will actually make Sir Francis Drake Boulevard traffic slower for vehicles and less safe for kids.


3/15/16 Meeting is Your Last Chance to Protest SFD Plan

Worsening SFD Safety and Gridlock

Meeting Specifics: The final opportunity for the public to weigh in about the plan is "Community Meeting #3" on Tuesday March 15 at 7 pm, at Kent Middle School, in the Multipurpose Room.

Summary of the Issue: The county’s plan to reconstruct Sir Francis Drake Boulevard from Ross to Hwy. 101 will snarl SFD and alternative central Marin routes to Hwy. 101 – and adds new features that slow down traffic and endanger school kids, pedestrians, and cyclists.

Who Should Attend: Everyone who commutes via SFD or alternative routes to Hwy. 101 (e.g., Miracle Mile, Magnolia, Doherty, Tamalpais); parents of children who walk or bike to school on SFD. Unless there is sufficient public objection, the “final” plan will move forward as proposed.

What You Should Demand: The County should Start Over and revert to square one, as urged by Marin IJ columnist Dick Spotswood, in his March 5 Marin IJ column:

The draft plan the county has crafted is fatally flawed. County staff needs to revert to square one and re-envision the project’s primary purpose. Goal one should be speeding auto and bus traffic and decreasing congestion. A necessary side task increases safety for all concerned, including neighborhood pedestrians.

See also Doreen Gleason’s March 15 Marin IJ Letter to the Editor, reprinted here:

"Drake improvements won’t help traffic or safety"

I concur with columnist Dick Spotswood’s assessment that the Sir Francis Drake Boulevard rehabilitation project is fatally flawed.

One prominent element of the county’s proposal is narrower vehicular lanes. These are a traffic engineering tool to slow vehicular speeds.

Between College Avenue and Bacich Elementary School, narrowing vehicular lanes makes room for dangerously slim bike lanes abutting heavy traffic. These provide school kids and adults an unsafe alternative to sidewalks on Drake and the bike path along Corte Madera Creek.

Equally ill-considered is the proposed new at-grade crossing of Drake, from Wolfe Grade to Bacich, right next to the pedestrian overpass that was constructed after the death of two schoolchildren.

The county is playing political games with children’s lives and drivers’ daily commutes.

Despite the clear designation of “bikes” on the latest proposed plans presented online and at a March 9 Kentfield planning meeting that she attended, Supervisor Katie Rice denies the proposed bike lanes’ existence, attributing them to misinformation and rumors.

Rice’s campaign supporter, Joan Lundstrom, states in her March 12 letter to the IJ, that “in checking with the county and Supervisor Katie Rice, I found the project will not be adding bike lanes in this corridor.”

These machinations lend credence to suspicions that the Drake “improvement” project is an election-year spending ploy gone awry.

Paving, introducing bike lanes and adding crosswalks were expected to make everyone in District 2 happy. Instead, we face a badly designed project that will make commute times worse, school children less safe, and turn Drake into a multiple-year construction zone, snarling traffic there and on alternative routes throughout Central Marin.

— Doreen Gleason, Kentfield