San Mateo County, CA November 2, 1999 Election
Smart Voter

Belmont's Car Problem

By Dave Warden

Candidate for Council Member; City of Belmont

This information is provided by the candidate
It's no secret that Belmont has traffic problems. What do we do about them?
Belmont has the misfortune of having ONLY ONE major east-west traffic artery: Ralston Avenue. In order to get to either freeway, or go to the store, or take your kids to school, it's almost impossible to avoid Ralston Avenue. Over 25,000 cars travel along Ralston Avenue every single day.

Belmont's Ralston Avenue traffic is caused by:

  • Excessive long-term housing development
  • Delays caused by the grade separation bottleneck
  • Use of Ralston as a "cut-through" by cars travelling between 280 and 101
  • Left turn back-ups in the AM and PM at Notre Dame and Ralston School

On average, every new house in Belmont generates 10 new car trips per day. 100 NEW HOUSES GENERATE 1000 NEW CAR TRIPS PER DAY. How many of these cars will wind up on Ralston Avenue? We need to look at the General Plan of the city and make some choices about how many more developments and how many more houses we want to see in Belmont--before we all choke on the traffic that these new houses will generate.

There are several things that we can try to accomplish to improve the traffic situation:

  • Encourage construction of a 280 onramp in North San Carlos to reduce traffic from Hastings and Alameda that eventually heads west on Ralston.
  • Work with the school districts and high schools to try to space the starting times of the various schools apart so that not all the traffic hits Ralston at more or less the same time.
  • Perform a detailed traffic study of AM and PM traffic and determine the precise amout of cut-through traffic from 92 to 101 and points East.
  • Look at funding shuttle buses to reduce the left turn traffic at Ralson Middle School. SamTrans is not adequately serving Belmont. If they won't help us, we'll have to take care of ourselves.

The SOLUTION to our traffic problems DOES NOT involve "high-density housing on the transportation corridors" as the real-estate developers would have you believe. High density housing just means more people, who mostly drive cars--like you and I do! Belmont's transporation corridors are needed for commercial and retail businesses to provide a tax base for our city revenues.

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