Tonight: Carriage house, bike lanes on Menlo council agenda

The Oak Grove bicycle boulevard proposal is a simple and effective means to encourage safe bicycling, especially for students biking to school. It is an important step in creating a safe cycling infrastructure in Menlo Park, which will help reduce congestion and encourage people to leave cars at home, creating a healthier, more connected, and more human scale Menlo Park community. Everyone will benefit by reducing the number of cars on the road.

Please support this proposal --- come to the council meeting tonight and send letters to city council urging their support (city.council@menlopark.org).

The reasons to delay this project are not well presented. If the bids are higher than expected then how much more would Menlo Park need to pay? If a signal change is recommended and lowers project costs then why not simply adjust the current bids. Constructions costs only go up in the current economic environment so how will delays likely impact the project costs. In general, residents have waited way too long for improvements to our community bike network and it is critical that this the ONLY east-west bike corridor we have be build soon.

Whether to move or to tear down the Carriage House (formerly known as Edy's Ice Cream) needs more time to sort out. Placing it on the Consent Calendar does not provide a forum for the community to chime in. As a decision does not need to be made until at least July 1, 2016, continuing this agenda item certainly has merit. One suggestion is to refer it to one of the City's Commissions, which will give interested parties an opportunity to express their thoughts. A decision does not need to be made tonight. Being more respectful to a building with many memories deserves the dignity of more time. We hope the staff and the City Council concurs.

Memories is all that makes the Carriage house worthwhile. Other than that, it's a very ordinary shed with a few strips of fancy fretwork. No reason for a penny of our City's cash to be spent on this.

Don't allow mis-placed preservationism to make junk more valuable than it is.