Takin' it to the streets, or how to create the impression of success by lowering your standards

Let's look at a few numbers for traffic density in Poway, specifically in the area around Poway Road. There's a measure called "Level of Service" (LOS) that describes, from A - F, the quality of the traffic situation on the streets: A being the best situation where dear old dad bragged about you to the neighbors, F being the grade that got you into trouble on your report card and strict talkings-to from daddy. A more official way is to use these descriptions from the Highway Capacity Manual (from the Transportation Research Board, a U.S. national highly respected organization) which describes the levels thusly:
A = Free flow
B = Reasonably free flow
C = Stable flow
D = Approaching unstable flow
E = Unstable flow
F = Forced or breakdown flow
Another definition of LOS A is the flow you see either late late at night, or on a car commercial.
Agenda item #8 in the March 16, 2010 Poway City Council meeting had a nice LOS map. I've taken the liberty of adding numbers to various streets as well as the summary in the lower right corner. These numbers, called "Car trips per day", indicate, well, how many cars per day travel these streets. It's interesting to note that the measurements are taken on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, not the weekends. No conspiracy theories here, it's just interesting. Ok, the numbers (obtained in 2007) show the car trips from 2003. The area with the numbers just coincidentally happen to bracket the existing wally-world store with LOS ranging from D to E. Lovely... The only worse area in the city is Espola Road going by Poway High, but that's going to be blessed with a couple of roundabouts (maybe) and made into a wider road with really wide bike lanes on both sides so I'm sure the LOS will move up a grade or two, just enough so daddy will let you take the car this weekend but not enough for him to give it to you forever.
One could note that because of the lousy LOS given in most of the city, they won't allow granny flats anywhere but the areas in east Poway...But that's a separate issue...



There was a 126 page General Plan amendment 10-02, item #15, dealing with the Transportation Master Element (TME) presented at the June 1, 2010 Poway City Council meeting where they changed the road standards. Note: We ALL love and support the General Plan, let's change it!!! Wait, we haven't really changed it, we've merely amended it. It's a living breathing document, don't you know? It presented the current traffic status of the roads, recommended redefinitions of the roads, and future estimates of the traffic on the roads. It also gave guidelines for bicycle paths, pedestrian paths, etc. Some of the following graphics are extracted from the staff report.The first deals with the current definitions of the roadways and traffic levels.

Sounds ok so far. The existing levels are "outdated" and aren't quite what the HCM (used by all local agencies) defines.

Ok again, let's be consistent with the way these things are done everywhere else in the county.

WAIT A SECOND HERE!!! Given the current levels and definitions from the General Plan, a whopping 46% of the roads FAIL to meet the standards? However, by using a standard that everyone else is using (if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you join them?) suddenly and magically EVERY SINGLE roadway is now in full compliance. Abracadabra, we're now in great shape. Thank GOODNESS for being able to lower our standards in the name of being like everyone else. No sense holding our city to some higher standard when a lower one will give us a 100% success rate, right?

Hold on, there's more. Projected studies of the traffic twenty years into the future (2030), show that ALL of the streets ARE STILL in compliance with the redefined elements. Whew, for a second there I thought they might actually have to FIX the traffic but apparently it's all good now and into the future. Of course it doesn't make a difference that every person you talk to about Poway Road traffic complains that it takes 15 minutes to go a mile. What could they talking about, the traffic studies show that the road is perfect?

So now we can add a Lowe's and a superwalmart because the streets can now handle the traffic, all by merely redefining your success criteria.

Just for information, here's pages showing the traffic levels now to show how wonderful the street system is! So don't complain about the traffic, it's all within acceptable limits, you whiner!

(More to come)

Poway Housing Solutions Propaganda Campaign

At the April 20th Poway City Council meeting, the Poway Housing Solutions folks gave a presentation about "Poway, Affordable Housing, and Our Way of Life." It must be nice to have a report (that they paid for) presented to the City as if it's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth...
A few of the things that were either asserted or implied was that:
1.) Low-income housing does not hurt the neighboring schools. It actually HELPS the API.
2.) Everybody loves low-income housing.


Let's first look at Poway Elementary schools from the report.
The measure of a schools goodness is the API, which is "The cornerstone of California's Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999; measures the academic performance and growth of schools on a variety of academic measures"
It's a standard to measure how the schools are doing. Anything under 800 is a no-no under the "No child left behind" act of 2001.


Here's the raw data for the Poway City Elementary schools from 2000 to 2009*:



And here's the data in graphical form:


Looks great huh? Everyone is FINALLY above 800. Note that Valley Elementary took until 2007 to break that barrier. Also note the general trend, every school is heading upwards. Soon they'll be breaking the max 1000 API limit. (API's go from 200 to 1000). Wonder what happens then?

What's the point? Well remember that quote about there being "lies, damn lies, and statistics"? The Poway Housing commission study on low-income housing and its effects on the schools, crime, and the housing market, states that (surprise, surprise) ".... the standardized Academic Performance Index scores from the two schools (Valley & Midland) improved at a higher rate than district-wide trends." The Valley Elementary API (the school with almost half the students being from low-income households) went up over 5% from 2005-2008. What was implied is that low-income students, being concentrated at Valley Elementary, managed to bring up the scores the most among the Poway schools. Hooray for that!!! Statistically that's true.

Of course they failed to mention a number of things. First, the 2009 score at Valley is down from 2008. For a number of years Valley was in danger of getting slapped from the "No child left behind" act. Check the numbers, if you average the scores w/o Valley, then Valley's API are a whopping 80 points BELOW the average and 52 points BEHIND the next school (Garden Road). Even as far back as 2000, Valley is consistently at the bottom. So we're supposed to be glad that Valley has improved 5%? That's better than going down, but there's a long long long ways to go to be even near average.

For years the city of Poway has clustered the low-income housing around two schools, Valley and Midland, and after the Brighton complex is completed there will be even more at Midland. The teachers at these schools are doing a bang-up great job with the resources they have to work with. The teachers volunteer to teach English to the parents on Saturday mornings, they provide extra tutoring to the students after school, they go BEYOND the extra mile to see that the students are given a good education. However, there are far too many disadvantaged students at Valley Elementary. If there were fewer, the extra effort would lift up the students more. What's a solution? Since the housing is already near the schools, busing to other schools in the city would help. If low-income students are helping raise test scores as the housing reports implies, then Painted Rock and Tierra Bonita, whose averages went DOWN during the same period that Valley's went up, would benefit from the influx of new students from Valley.

In the future, don't concentrate new low-income housing near these two schools, spread it out.


Next, the residents love to live there.
The report states that the residents of the low-income housing love it there. I'd love it too if I could pay $583/month for a 1440 sq. ft. condo as is being offered for Brighton**. Maybe I'll quit my job, go to work at walmart, and my disabled wife and I can live there on our low income?
Note that the report didn't ask the neighbors of low-income housing how they feel about it. I live next to two complexes, they were built years after I moved there. From talking to the housing residents, if the kids misbehave, if the residents violate the rules, park on the street instead of the garages, etc, they will be evicted from the housing complex. Sounds good. Except that a half dozen of these cars now park in our neighborhood every night. (too many cars per household?) The kids, bless their hearts, play in our streets because there's not enough playground room in the complexes for them. Where are they supposed to play when the City doesn't provide adequate green space in the complexes and doesn't build any new parks for the increased population? Another former resident, who just moved to RB, used to have a condo that backed up to the housing. The kids would throw garbage over the fences into the condo parking lots, would climb the fences to "play" in the greens there, etc.

Last, how much do these complexes cost? According to Mayor Higginson (April 20th council meeting), the average cost for EACH unit is $399,000!!! Holy cow!!! The city could have bought up houses in foreclosure for under $300K each during the last couple of years but instead are spending almost $400K for a low-income unit!!! The report also stated that there's an average of 2.1 people/unit. That's not a lot of people in a $400K unit. Once again, I wouldn't mind paying under $500/month (for the small 1000 sq. ft. units) to live in a $400K condo with maintenance taken care of.

While nothing stated in the housing report is a lie, it's far from "the whole truth".


*http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/API/APISearchName.asp?TheYear=&cTopic=API&cLevel=County&cName=&cCounty=37,SAN,DIEGO&cTimeFrame=S
** http://www.poway.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=1175