"Recommendation Table" Uploaded, Please Review

[Bruce Karney]

I'd like the Working Group Leaders to review the "Recommendation
Table" that I've uploaded to this Forum's Files area. This table will
be included as part of the Report's Introduction.

Please send me any desired changes.

A few words about how to format a recommendation:

1) In the table, a recommendation should consist of a single
sentence. You can say more within each WG's chapter, but every
recommendation should begin with a single clear sentence that captures
its essence.

2) The use of the word "and" as a way to cram two recommendations into
one sentence should be avoided.

Example: "You should lose weight and stop smoking" is a single
sentence but contains two recommendations. This could be revised to
"You should take immediate action to decrease your risk of a heart
attack." Or, if each of the actions is important enough, there should
be two separate recommendations, e.g.: Lose 30 pounds in the next 12
months. and Stop smoking immediately.

3) There is no need to attempt to explain WHY the recommendation is a
good idea.

Example: don't include introductory clauses like "Because Mountain
View is in the heart of Silicon Valley, tech capital of the world, we
recommend..."

4) It would be nice, for the sake of consistency, if most or all of
the recommendations began with "The City should..."

Cheers,
Bruce Karney
650 450-0332 (cell)

[Cliff Chambers]

Bruce:

Thanks for your hard work in putting together the table. I have a few
comments.

1. It is not clear to me whether the cost categories reflect annual
costs, life cycle cost, or in some cases one-time costs. The
categories needs some better definition.

2. S, M, L also need be defined for the reader.

3. Eyeballing the last two columns for C02 reduction and $ per metric
ton, about 2/3 of the entries are "unk." While these columns were
laudable objectives, it is obvious that a majority of task force
members were not able to provide the calculations. The last two
columns are NOT going to provide guidance to the City Council and I
would recommend deleting the columns. In some cases, task force
members provided illustrative examples of C02 reductions for a given
number of participants. You have included the examples as total C02
reduction, which is just not the case. The best example is Deb's
illustration of the impact of a network of four Grand Boulevards...the
real transportation impacts for ALL system user would be far greater
than 950 metric tons per year.

4. In order to reduce recommendations to 10, our WG decided to
combine a few recommendations in order to comply with the wishes of
the Steering Committee.
The summary titles we wrote are titles and not the recommendations.
For example, the title of "Bicycling in Mountain View: Rental and
Parking" has two parts of the recommendation: "The City should
facilitate implementation of automated rental at the train stations as
well as in neighborhood depots near housing clusters. The City should
should ensure that bicycle parking is readily available and the
facilities should meet standards as has been done for automotive
parking." If we had known the titles were to be included in a summary
table like this, we would have written the TITLE differently. I will
review the list of our titles, and review them with our WG members in
order to provide you with concise summaries of the recommendations for
inclusion in this table.

Thanks,

Cliff

[BKa...@aol.com]

Hi All,

 

In response to Cliff's comments:

 

1) I would suggest that the Net Present Value of all costs, using an 8% discount rate, would be the "gold standard" for defining costs.  This allows one-time costs and streams of future costs to be compared on an apples-to-apples basis.  But I'm willing to accept whatever approach each WG has used.

 

2) I will add the definitions of Short/Medium/Long term to the section.

 

3) These columns were explicitly requested by the Council at their Study Session in April.  The fact that the majority of our recommendations don't even provide estimates is disappointing to me, and I imagine will be disappointing to some of the Council members too.  The numbers I used in the table came from the latest version of the recommendations that I've read, so if there is a better number please make sure it appears in the version of the recommendation that goes to Julie and also let me know what it is so I can update the table.

 

4) Thank you for making this revision, Cliff.

Cheers,

Bruce K.