Your Boulevardier's Foolproof Plan for Balancing California's Budget

Step 1: Post a CHP officer at the Redwood Road onramp to westbound I-580.

Step 2: Ticket all motorists who don't yield to pedestrians in in the crosswalk, don't stop for a red light, and/or talk on their phones without using a hands-free device.

Problem solved!

CV To Lose M Transbay Bus?

Your Boulevardier occasionally takes the M bus across the San Mateo Bridge to visit Mon Petit Chou. The bus is clean and comfortable, even if the schedule is far from ideal. One works with it.

However, it appears that, because of budget cuts, the schedule will get even worse for Castro Valley residents. If Your Boulevardier reads AC Transit's current staff recommendation correctly, the bus will terminate in the East Bay at the Hayward BART station, rather than Castro Valley. The relevant section can be found on page 12:

Line M: Hayward BART to Oracle via Winton, Hesperian, Hwy 92, Chess Dr., Metro Center, Hillsdale Blvd. Hillsdale Caltrain, Oracle HQ. The Line M will no longer provide service to the Dumbarton Bridge corridor and consequently the Ardenwood Park and Ride facility.

Granted, the major cut in service has been made on the west end of the line, not on the east. Still, Your Boulevardier will miss the chance to catch the M at the Castro Valley BART station.

BART Parking Fees Kick In

Your Boulevardier drove by the Castro Valley BART station this morning at around 7:45 a.m. on his way home from yoga class. The parking lot at the station was not full, which is unusual for that time of day. So, with one day's experience, the dollar-a-day parking fee appears to be having some effect on ridership.

So you know, Your Boulevardier is not necessarily opposed to the new parking fee. He does wonder, however, how much of a revenue-generator it really will be. Because someone must check the occupied parking spaces against the records of the parking fee machines, in order to find out which spaces are not paid; then that person must write tickets. (Perhaps he is wrong, but Your Boulevardier assumes this is not done by BART police, who have enough on their hands already.) And then someone at the BART headquarters must process those tickets and send out delinquency notices when they're not paid. All of these tasks take considerable labor hours, which can equal considerable cost. And then there's the lost fare revenue, and the cost to maintain the parking-payment machine, and to keep the new parking space numbers and fee-related signage clean and up to date.

In all, there can be a lot of costs associated with collecting money.

BART Parking Fees

Your Boulevardier noticed on a recent walk that BART has posted signs that, he presumes, announce the new $1 per day parking fee that goes into effect next Monday, April 27.



On that fateful day, the brown paper will be removed.

Build It Up, Tear It Down

Your Boulevardier walked around the neighborhood just east of the BART station yesterday afternoon. This area is choked with trucks and workers right now because of two big projects.

First is the new Castro Valley Library. The building is crawling with workers who are attaching bright yellow gypsum board exterior siding to its metal skeleton. It looks like roofing panels are stacked on the building's top, but are not yet attached. It still remains very difficult for Your Boulevardier to envision the finished building based upon the construction to date and compared with the artist's rendering that appears on the billboard on Norbridge Avenue. Perhaps it's just a matter of where the front of the building is.

Speaking of the library, Your Boulevardier notes that Don Jose's Restaurant in Castro Village will donate ten percent of its sales during the week of April 13-19 to the library. (It's not clear from the flyer posted on Don Jose's door whether the funds will go toward library construction or to the Friends organization.)

The second project that is clogging the neighborhood just east of the BART station is the reworking of the I-580 interchange with Redwood Road. When completed, there will be a full set of on- and off-ramps here, eastbound and westbound. Yesterday, workers were breaking down the soundwall and ripping out trees along the highway's north side. This is the neighborhood along Juniper Street, behind the Jess C. Spencer Mortuary. (Where, it is noted, Madame Boulevardier was cremated.) Several homes have been demolished, but a few remain defiantly standing -- though it's not sure if they're occupied. It's assumed that Spencer's will lose a good portion of its parking lot to the project as well. Progress is visible on the other side of the freeway as well, with the former professional building having been demolished a few weeks ago. A fairly clear aerial representation of the project can be found here.

It seems the hangup in government budgets has not put either of these projects on hold, which is a good thing because they seem like they would be quite disruptive to the residents of the neighborhood.

That Ought to Keep the Kids in School

Construction continues on the security fence surrounding Creekside Middle School. The chain-link portion on Paradise Knolls is complete, and its tall zinc-clad poles and mesh gleam. Heavy, rectangular black posts now line the Center Street frontage, awaiting some sort of connectors; judging by the height of the posts and their color and construction, Your Boulevardier suspects that an eight- to ten-foot-tall wrought-iron-style barrier is on its way.

One wonders if there isn't a better use for the CVUSD's capital improvement budget. Your Boulevardier cannot claim to be a student of the district's finances or a close scrutinizer of its operations, so he will not judge. He will just wonder.

One is reminded of the new roadsigns going up along Interstate 580 through Ashland, San Leandro, and Oakland, just west of Castro Valley. Soeur de Boulevardier first noticed and mentioned that these monumental new signposts seem to be replacing perfectly adequate existing signage. One sometimes wishes that the dollars had been spent on the road surface, rather than on the directional placards that dangle above it.