49ers Stadium: It's not about the parking spaces - Part 2

Dear Santa Clarans,


The Planning Commission meeting on Wednesday evening should have been about the actual changes applied for by the San Francisco 49ers. But after an extended presentation by the team's public relations corps, the discussion rapidly turned towards rationalizing other faulty aspects of the very Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that has unfortunately brought us to where we are today.

Again, the so-called "parking plan" isn't. But in spite of that simple truth: The rationalizations flew thick and fast, with one Planning Commissioner actually claiming that pedestrian traffic (!) and mass transit will save the (game) day.

Frankly, those claims are subject to serious dispute:

* The CS&L studies - paid for by the 49ers themselves - show that there are a mere 781 hotel rooms within 1/2 mile of the stadium. For a 49ers home game, we'll be very lucky to see even a a mere couple-of-hundred fans actually hoofing it to any stadium containing 68,500 seats.

** The kind of people who can afford $5,000-to-$20,000 for a single Personal Seat License in Santa Clara will most emphatically not be walking, cycling or taking the 57 bus to a one-billion-dollar NFL stadium. They'll be driving the Escalade or the Q45 as they are unlikely to be residents of Santa Clara. All the bike racks in the world cannot change that.

*** No hard commitments have been made by VTA for any game-day transit from the two nearest CalTrain stations to the stadium. Those train stations are nearly 3 and 4 miles from the stadium site. For game-day traffic: CalTrain, one way or another, is going to be a big choke-point.

Irrational exuberance isn't going to fix a faulty parking-and-traffic scheme. The hard numbers already made public are very clear - and the folks who will be forced to live with them are Santa Clarans living north of U.S. 101.

Santa Clarans, please speak out on this issue to the Planning Commission and to the City Council. For our $444 million in subsidies for the 49ers, we're entitled to a lot more than we're getting.



Thanks for your support, and regards,

Bill Bailey, Treasurer,
Santa Clara Plays Fair

-=0=-