A 9-mile stretch of Highway 101 north of the Interstate 380 interchange could soon be the next span of the thoroughfare to get carpool or toll lanes — but opposition to the potential expansion is already mounting.

Multiple portions of the highway, which spans much of the state, are slated to receive such lanes, which are designed to reduce traffic and encourage ride-sharing or use of shuttles or buses. While the lanes are often added by widening the freeway, a South San Francisco Coalition is leading a charge to see the lane added by converting an existing lane, citing environment and other harms associated with increasing overall capacity.

“We really need to be, not just for the local community but for the global community, doing everything we can to reduce traffic now,” said Jennifer Garstang, a member of Sustainable South City, the coalition taking up the issue. “It’s been pretty clearly demonstrated over the past 60 years that when you add more lanes to the freeway, even managed lanes, it will increase traffic.”

According to the coalition, freeway expansion induces demand by further enabling reliance on cars for transportation needs. The coalition, Garstang said, would like to instead see investment in public transit in addition to improving bicycle and pedestrian facilities.

The span in question, from the interchange to a mile north of the northern county line, is currently four lanes in either direction. The project, a collaboration between the San Mateo County Transportation Authority, the City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County and Caltrans is still in its early stages, and both options to add a lane and convert a lane are being considered. The agencies hope to finalize a design by 2025 and complete the project in 2027.

The lanes to be added, defined as “managed lanes,” would likely be implemented as high-occupancy toll lanes, or express lanes. Express lanes function as carpool lanes but also allow lone drivers to pay a fee for use.

The lanes would join with those currently being built south of the I-380 interchange to Whipple Avenue in Redwood City where an express lane is being added, and south of that, from Whipple Avenue to the southern county line where an existing carpool lane is being converted to an express lane. Those lanes are planned to be open early next year, and more lanes are planned to be converted further south.

Garstang said the elimination of a standard lane for a managed lane would help put downward pressure on motorists to adopt more environmentally friendly means of transportation. As an example of induced demand, she pointed to a Houston portion of Interstate 10, now built out to 26-lanes including frontage roads, which still draws gridlock traffic.

“If you expand roadway capacity, if you build more roads and make it easier to drive, more and more people are going to drive, and they’re going to drive more often,” she said. “Over time you see more infrastructure, more houses, more shops and destination points get built along the freeways and along the roadways because that’s the primary way people get from point A to point B, and of course that makes more traffic over time.”

Among other concerns, the coalition points to disproportionately low income and people of color who live near the freeway who are most impacted by air and noise pollution. Widening would also serve to further divide those communities from the rest of the city, Garstang said.

“You can see how the freeway splits us essentially up the middle,” she said. “The much more vulnerable communities … it’s through their communities. The wealthier neighborhoods don’t really have to think about it as much.”

And electric cars, according to the coalition, while better, still produce brake dust and microplastic from tire wear. They also produce emissions associated with the generation of the electricity they rely on, Garstang pointed out.

Garstang said support for the coalition’s initiative has been picking up, and the coalition will ask for the South San Francisco City Council’s backing in January, something she believes will be granted. Co-signers of a letter sent to the collaborating agencies include South San Francisco Council member James Coleman.

“It’s very exciting to see how much support there is for this right now,” Garstang said. “It’s extremely heartening and makes me very optimistic in our chances of actually succeeding.”

The proposal is currently in the environmental scoping phase. It will next undergo environmental review and project approval, expected in 2023.

corey@smdailyjournal.com

(650) 344-5200, ext. 105

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WOODSIDE (KPIX 5) – The town of Woodside began accepting Senate Bill 9 housing applications Monday, just one day after Attorney General Rob Bonta chastised town officials, accusing them of using the idea of ​​a mountain lion habitat to skirt the new housing law.

SB 9 allows homeowners to build up to four residential units on a single family lot.

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Kara Cox is in the process of getting permits in San Mateo.

“It’s carbon neutral to provide housing on the Peninsula, so everyone’s not driving back-and-forth from Concord and Fairfield and all these outlying places where housing is more reasonable,” Cox told KPIX 5.

Terry Szeczyk owns a planning services company for homeowners and said a permitting process that used to take two years will be cut down to four months under the new rules.

“It’s much more streamlined and much easier. It’s refreshing to roll back the standards that may have existed in 1970,” said Szeczyk.

Cities like Woodside insist they’re doing their part.

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“The town of Woodside has consistently exceeded its state mandated low and moderate income housing commitments,” said Woodside Assistant Attorney Kai Ruess.

For middle-income earners, finding a home to buy in the San Jose metro areas is much harder than in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The National Association of Realtors says there’s only 1 listing for about every 3,500 households.

“SB9 is just one part of a larger puzzle for how to solve the housing crisis. SB9 is very limited in terms of the kinds of parcels and places where it makes sense,” said Matt Gelfand of Californians for Homeownership.

The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley estimates SB9 would create as many as 700,000 new units on California’s 7.5 million single-family home lots.

“Across the state where the cities and counties and towns have to plan for where they’re going to put housing for the next eight years, that’s going to be really critical in terms of determining whether we actually solve this crisis,” said Gelfand.

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Cox said, “At this point, density is necessary and I think there are appropriate places to do it.”

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DAVIS (AP) – Banana peels, chicken bones and scraps of vegetables have no place in California trash cans as part of the nation’s largest mandatory food waste recycling program due to come into effect in January.

The goal of the effort is to keep landfills in the most populous US state free of food waste, which will damage the atmosphere as it decays. When food scraps and other organic materials break down, they release methane, a greenhouse gas that is stronger and more harmful in the short term than carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

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To avoid these emissions, California plans to begin converting residents’ food waste into compost or energy, making it the second US state to do so after Vermont launched a similar program last year.

Most people in California will be forced to throw excess food in the green waste bins instead of in the trash. The municipalities will then compost the food waste or use it to produce biogas, an energy source similar to natural gas.

“This is the biggest change in waste since recycling began in the 1980s,” said Rachel Wagoner, director of the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery.

She added that it is “the easiest and fastest thing any individual can do to influence climate change”.

The California push reflects the growing recognition of the role food waste plays in pollution in the United States, where up to 40% of food is wasted, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

A handful of states and nations, including France, have passed laws requiring grocery stores and other large businesses to recycle excess food or donate it to charities, but the California program targets households and businesses.

The state passed a law in 2016 aimed at reducing methane emissions by significantly reducing the amount of food thrown away. Organic materials like food and garden waste make up half of all California landfills and a fifth of the state’s methane emissions, according to CalRecycle.

As of January, all cities and counties that offer garbage services are said to have introduced food recycling programs and grocery stores will have to donate edible food that would otherwise be thrown on blackboards or similar organizations.

“There’s no need to put this material in a landfill, it’s just cheap and easy,” said Ned Spang, director of the Food Loss and Waste Collaborative at the University of California, Davis.

Vermont, home to 625,000 people compared to nearly 40 million in California, is the only other state that bans residents from throwing their food waste in the trash. According to a law that came into force in July 2020, residents can compost the garbage in their yards, choose to pick it up at the roadside or drop it off at garbage stations. Cities like Seattle and San Francisco have similar programs.

California law requires the state to reduce organic landfill waste by 75% compared to 2014, or from around 23 million tons to 5.7 million tons by 2025.

Most local governments allow homeowners and apartment residents to dispose of excess groceries in garden trash cans, with some placing containers on the countertop to hold the trash for a few days before taking it outside. Some areas may have exemptions for parts of the law, such as rural areas where bears rummage in trash cans.

The food waste is composted or converted into energy through anaerobic digestion, a process that creates biogas that, like natural gas, can be used for heating and electricity.

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But California composting facilities have a strict licensing process to dispose of food waste alongside traditional green waste like leaves, and only a fifth of the state’s facilities currently accept food waste.

The state has also set a goal of diverting 20% ​​of the food that would otherwise end up in landfills by 2025 in order to feed people in need. Supermarkets must start donating their excess groceries in January, and hotels, restaurants, hospitals, schools and large venues will do so from 2024.

The donation portion of California’s law will contribute to a federal goal to cut food waste in half by 2030.

Davis is one of the California cities that already has a mandatory food recycling program. Joy Klineberg, a mother of three children, throws coffee grounds, fruit peels and cooking waste into a metal container with the label “Compost” on her worktop. When preparing dinner, she empties excess food from the cutting board into the rubbish bin.

Every few days she throws the contents into her green waste bin outside, which is picked up and sent to a facility in the district. Unpleasant smells on the countertop were not a problem, she said.

“All you change is where you throw things, it’s just another trash can,” she said. “It’s really easy and it’s amazing how much less rubbish you have.”

Implementing similar programs in larger cities is more difficult.

The two most populous in the state – Los Angeles and San Diego, which together make up about one in eight Californians – are among the cities whose programs won’t be available to all households next month.

That’s because it takes time to buy the necessary equipment, such as green waste bins for households that don’t already have one for garden waste, and facilities to dispose of the material. Garbage collection fees will rise in many places.

Like Davis, CalRecycle wants to focus more on education and less on punishment. Governments can avoid penalties by reporting to the state themselves by March if they haven’t set up programs and outlining plans to launch them. Cities that refuse to do so could be fined up to $ 10,000 per day.

Ken Prue, assistant director of San Diego’s environmental division, said the city invested nearly $ 9 million in this year’s budget to buy more trash cans, kitchen containers, and trucks to carry the extra trash.

Prue hopes that after the program starts next summer, San Diego residents will quickly realize the importance of recycling food waste.

“Hopefully before you know it it becomes second nature,” he said.

© Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Cal Duct Cleaning is a licensed, California-based, local family business that specializes in cleaning ducts, chimney sweeps, and dryer vents for residential and commercial properties. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company is looking for further business expansion.

We hereby request that you send us a business offer that may help us expand our business. We currently offer chimney sweeps, dryer fume hoods and duct cleaning to our residential and commercial customers and a similar business plan is very welcome. In addition, we offer special prices for larger subdivisions, HOAs, apartment complexes, planned communities, brokers or condominiums.

Cal Duct Cleaning has over 10 years of experience and expertise, providing sewer cleaning services at an affordable price. The company has a team of certified professionals and experts qualified to serve customers only with the best. Cal Duct Cleaning currently operates in over 10 locations in the San Francisco Bay Area and also in a few locations in Los Angeles and San Diego. In addition to cleaning services, the company is also available for installing chimney caps, dryer vents, booster fans and bathroom fans.

“We have been in this business for over 10 years so we know how to serve our customers and make sure they are satisfied. No matter how long it takes, we’ll do our best, ”said a brand spokesman.

In addition to specializing in the cleaning of air ducts and chimneys, Cal Duct Cleaning concentrates on the flammable cleaning of dryer fume hoods. Every year thousands of homes in the US burn because the dryer vent is not cleaned. If the heat from the dryer comes in contact with accumulated lint and dust inside the dryer, a fire could result. For this reason, Cal Duct Cleaning is offering a free inspection of the dryer opening and chimney in the neighborhood to help prevent this type of fire.

“We are offering a free inspection of the dryer vent and chimney as this is a fire hazard. A clogged dryer vent or chimney is a risk to life and property. That’s why we’re doing our best to ensure that such unfortunate accidents never happen, ”said a brand spokesman.

Cal Duct Cleaning has provided cleaning services for 2000+ units for commercial projects and 5000+ for residential customers. Now the company is about to expand and is looking for new private and commercial customers.

More information is available at: www.calductcleaning.com

Media contact
Company Name: Cleaning the calibration channel
Interlocutor: Max
E-mail: Send e-mail
Country: United States
Website: http://www.calductcleaning.com

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SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) – San Francisco supervisor Rafael Mandelman proposed an ordinance on Tuesday that would prohibit landlords from breaking leases by depriving tenants of amenities such as storage, parking, bike storage or laundry.

The proposed regulation would require landlords to provide a just cause for the removal of existing facilities, Mandelman said, and would effectively extend the same remedies that apply to unlawful evictions to cases of illegal removal of housing services.

Mandelman said landlords removed such services when converting garages and common spaces into new rental units known as additional housing units, or ADUs.

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He said he drafted the ordinance after hearing an increase in such cases over the past few months reported to his office by tenants in District 8.

“Adding one or two or more new units to existing buildings can be a great way to increase the number of homes in our neighborhoods, but adding new homes shouldn’t come at the expense of current tenants,” Mandelman said. “It’s not okay to take away storage rooms, parking lots, bike rooms or laundry that people have relied on for years and that have the right to continue to enjoy being part of their home.”

Mandelman said his office reached out to the San Francisco Housing Rights Committee – a tenant rights organization – which was aware of similar cases in at least 10 other residential buildings in the San Francisco area.

“Landlords should build ADUs to create new rent-controlled apartments, not to remove contracted housing services from existing tenants,” said Brad Hirn, a senior organizer of the group. “The problem becomes even more troubling when we see some of SF’s largest real estate investment firms using ADUs to segregate services and exacerbate long-term renters displacement.”

Copyright © 2021 Bay City News, Inc.

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SHERMAN OAKS, CA – Jimmy Nicholos almost lost his mind when his beloved dog Boots was stolen on New Years Eve. The two had been best friends for six years, and the brown Labrador Retriever was a steady source of joy on cold nights sleeping on the streets of Sherman Oaks.

When a woman stole the dog after promising to care for and return it, Nicholos was understandably upset.

“Boots are my life,” said Nicholos. “He depends on me and I love him to death. He lets me know that I’m fine.”

With the help of the community and the animal-oriented second-hand shop START Rescue Resale, where Nicholos works, lost dog posters were pasted over the valley and a reward was offered for the return of boots.

Suspecting the snow groomer’s story of losing boots at a dog park, Nicholos filed a lawsuit against Mrs. Nicole Lawrence accusing her of taking the dog. Soon after, Boots was brought back on a cold Monday evening in mid-January. Patch asked Lawrence for a comment.

Nicholos “really became a family member,” said Renee Ruston, owner of START Rescue, who helped organize the search effort. “That’s why we came together so hard to get the dog back from this woman who really betrayed us all. I didn’t want to stop until this dog was brought back. I have such admiration for him and his courage and perseverance on the.” Street.”

The civil suit is still pending, but Nicholos is overjoyed to regain his trusted companion. After Nicholos and Boots reunited, community member Jolie Salter started a GoFundMe to help him build his own craft business and buy a RV to sleep in and store his tools. As of Thursday, the fundraising hub had raised $ 3,870 for the fundraiser’s $ 20,000 goal.

“There are a lot of people in the neighborhood who know him,” said Salter, who is currently starting a nonprofit called HelpOurHood. “They want craft work; he’s a handyman. If he had a van he could sleep in it, lock a door behind him, have heating and air conditioning, and he could use them to run a business and to support himself.”

Nicholos, a lifelong fixer, said his proudest improvement project was a recent cherry wood furniture restoration that allowed him to use his skilled hands and indulge his love of antiques.

“I know a lot about antiques,” he said. “I love collectibles. I would be really good at selling coins. Give me a US coin, I’ll tell you what year it is, what year they stopped minting them, and I can give you that rare key dates from a say mint. “

Nicholos’ helpful spirit earned him a job at START Rescue four years ago. First he visited the store in the hope of buying a new boot cart. The shopkeeper offered to give it to him for free after learning of his situation.

“I’m not used to feeling gratitude,” said Nicholos. “I haven’t had much reason to be grateful in my life.”

A few days later, he found something the store wanted and returned to START Rescue to sell it to them. While he was there, they asked him to fix something in the store and did the same a few days later. It wasn’t long before Nicholos started working part-time, and Boots became a local celebrity for the business.

“After a year people came into the store just to see boots,” he said.

A few years after meeting Nicholos, Ruston and START Rescue started a new program called Homeless Owners and Pet Efforts (HOPE). The program connects unoccupied residents and their pets with medical care and meals, and provides a mailing address for those who wish to receive parcels.

With HOPE, Ruston would like to help Nicholos to find permanent housing and to support him in becoming a functioning member of society.

“I want to give him the same thing that I have: a shower, a kitchen, a living room,” said Ruston. “I want to bring him into a home and help him become a functioning member of society.”

Nicholos credits the people at START Rescue for helping him get his life back on track. After he started working there, the owners helped him get ID for the first time in his life. They recently connected him to Sean Ebrahimian, a dentist who has offered to restore his teeth with a permanent tooth transplant completely free of charge.

“I haven’t had any teeth since my early 40s,” he said. “I didn’t ask anything of you. I told you if you want to give me something, you have to say it’s for boots so I can take it.”

Nicholos said he was 15 when his parents bitterly divorced and the teen was taken to a juvenile detention center while family services were looking for a foster family. After six months had passed with no hope in sight, he saw a chance to escape when his social worker took him to an appointment and he took the opportunity.

“I opened the door and ran,” said Nicholos. “When I did that, the social worker started yelling at me to come back. I just ran until I saw a house to dive under and hide under. After a while, I heard the social worker yelling that I should come back I could see the street from where I was hiding. She wasn’t alone; she had a cop with her. After a while I fell asleep and when I woke up it was dark and I was cold. “

With no home, Nicholos spent the next few years hitchhiking around the country.

Now he has made a home for himself in Sherman Oaks where he feels welcome. When he’s not working at START Rescue or playing with Boots, he can ride his bike through the community. If you’re ready, he’ll even take you on a bike race.

“I can override anyone, I don’t care how old you are,” he said with a laugh.

Salter said the fundraising project will be the first of many at HelpOurHood. Hoping to launch the website soon, she said that future major projects will be crowdsourcing projects so the community can come together for future improvements.

“I want to take it into my own hands where we don’t deal with the state, the governor or the city council because we would wait forever,” said Salter. “We can do it alone.”

GoFundMe is a patch advertising partner.

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