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Letters
I Told You So
To the Editor:
It is not too often that„one gets to say “I told you so."
In 1952 concerned citizens of the unincorporated residential area known as North Palo Alto held a meeting at the Ravensworth Elementary School to discuss the problem of autos speeding through their subdivision, especially on Saturday afternoons after a football game at Stanford U. 'North Palo Alto wa!s a small subdivision of modest single-family homes located between Menlo Park on the North and i Palo Alto on the South.
The State Highway Patrol claimed that it did not have the manpower to patrol the few streets involved. (No one had been killed yet. The usual impetus for official action.) Installation of 25 Mile Per Hour speed limit signs had no effect. At the meeting the writer, a full-time San Mateo County deputy sheriff, and a resident of one of the streets with the greatest number olf speed violators on those Saturday afternoons, spoke favorably of his experience with the success of speed bumps by a little town in Illinois in curbing out-of-town speeders.
“Speed bumps, how droll.” “What a dumb idea.” and other similar comments until the chair gavelled the meeting to order and other ideas were revealed as the meeting went on.
In a short time the area was annexed to the City of Manlo Park with the promise that after the annexation a Menlo Park motorcycle policeman would stop the speeding. The annexation did result in the doubling of the real estate taxes for the subdivision, but it did not stop the speeding.
On Friday, June 28, 1996, two weeks ago, this writer flew in to San Francisco on his way to a meeting in Palo Alto, and in his rental car decided to drive by his old home to see how, it had fared in the passing of years, hen he turned off the arterial road to his old street (these are 28 foot wide residential streets) at the first intersection there was a “traffic inhibitor” in place. This was a concrete mound in the center of the intersection that narrowed the intersection to one lane, making the passage of the intersection difficult and requiring the driver to slow down to negotiate the intersection. These mounds had flower pots on them, after all. this is California. Then, very plainly marked bv large signs at the curbs “SPEED BUMPS AHEAD” a few feet beyond the intersection was the first of the speed bumps, a humungous, curb to curb hump, that required almost a complete stop by the driver. Each block, including his old block, the 200. block of Chester Street, had
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