Letters to the Editor Letters to the Editor (October 07, 2005)

Library should clean up its blight

Editor:

The Mountain View Library, of which we should be proud, has celebrated its centennial. Perhaps now it can pay attention to the blight it left at the corner of Middlefield Road and Moffett Boulevard. When the new building was being constructed, the library moved temporarily to this corner, which required pouring concrete pads to support trailers housing the temporary library. The pads apparently have become permanent.

Since then all that has been done is to place unsightly concrete barriers (painted a military brown) on the site to restrict vehicular traffic. In addition, the area is being used to store shipping containers.

I hope I'm not the only person offended by this ugliness. It was so much prettier when weeds and grass covered the corner, where insects and small animals could survive. I hope that after a century of community service, the library can clean up the mess it left behind at Middlefield Road and Moffett Boulevard. Robert Pollack West Middlefield Road

Taxation without transportation

Editor:

I oppose the imposition of an additional sales tax to pay for extending BART from Fremont to downtown San Jose. The only condition under which I would approve this tax is if it also were to pay for extending BART from San Francisco Airport all of the way to downtown San Jose, thus ringing the Bay with BART. Otherwise, there is no benefit to the citizens of northern Santa Clara County, only taxation without transportation.

The principal beneficiaries would be riders from the East Bay counties and the city of San Jose, so they should pay for any stand-alone San Jose extension. Also, just like the BART extension to SFO, this may be another money loser that further burdens the Valley Transit Authority, which is already up to its neck in negative cash flow from the light rail system and its overextended bus system.

Quite suspiciously, the passenger and revenue numbers for the proposed San Jose BART extension have been dreamed up by the VTA and already revised once to make them more favorable. These are the same VTA folks who have stuck the citizens of Santa Clara County with a disastrously unsuccessful and horribly designed light rail system by grossly over-inflating its revenue and passenger numbers.

Any further extensions of BART (or the San Jose light rail system) must be part of an integrated, multi-county improvement of the Bay Area public transportation system. Also, the financial benefits of such transport improvements must be analyzed and evaluated by competent agencies that are politically and financially independent of the counties and the projects. William R. Hitchens Sunnyview Lane

Will Tasman West line be useful someday?

Editor:

I'm glad to read that at least council member Kasperzak lacks buyer's remorse for VTA's expensive, slow, and rightfully underused Tasman West trolley line to downtown Mountain View. Perhaps his prediction may come true that by 2026, we'll be glad to have built it.

But as a daily transit user, I can only wonder what future reincarnation of Silicon Valley would exist 20 years from now in which a 10- to 15-mile-per-hour trolley line would constitute useful transportation infrastructure. I sure don't think I'd want to live there. Eli Goldberg Franklin Street

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