Valley Vision Meeting -- SHORT blurb

Submitted by Todd Kunioka on Wed, 03/26/2008 - 10:11
in

We had what I think was a very good meeting regarding the future of Valley Blvd.  The consultant gave us some guidelines, and the public provided comments.  I was very impressed with the quality of the comments.  Many people clearly spent some time thinking about this issue and came up with concerns that were both constructive and insightful.  But it's a workday, so I don't have time to summarize them all.  I did take detailed notes and I will do my best to see that these comments are addressed as the Valley Vision study goes forward.

Guess I also ought to say something about the postcard snafu.  The city paid good money to a direct mailer to get postcards announcing the Valley Vision study session to all households in the city.  But instead of going into the mail on Thursday as intended, they did not get mailed until Monday.  That meant the postcards arrived in people's mailboxes just hours before the actual meeting.

The good news is that the mailer knows they screwed up and will be giving the city the next mailer at no additional charge.  And there will be additional Valley Vision meetings.  So be assured the city wasn't trying to pull a fast one on you and it didn't get entirely ripped off on the mailer.  The city IS trying to be better about communicating with the residents, but they havn't yet worked out all the kinks.

Valley Vision Meeting --

Submitted by Todd Kunioka on Thu, 03/27/2008 - 23:45.

A few more observations from Valley Vision:

The consultant had a nice slide showing satellite views of Old Town Pasadena and Valley Blvd.  Turns out our stretch of Valley Blvd is quite similar in overall length to the Old Town portion of Colorado Blvd, and to the South Lake section of Pasadena.  It gives you some sense of scale to what Valley Blvd could be.

Of course, even if we wanted to (and I don't think we want to), we can't exactly turn Valley into Colorado Blvd or South Lake Ave.  There are a lot of offices on and around both Colorado and Lake, presumably because it's a prestigious address.  Valley wouldn't have that same cache.  Also, it wouldn't bring in the sales tax revenue we need.

But it's nice to imagine what Valley Blvd could look like with a little bit (okay, a lot) of private investment.

One very interesting observation I heard from a public commenter is that (with the exception of Old Town Pasadena), most of the other Old Towns we see in the San Gabriel Valley are on north-south trending streets.  I also heard it said that Valley Blvd took out the parking pockets and landscaping back in the 1990s at the behest of Caltrans, to make Valley Blvd an emergency alternative to the San Bernardino Freeway.  Is that true?  I don't know.  I wouldn't think that Caltrans has the authority to order Rosemead to do anything on Valley Blvd.

Both comments are insightful because they suggest that trying to turn Rosemead's Valley Blvd into a destination rather than a regional arterial is not feasible.  So both comments are very deserving of further investigation.

Valley Vision Meeting --

Submitted by night reader on Sat, 03/29/2008 - 18:06.

Thanks for the report. It's extremely useufl.

Here's a link to information about the 10 freeway:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_Freeway