AgdaPkt 2021.02.08 Joint SA PFA - Laserfiche WebLink

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From: Travis Wood To: GRP -City Council Subject: regarding Sequoia Station Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2021 11:41:17 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside your organization. Exercise caution when opening attachments or clicking links, especially from unknown senders. Dear Redwood City Council, As a Redwood City community member and architectural designer, I am emailing you in general support but also with an important criticism of the Sequoia Station proposal. I moved to Redwood City because I felt it had the most potential of any city between SF and SJ to evolve into a charming, walkable, vibrant and charismatic city with the right kind of melding of urban, light urban, and suburban required to truly make it a forward -thinking model of urban planning for the next century. I do have one major reservation about the Sequoia Station project. I would like to see the project be more creative than to create more unneeded surface streets within its interior. One of the major issues with new development on the Peninsula is the insistence of automobile access to every corner of a project and I don't see the point of repeating that issue here. Despite the perpetuated mythology to the contrary, mixed-use and retail projects are far and away more successful when they reduce automobile access to a minimum and double down on walkable, flexible, green pedestrian avenues and plazas as a means to gain access to shopping and dining activities. I appreciate that the project will put its parking underground. This is a no brainer, but don't let the good decisions stop there. There is a reason why most American cities do not have the same walkable charm as our European counterparts. Our cities were predominantly laid out after the invention of the automobile and so we insist on including wide and disruptive access for them to every square foot of our developments. If you need a local example of how successful a large open, walkable shopping center can be you can look to the Stanford Shopping Mall. It is a pleasant place to walk and shop free from the threat of a honking car and on a nice, sunny day (of which there are 300 a year in this area) the pedestrian ways are packed with vibrant life. Furthermore, the pandemic should have provided an adequate case study for us all on how human -scale, pedestrian friendly downtowns can operate. I don't think anyone in our community lamented Main Street being closed for most of last year. It made eating at places such as Milagros so much more pleasant that you didn't have noisy cars whizzing past you while you sipped on your margarita! Now imagine if we'd taken the extra step to rip up the asphalt and planted some trees for beauty and shade and had more seating areas and food trucks, etc. Main street would be absolutely sizzling with activity! We need to be thinking how to rebuild our communities, not just return them to how they were. And this doesn't have to be unfriendly to the developer or the bottom line! Imagine that instead of Franklin Street it was fire -lane access only (to a minimum point) and instead of a two-lane road you could create more open seating, more art walk, food truck spots, you know, places for people to actually use rather than just another paved -over, in name only "Parklet" such as at the corner of Winslow and Middlefield. The architect, HOK, is well known for creating projects that pencil out on paper but always leave communities with the end result falling short of being truly spectacular. Ask them to be more creative, to offer you a model of something truly special, not just an iteration of what they have been doing for the last 50 years. The heart of Redwood City deserves better. I hope you will consider my comments. I appreciate your continued leadership and would, of course, be happy to talk further about my comments. Sincerely,