Comments by TrailHacker
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Posted on June 3 at 11:09 p.m.
When I first came to Santa Barbara, over 28 years ago, the Botanical Gardens had free admission. It was a beautiful and wondrous place. Then at some time it was determined that the Garden had to charge admission to support itself. Everyone pretty much agreed with that. But they started out immediately charging $3.00 rather than gradually bringing up the price. the first effect was that people, including myself went to the garden less and less. The second more insidious effect was that the Garden began accumulating large sums of cash. And they kept raising the price. Now we have a garden with too much money on their hands and no way to spend it. In comes the newcomers who feel that that money just needs to be spent. But how do you spend millions of dollars when your charge is a native, low maintenance, garden? Why you come up with grandiose plans and large buildings. But maybe you don't have enough to pay for all that so you come up with money generating ideas - weddings, parties, all kinds of private affairs where you lock out the public. What's wrong with this picture? I can hear them saying, "We must destroy the garden to save it."
Posted on August 27 at 4:04 p.m.
We hiked up the Romero Trail (not the road) two weeks ago when the fire was really going strong. From there we could see the fire and the fire fighters at the water tank on Romero Saddle. It seems logical to me that they reopen the trail since that's where the water tank is. Those whining about the poor shape of the trail (AKA road) must be forgetting all those nasty slides that were just plowed away. So now the road is a road again. Anyone with any local history knows that there will be more slides and there will be more scrub growing on the roadside. Let's use this as an opportunity to build a multi-use trail. Are bikers like Nitz and others saying that they don't like multi-use trails? Either the community will turn it into a model multi-use trail OR nature will have her way with it and it will be similar to the way that it was before. What's the problem either way? There is far more destruction to focus on in the backcountry with the loss of 230,000 acres than to worry that an old road is a road again.
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Posted on June 16 at 5:43 p.m.
That's Great! Of course, when I lived in Buffalo New York almost thirty years ago they had their stoplights synchronized and they had real traffic circles that the city was designed around. Nothing new there. Now if Santa Barbara would just stop going in the opposite direction - constantly making traffic slower and more congested. They call it "traffic calming." I guess they are thinking that if they can make drivings as unbearable as possible people will give up on it and use alternative transportation. Meanwhile, we sit in traffic and burn fuel, add CO2 to the atmosphere and go nowhere. The only traffic circle that comes close to working is the one on Milpas because of its size. Even there it is a little too small to really be effective.
On A City's Carbon Footprint