1 From: Max Mautner < >
Sent: Saturday, September 19, 2026 8:00 AM
To: City Council (San Mateo); Clerk
Subject: Item 17 — Alternative 4 locks in the street we already have Mayor Loraine and Councilmembers,
In January, Veronica Vasquez was killed in the crosswalk at El Camino Real and 17th Avenue. The city's response, separating the turn phase from the walk phase, was the right fix and it moved quickly. It also cost zero parking spaces. That is the pattern: every safety improvement San Mateo has delivered on this corridor has been one that took nothing from the curb. A signal phase change is not the ceiling of what this street needs. It is what is left available once parking is off the table, and it took a death to get it.
Alternative 4 makes that constraint permanent. This corridor recorded 144 injury collisions from 2019 to 2023, eleven of them fatal or severe. The evaluation matrix in front of you rates staff's preferred alternative "Low" on Caltrans policy and "Low" for walking, biking, transit, and the environment. It is also the only alternative scored by city staff rather than by the consultant who scored the other three:
The same report projects 9,000 jobs and 10,000 residents within a half mile of this street over the next 10 to 15 years. Alternative 4 hands those 10,000 new residents the El Camino Real that exists today, for decades.
The parking capacity question has already been answered, by the city's own $70,000 analysis: roughly 300 vehicles parked on El Camino at a given time, enough surrounding supply to absorb them within one to two blocks, and no corridor-wide capacity constraint. Whatever the case against reallocation is, it is not capacity.
2 My request: direct staff that San Mateo enters the PID with on-street parking available for reallocation where safety or transit performance requires it, and that Alternative 4 does not carry this council's support.
Explicit direction matters here, because in its absence the record reads as instruction to preserve every space regardless of whether it is occupied, what it costs the people crossing the street, and what it costs those riding the bus, my family included.
Max Mautner
Co-lead, Move San Mateo. Writing for myself.