How does that categorical imperative work again?

When I was in junior high, I ran into my friend Chris Garcia and his dad on the mountain at Squaw Valley (yes, I'm sure our foreign correspondent will give me a hard time for skiing, too). Chris made some idle complaint about too many people being on the mountain that day. His dad, who was either a strident Kantian or just annoyed that he had to pay the "adult" ticket rate for an ingrateful oldest son, did not appreciate that. He barely let Chris finish his sentence before snapping at him, "And you're one of 'em. Don't you forget that."

Bob, if you're reading this and have some free time (which, if you're reading this, you must), could you please make your way to the Monta Loma neighborhood and have a chat with this week's batch of letter writers to the Mountain View Voice? Here's one example of the calls for a limit on the number of homes at Mayfield Mall:

"If this is not done, our environment will be choked from the exhaust from the added number of automobiles in the area.

A number of issues would arise by increasing housing units on the site. Already the Rengstorff, Thompson and Mayfield on- and off-ramps from Central Expressway to San Antonio Road, the left-turn lane to California from San Antonio Road, and the turn lanes entering San Antonio shopping center are a mess with heavy traffic. Those streets could not handle additional traffic from a high-density project at the Mayfield site. Where does the city propose parking the large number of cars in this area?"

It's been a while since I took philosophy, but I'm pretty sure that if your behavior would lead to an unsustainable situation if everybody were to do the same, you're supposed to change your behavior, not try to keep other people away from you. And if you happen to run into some kind of tragedy of the commons problem where no one else is willing to be as moral as you are, you get the government to step in. But you regulate the problem, in this case (as in most) cars, not people. Just don't forget you own of them.

Ready those pointing fingers

There is going to be a lot of blame to go around if the Mayfield Mall project falls through, something that's looking quite possible after Tuesday's night city council meeting, which left Mountain View nonsensically poised to preserve the vacant office building and surrounding parking lots while developing one of the city's last farms.

The Voice's account of the meeting makes it all seem like a lot of standard negotiation posturing (read: bullshit) from both sides:

Toll Brothers spokesperson Kelly Snider repeated a cautionary message about the financial viability of the project several times, saying that fewer units or more park space would "push us towards the tipping point of non-viability," and make it "difficult to move the project forward."

Honestly, what else would you expect them to say? Every single concession Toll Brothers has to make pushes them "towards the tipping point of non-viability." The issue is how close they are. This the equivalent of asking for a raise and, when the boss returns with a counteroffer, saying that is going to make things "difficult"

[Jac] Siegel shot back.

"I think it's an absurd project as it's proposed," he said, after declaring he had "no baggage" connected to the project as a new council member.

Jac Siegel, of course, was the chair of the environmental planning commission during the environmental impact report hearings. Granted, he only oversaw the environmental review, but, as baggage goes, he has quite a lot of it.

"It's going to hurt the entire area." He added that if Toll Brothers needed more than 500 units the developer "should look in a different area."

Siegel invoked an image of grid-locked streets when he talked about San Antonio Road, Central Expressway and nearby Rengstorff Avenue as already having some of the worst traffic in the city. He said he preferred that the site remain office space.

Here's a win-win solution for both sides. Drop the minimum parking requirements for the project. Just eliminate them altogether. Toll Brothers can adjust their plans to make a little more profit, Monta Loma can move to a permitting program for on-street parking to keep Mayfield residents from overflowing onto neighborhood streets, and the city can stop encouraging people to drive everywhere.