Chair and Members:

My name is Tye Simpson and I am the director of physical and environmental planning at UCSB. I speak to you today about the GOTIIP staff report regarding State Route 217-Ward Memorial Boulevard. In short, the University respectfully requests that you conceptually endorse intersection design elements that DO NOT include stoplights on Highway 217. I would like to briefly highlight for you what I expect you will hear from my University colleagues today in more depth.

I would like to emphasize that faculty, staff, and students at UCSB strongly and uniformly oppose the County's plans to put stoplights on Highway 217. The University has retained a traffic consultant, HNTB Associates, to develop and examine alternatives that DO NOT involve stoplights and which improve access for all users. HNTB is working with County staff, their consultants, Associated Transportation Engineers, and the University on alternatives that will allow the county and the community to achieve its redevelopment objectives without stoplights. Today we ask that you not preempt the future results of this hard work and, instead, direct your staff to conceptually endorse intersection design elements that DO NOT include stoplights.

In short, the opposition we have to the stoplights results from our concerns about safety, congestion, efficiency, accessibility, and pollution.

The University community is concerned that the stoplights will increase the risk of accidents for motorists who are forced to stop along a roadway that was designed to be a higher speed thoroughfare. It should not be an issue of shifting accidents from other intersections and roadways to the stoplights on 217 but, rather, the implementation of a redevelopment program that protects the safety of all motorists in and around Old Town Goleta, including those traveling to and from the University, Goleta Beach, and airport.

Highway 217 operates relatively efficiently now and there are concerns that stoplights will congest needlessly this roadway with little appreciable improvement to other roads in the vicinity. Although County consultants have predicted that congestion created by the stoplights will be modest, we regard this view as too self-serving to be credible, and contrary to our collective experiences of County roadways and intersections. We are also concerned about the potential adverse impacts that stoplights on Highway 217 may have on Highway 101.

We have received many comments and concerns that the community's perceptions of stoplights and congestion will make the University appear more remote and isolated from the community. There is a strong interest in increasing the integration of the University and the community, and we foresee that stoplights will decrease the accessibility of UCSB to the tens of thousands of visitors and community members who drive to UCSB each year. We have commissioned Prof. Barton Myers, noted architect and urban planner from UCLA, to study this issue from the perspective of regional planning. We are pleased that he is here today to explain his findings to you.

We have also heard concerns from the campus about air pollution associated with traffic congestion and idling automobiles, about the low benefit:cost ratios of some project components (such as the Fowler extension), and about the County's ability to maintain this road in light of its huge backlog of road maintenance projects. Some campus constituents also are concerned about creek crossings, wetland filling, endangered steelhead trout, industrial pollution, and the legacy of underground chemicals from past industrial uses which will be unearthed by the new construction.

Finally, I would like to direct you to the bottom of page 6 of the staff report that outlines the objectives of the GOTIIP. NONE of those objectives requires installing stoplights on 217. There are better ways to connect Goleta Old Town to Highway 217, and we urge you to conceptually endorse design elements that DO NOT include stoplights on Highway 217

Thank you.