Sustainability in Burlingame

By Cathy Baylock

Burlingame grew around the nucleus of the Burlingame Avenue train station that is still operating today. Though the original station was built in 1894 by a few wealthy landowners to service the Burlingame Country Club (now in Hillsborough), our town's main business street and first residences were built surrounding the station. Earthquake refugees migrated to the town in 1906 making their homes in Burlingame and commuting by train or bus to their jobs in San Francisco. Much of Burlingame's core was laid out and built before Henry Ford's cars were affordable for the ordinary person.

Likewise, "community centers" such as parks, schools, and churches were all built within walking distance of homes and by the late 1940's most households still had only one car that dad took to work each weekday.

I have worked for the past eight years as your city council member to maintain and restore the walkability of our town. Long before I joined our Green Ribbon Task Force to create a plan for making our city more sustainable, I was working to make our city green. I was appointed as the first-ever Burlingame member on the County's Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee in 2003 and within the first year pushed our city to create and adopt our first Bicycle Master Plan. This allowed us to apply for regional funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects.

Since 2005, I have brought home nearly $300,000 in funding to Burlingame which has resulted in improvements to in-ground lighted crosswalks at Broadway and Paloma, Morrell and Carolan, and on California Drive at Christie's Restaurant. Bike route signage has been placed at 52 locations, "Sharrow lanes" will be installed on the length of California Drive delineating where drivers must share the road with bicyclists. More funding is advancing the safe connections at the new Broadway pedestrian over crossing on both approaches to the ramp. In August 2009, Howard Avenue received new bike lanes spanning the distance from Humboldt Road to California Drive. All of these improvements will help people get out of their cars if they choose and ease pedestrian access to schools, parks and our downtowns.

Perhaps the greenest initiative I have supported was my very first initiative--protecting our residential housing stock. In an article for the May-August edition of American Bungalow magazine, which is available at the Burlingame public library's reference department, Jane Powell writes about how "the greenest thing you can do is to continue the life of an existing building--ideally by maintaining it, but if it is too late for that, then by restoring or rehabilitating it."

The article goes on to note: "According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 48 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the construction and operation of buildings. Even a new green building made with sustainable materials still uses up resources and energy, and it will be 40 years or more before the energy it saves by being operated under green principles balances out the energy that was used to build it."

I will continue to enhance Burlingame's sustainability through efforts like recycling and energy management that are well understood as well as those that take a bit more digging to fully appreciate. I hope you will join me in that effort.